"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK
- Evan has a post on some creative use of old Border's space. He writes: "Both of these projects stretch the concept of the bookseller to include a mandate of contributing to the cultural engine. What is going on is not simply the presentation of books for consumption, but also a preferential option for the small publishers or for local work, and also for continued production of literature or other arts. Both are pointing social networking tools toward useful rather than gimmicky ends. I'm not sure what will come of either venture, but the energy behind them seems important in itself. People want to set up something like this, and it's encouraging to see some people go out on a limb and do it."
- "Lord Keynes" writes about a similarity between Hayek and Keynes on the parameterization of models. Unfortunately, I disagree with Keynes on this point.
- In this post, I discuss the suggestion that government causes externalities. There's a pretty obvious Pigovian solution to this, of course - if you think it's a problem. Poll taxes. Not exactly a solution a lot of people will reach for, of course. But it bears a resemblence to the sort of voluntary government that a lot of people propose, and it raises one of the major problems with that sort of voluntary scheme: the dependence of voice on the ability to pay.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
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Voluntary government is a fiction. It will NEVER happen.
ReplyDeleteMy own residential community is proof. We organized a voluntary group that builds the roads, maintains the parks and gardens, cleans the streets, and supplies uninterrupted electricity
All that we asked was that members of it pay their fees and on time. Many are not members, and that is okay - we do not mind the free rider issues, because we like the local parks either way. They do not get the electricity either way and use government electricity. And they don't get to decide how the organization is run.
The problem is people who are members. A small group likes to avoid paying fees. And they want to access to all benefits. And they want to call the shots. The organization has to press for fees, these matters go to the court, and such members deliberately waste the organization's funds on legal fees. That is borne by honest members through higher fees. Guess what happens after fees are raised.
In the case of Indian American woman who repatriated back here to India, when a stray dog was removed from the local community, she started blackmailing several of us for having done so. She threatened us to bring it back. She even called her friends at animal rights organization, and they sent their thugs to several board members.
A British expatriate commented on our organization's meeting that the cosmopolitan nature of our neighbourhood may have been at fault (I live in a region with an outsourcing-based economy), since no one was local enough to feel emotionally invested in our community. After all, the nuisance woman had lived in US for much of her life. Unfortunately, disparities outnumber similarities in this world, and there are not many homogenous communities in this world.
In short, coercive, authoritarian, non-consensual governments are here to stay, precisely due to the fact that this world is full of jerks.
Could you rescue a long post I just made?
ReplyDeleteDone.
ReplyDeleteIn what post?
ReplyDeletePrateek,
"In short, coercive, authoritarian, non-consensual governments are here to stay..."
Until they aren't.
At one time in the world it used to be the case that opting out of state religion was considered, well, impossible (for what people thought were rather sound reasons). The state - despite its best efforts - has constantly been excluded from our lives over the last several hundred years. The question is, can we go all the way? I think it is worth considering.
In the spirit of the link to Evan's post, here is a link about the arts: http://reason.com/blog/2011/04/20/but-other-than-being-brutally
ReplyDeleteIt's kind of a weird article. I don't see why the author is drawing such a sharp distinction between culture-as-Bildung and culture-as-expressive-engagement. Presumably the two go hand in hand, and the "simple problem, simple cure" characterization (also the idea of the first view of culture as "instrumental") is... an overly simplistic picture of people who see culture as of moral or educative value.
ReplyDeleteThe article's best point was that taking away federal funds for arts doesn't constitute a wish to kill the arts. But for some reason, the author says "let's leave aside" that point.
"...is... an overly simplistic picture of people who see culture as of moral or educative value."
ReplyDeleteNeither I nor the author see it as overly simplistic.
My counter would be, why should should I care if it is educative or not to anyone but me? From my POV, when people start talking about art as instrumental I tend to fall asleep. Why? Well, obviously because it is boring, but more importantly, because aesthetic pleasure is so varied and subjective that the notion seems like poppycock (and in particular, the sort of poppycock that nation-states like to foist on people and tell them what is and is not good art - see socialist realism as an example). It is a bit like the business at the start of "Dead Poets Society" where the various poems are graded as if on an objective scale (or graph in the particular instance).
"Now I want you to rip out that page."
My counter would be, why should I care if it is educative or not to anyone but me?
