Fuzzy Libertarianism

[Walden]

I like Finnis, he's a law prof at Notre Dame.

About the libertarian idea of keeping the gov
off our backs, I think this as an idea in popular
culture flows significantly from the frontier,
that people became very individual and misfits
could move on to new parts on this
immense continent, that finally
you carved a life for yourself out of the
wilderness by your own efforts.
Also part of the meaning that guns
have in American life. That
as much as the enlightenment.

That's a way we're not likely to be like
Sweden, at least not anytime soon; not
a relatively small family of people from
a common stock who have lived together
in the same rather small area for
thousands of years--
different ethos. I suspect this has
something to do with why we're
so hard for outlanders to fathom. Best

Yes, and they are highly critical of us. Perhaps Canada and Australia have similar frontier histories. We have had a multicultural issue to deal with on a large scale, from almost the start of the USA.

Countries such as France and the UK are now dealing with much immigration from their old colonial empires, but we are all dealing with a new multicultural issue. The USA has, historically, had three main broad groupings:

White (broadly, British Isles, Continental, and Jewish immigrant groups)
Native Indian (these first two groupings intermingled somewhat, and the intermingling includes many Hispanics)
Sub-Saharan Africans

So, the current immigrations are a bit of a new thing on us, too, coming from such diverse regions.

Today, there is such a widescale border crossing that so many misunderstandings and just a general not knowing how to deal with things is occurring, on a somewhat global scale. The issues are compounded by the increase of communications (not just the increase of travel) which makes people in various countries much more aware of what goes on elsewhere.

[elendil]

White (broadly, British Isles, Continental, and Jewish immigrant groups)
Native Indian (these first two groupings intermingled somewhat, and the intermingling includes many Hispanics)
Sub-Saharan Africans

Walden,

1. "Continental" seems a tad too broad for me. It's an interesting, although perhaps not very widely known fact, that to this day the single largest ethnic group in America are Germans. And they come from a very different background than do the Eastern ( = especially Poles) and Southern (= especially Italians) Europeans.

2. Many of the "Hispanics," especially the Mexicans, are actually "Indios."

3. There was also quite a bit of intermingling among Indians and Africans, including out your way.

There's a fascinating atlas you may have seen called "We the People" that maps out the location of every conceivable ethnic group in America--including some most of us never conceived of.

[elendil]

Normally, I'd start a new OT thread for the article I'm gonna link. However, I had a thread on pretty much the same topic (based on a George Weigel article), so I'm going to include it hear, even though it's not directly related to the original topic. On the other hand, population dynamics probably do play into forms of government, as well, so... Anyway, I found it to be very thought provoking--that's right, not "provoking," just "thought provoking." However, since any discussion of population seems to raise passions, I'm recommending that tender readers deck themselves out in Hazmat gear.

The article is:

Power and Population in Asia

By Nicholas Eberstadt

It seems too long to include here, and the link is very clear for reading:

http://www.policyreview.org/feb04/eberstadt_print.html

[Walden]

1. "Continental" seems a tad too broad for me. It's an interesting, although perhaps not very widely known fact, that to this day the single largest ethnic group in America are Germans. And they come from a very different background than do the Eastern ( = especially Poles) and Southern (= especially Italians) Europeans.

I warned you they were broad groupings.

2. Many of the "Hispanics," especially the Mexicans, are actually "Indios."

Yep.

3. There was also quite a bit of intermingling among Indians and Africans, including out your way.

And also the former slaves of the members of Indian nations were included as tribal members, during the Reconstruction era.

[elendil]

Sounds reasonable to me, Walden.

BTW, I received a PM recently that included a quote from the press that pretty well defined Fuzzy Lib, while also taking American exceptionalism into account, as well--a la jim stone.

What the article said, as nearly as I remember, was something like, Americans don't like to ban things, but they also like to support big societal institutions. So, as Fuzzy Libs, they don't want to ban homosexual "marriage," but on the other hand, due to America's fundamentally religious and conservative outlook, they're very uncomfortable with words like "gay" and "marriage" in the same sentence. Jim's example of the movie High Noon comes to mind again: couldn't you guys just have your shoot out on the outskirts of town, and the winners kinda move on down the road? Of course, that's not the real world. The real world is a pretty rough neighborhood, and my belief is that Fuzzy Lib is, ultimately, non-adaptive.

To offer a few examples, Colin Turnbull wrote a book some years back called "The Mountain People" about a tribe in Africa that was socially imploding--on the verge of extinction due to non-adaptive views that they acted out in their behavior. Point: it can happen. Now, some might say that that's the market at work, in a societal sense. Market forces, in this sense, have weeded out the non-adaptive society. True, but that doesn't mean that the society at risk should simply lie down and die, nor that that is a good thing for the world of humanity at large.