ReplyDeleteNo one's forcing you to care, but a lack of care for the wider social effects of culture production seems to simply be a disengagement... that is, I'm not sure what you're "doing" is really culture if there isn't a sense of its constructive social effects.
Saying this doesn't imply some totalitarian direction of culture... why can't a free cultural market be educational or moralizing?
Put it this way... the Reason article defines the so-called "instrumental" view of culture as "good art makes us good and bad art makes us bad". I don't see anything in this definition that articulates a state-enforced standard of good/bad, or for that matter even any particular standard enforced by a literary class, or popular opinion, or the Church, or the avant-garde. All that's implied by the definition is that art has moral effect (and I might add, "moral" in the broadest of senses, as it's not obvious what "good" and "bad" even mean here).
I don't see why this is an unhelpful or especially totalitarian (...communitarian, whatever) view of culture.
...presumably the schoolboys ripped up the Pritchard text because it was judged to be bad culture that would make one bad... don't forget that they were sitting in a classroom when they did this. And the readings in a cave were instigated by this educational experience, not done in opposition to it.
ReplyDeleteGary -
ReplyDeleteWhy does saying that art/culture has moral or educational value conflict with the idea that it is varied and subjective?
Maybe this made sense in your head, but it doesn't when you write it out. Of course it's varied and subjective. Do you think it has to be uniform and objective to make a moral and educational contribution? That's a bizarre thing to assume.
re: "in particular, the sort of poppycock that nation-states like to foist on people and tell them what is and is not good art - see socialist realism as an example"
Can we get through one comment section without you taking a point completely unrelated to the state and bringing it back to the state? This is precisely what I mean when I say you are obsessed with politics and the state. Evan said nothing about states, Evan is talking about culture that is emerging completely independent of any state. Evan cares about the state and politics even less than I do and I care to talk about it substantially less than you'd like to talk about it. Why bring in the state here? What relevance does that have to the moral and educational value of cultural enterprises like these bookstores?
...in fact, it's rather noteworthy how much the two bookstore projects I mention draw from the anarchist tradition. The guy in Minneapolis has been actively involved in various self-described anarchist ventures, and the Pittsburgh store smacks of the emergence one sees in that subculture (whether they self-identify with it, I'm not sure).
ReplyDeleteEvan,
ReplyDeleteI wasn't commenting on the bookstores.
"...that is, I'm not sure what you're "doing" is really culture if there isn't a sense of its constructive social effects."
Really? That really does not make any sense at all. Most of what humans do as far as culture is concerned is totally disengaged from that sort of idea.
"...why can't a free cultural market be educational or moralizing?"
It can be, but again, it doesn't have to be, and for a lot of people it never will be.
"All that's implied by the definition is that art has moral effect (and I might add, "moral" in the broadest of senses, as it's not obvious what "good" and "bad" even mean here)."
Au contraire. What is also implied is that something ought to be done about it. Thus you get "TV is a wasteland" comments which leads to an actual bland, wasteland or the self-censorship (at the behest of moral scolds) in the graphic novel industry which curbed a very creative art form for decades.
"...presumably the schoolboys ripped up the Pritchard text because it was judged to be bad culture that would make one bad..."
No, they tore it out because there is no possible way to judge the value of a poem objectively - again, Pritchard wanted the boys to graph poems - utter non-sense. And I say this an amateur poet who has written hundreds of poems in his life.
Daniel,
"Do you think it has to be uniform and objective to make a moral and educational contribution? That's a bizarre thing to assume."
It is a natural thing to assume actually.
In regards to your third point, what about a Starship Troopers type solution instead of a poll tax?
ReplyDeleteHappy "Judgment Day."
ReplyDeleteMore for Evan:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.powells.com/blog/?p=32428?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=facebook_fans&utm_content=Guest%20Blog%20April19
"At one time in the world it used to be the case that opting out of state religion was considered, well, impossible (for what people thought were rather sound reasons)."
ReplyDeleteWell, did anyone really think it was impossible, or wasn't it, rather, unadvisable and to be kept to a minimum?
In any case, don't libertarians like to complain that we have a religion of state-worship in the US today? Perhaps there is a connection between our supposed lack of a national religion and our de facto religion of "America the Beautiful"?