Another example. Margaret Mead wrote a book about 3 New Guinea societies that embodied very different sex roles. In one, in fact, the women were dominant and the men were wimps, unlike most New Guinea societies, which tended toward more manly stuff like head hunting and ritual cannibalism. Point: sex roles are relative and human can adapt in many different ways, and they're all part of the rainbow. Right?

Probably not right. The tribe of amazons and wimps was on the verge of extinction because their societal structures were distinctly non-adaptive. Human nature can only be stretched so far before something has to give. And my main point is that Fuzzy Lib provides a radically inadequate theoretical basis for the type of adaptation that we need. Man being a social animal, the radical individualism that Fuzzy Lib espouses is ultimately incompatible with a healthy society that can regenerate itself and even defend itself against barbarian hordes--figuratively and even literally. But this isn't intended to be a gloom and doom thread, because I do believe that there are a lot of healthy things going on in America.

And now some links. The first features two global strategy wonks discussing the state of the world. A lot of stuff about Europe and the US, but it fits in with the general idea of the thread.

http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2003_ ... ngton.html

Next we have an interview with the author of an upcoming cover article in The Atlantic (yes, I do check them out regularly), under the provocative title: How Serfdom Saved The Women's Movement. Here's the link to the interview.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/inte ... -02-12.htm

In addition to the serious things the author tries to say, there are some really hysterically funny snippets that only a liberal could say with a straight face. Here are some samples:

I grew up in Berkeley in the sixties, and I was so proud of my parents' politics, which were liberal.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself. Think of how far the Irish-Americans came...

Heh, heh. Both of my wife's parents came from Ireland as adults and worked menial jobs all their lives. She doesn't feel like she comes from an "immigrant culture." Grew up in Berkeley, "a couple of generations away" from her roots, and she has fantasies about being part of an "immigrant culture?" Identifies with the oppressed. Oh, my.

The hot new thing in feminism these days is maternal feminism. It was launched at a big conference at Barnard College a couple of years ago, attended by some of the major feminists of our time, including Ann Crittenden and Sylvia Ann Hewitt. The crux of their argument is that mothering—as opposed to fathering, or parenting, or care giving—is something unique, and of inestimable value. That the bond between a mother and her children is different from any other kind of human bond, and that it should be revered and respected.

Thank you so much for reinventing the wheel. Perhaps we could find a few more projects for you.

Ironically, the people in this country who most revere that mother-and-child bond are fundamentalist Christians, who make huge sacrifices so that moms can stay home with their children. Many of them home-school their children, because they're convinced that mothers are the best teachers of children and that the public school system in America immerses kids in cultures and values antithetical to the kind of reverence for family life—and especially for motherhood—that so many Christians have.

I guess you'd really have to be a liberal to find the irony here. As nearly as I can tell, the irony seems to be that, somehow, in some unfathomable way, Christians have beat the "big conference...Barnard College...major feminists of our time" to the cutting edge. I suppose irony is in the eye of the beholder.

Still, the author does have some interesting observations. Again, I think this ties into the Fuzzy Lib outlook. Here, Fuzzy Lib on the Left runs smack into social reality and human nature.

[Nanohedron]

Point: sex roles are relative and human can adapt in many different ways, and they're all part of the rainbow. Right?

Probably not right. The tribe of amazons and wimps was on the verge of extinction because their societal structures were distinctly non-adaptive.

And one might add that matriarchy per se doesn't imply a society's inability to be flexible.

[Zubivka]

It's too dense. Give us the Reader's Digest
version. Night

I'll quote you on that one :roll:

[Lorenzo]

Countries such as France and the UK are now dealing with much immigration from their old colonial empires, but we are all dealing with a new multicultural issue. The USA has, historically, had three main broad groupings:

White (broadly, British Isles, Continental, and Jewish immigrant groups)
Native Indian (these first two groupings intermingled somewhat, and the intermingling includes many Hispanics) Sub-Saharan Africans

I found this article interesting. I had heard this from the Mexicans in NE Mexico when I visited there years ago, but never thought twice about it again till now...

Texas Mexican Secret Spanish Jews Today, by Anne deSola Cardoza
Jewish food, oral traditions, culture, and secret, religious customs are showing up today in the folklore, habits and practices of the descendants of early settlers in southern Texas and the surrounding areas of Mexico. In northern Mexico and what today is Texas, the Jews of Nuevo Leon and its capital, Monterrey, Mexico, lived without fear of harrassment from the Holy Office of the 1640's and beyond. Many of the leading nonªJewish families today of that area are descended from secret Jewish ancestors, according to scholar, Richard G. Santos. Santos states there are hundreds, if not thousands of descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews living today in San Antonio, Texas, USA and throughout South Texas. Not all are aware of their Jewish heritage. Santos is a renowned San Antonio, Texas scholar in ethnic studies of South Texas secret Spanish Jewry.

(more) http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/011/texas.html

[elendil]

Here's an article that follows up on my previous two links, on population trends in Asia and on motherhood. Of course, drastic changes of this sort also impact on the political economy. Since it's not too long, I'll insert the article right here.

WARNING!! THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS REFERENCES TO HUMAN REPRODUCTION. YOU MAY WISH TO DON HAZMAT GEAR BEFORE READING IT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ADVERSE REACTIONS!!

Japan's birth dearth

By COLIN DONALD
FOR THE STRAITS TIMES

GRIM economic predictions have been commonplace in post-bubble Japan but the most potentially devastating of all is only now starting to alarm policy makers and business leaders.

The dramatic slump in the nation's birth rate is the economic earthquake that no one knows how to avert. Stirring from policy paralysis, the Tokyo government's struggle to get the Japanese breeding again is looking increasingly desperate.

Recently, in the wake of the launch of the so-called 'Plus One' programme, an initiative by the Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry to coax another child out of every couple, a senior official admitted: 'If the low birth rate continues as it is, the nation's population could be reduced to less than a quarter of the current level, or as few as 30 million 100 years from now. If so, the nation's economy as well as its social welfare system would collapse, jeopardising the very foundation of the country.'

However apocalyptic the long-term view, concerns about the next two decades press most heavily on anxious Japanese, compounding their devastating reluctance to spend. The Home Affairs Ministry calculates that Japan's labour force will contract by 10 per cent to about 60 million by 2025, bringing the country's GDP down by a massive 6 per cent.

'The government is not doing enough and the public don't realise how serious this is,' says Mr Kazuyuki Kinbara, spokesman for the influential Japan Federation of Economic Organisations, or Keidanren. 'Right now, they are more worried about 5.1 per cent unemployment, but they are beginning to note the implications of this for the future state of their pension funds.'

Japan's baby shortage is more acute than the rest of the world's but it is not of course unique. Singapore has led the world in fashioning pro-family awareness campaigns, while Italy leads a virtually Europe-wide population slump.

FEW INCENTIVES TO BREED
BUT Japan's ingrained and male-dominated social norms, and its consistently weak economic performance, make it the least promising location for the baby-friendly policies that could reverse the trend. To do so would require the active cooperation of the business sector at grassroots, and in recessionary times, they are more resistant than ever to workplace innovation.

Because of cultural antipathy to working mothers, the limited availability of satisfactory day care, and a general equation of motherhood with unrelieved drudgery, there are few existing incentives for Japanese women to breed. The child per woman average has dipped from 3.65 in 1950 to 1.34 in 2001, far below replacement levels.

Since the late 1980s, socially-engineered attitudes about the precedence of work over family, the ones that gave Japan its much vaunted economic edge until 1990, have remained rock-solid, despite decreasing rewards. While there is a growing sense that the old attitudes are outdated, there is no consensus on what should replace them.

'The government should make further efforts to provide an environment where working women can more easily have children without giving up a job,' says Mr Kinbara.

'The things the government needs to do are to improve the legal framework and encourage more cooperation on the part of husbands. Changing people's attitudes is necessary but hard because, more so than in Singapore, Japanese women's fertility is considered a private matter.'

The present reality in many if not most Japanese firms is that married women are kept in marginal posts, and working mothers barely tolerated.

DOWDY MOTHERHOOD V GUCCI

MEANWHILE, the growth of service industries that attract women to the workplace and the narrowing wage gap between the sexes have made marriage and motherhood seem the dowdy option to millions of Vuitton and Gucci-fixated young women. And with the modern preference for love matches over family-arranged contracts, women are either postponing marriage until their late 20s - giving them fewer child-bearing years - or forgoing it altogether.

Tokyo's Plus One policy, budgeted at 1.7 trillion yen ($27 billion) a year has succeeded in increasing the amount of nursery places available, though these have filled up quickly. A raft of legislation last year included the establishment of the Centre to Promote Measures to Support the Development of the Next Generation, plus changes in the child welfare law.

But it will take more than policy objectives to change the way Japan Inc views personnel matters.

Innovations like paternity leave, which halted declining birth rates in Sweden and elsewhere, prompt gruff laughter from most Japanese men. Few would risk the mockery of their peers, or the wrath of the boss, by daring to apply.

Nor does the Japanese state meaningfully compensate parents for raising the next generation of taxpayers. According to Naoki Atsumi of the Fuji Research Institute, women who take an eight-year break from the workplace to nurture a child lose an average of 60 million yen, including salary and retirement allowances.

Ultimately, the Japanese fear economic uncertainty and the inconvenience and expense of reproducing even more than they love children.

Until Tokyo aggressively targets the hearts and minds of corporate Japan in the quest to make motherhood a more positive prospect for employees, Japan will either have to look abroad for workers to operate its giant economy, or accept a diminished version of its former world-beating economic glory.The writer, formerly a lecturer at a Japanese university, is a freelance journalist based in Britain.

TOMORROW: Japan wakes up to its need for immigrants, slowly