The road to nowhere…
Enjoying the swimThe Worst Form of Government
Just realized I stuck this in drafts and never actually posted it. It’s slightly out of date, but oh well. The general point still stands.
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Reading through BBC’s Have Your Say thread asking “what will the ban on minarets in Switzerland achieve”, I was stopped short by an utter wtf moment in response to one of the comments:
“I envy the Swiss.
I’d love to be able to vote to set standards that visitors to our country have to abide by; whether they be religious or otherwise.
Instead, as a white, able-bodied, hetrosexual, Christian man, I am relegated to the bottom of the pecking order in just about any category you care to mention.
I’d move to Switzerland, but as they’re outside the EU, they’re allowed to control immigration too.
Imagine that…”
Now, I’ll admit, what really bowled me over was the commenter’s ability to write the second paragraph with what appears to be complete sincerity, but others (note: this link does not indicate agreement with the linked author on all/any issues) blog far better about privilege than I ever could.
This man’s comment, however, also raises a second point: pure democracy sucks. No, really.
A lot of people don’t stop to think about this. Somehow democracy occupies this almost deified position in much of Western society. And yet, there’s a very good reason why the term “tyranny of the majority” exists.
To the man originally quoted, my response is to try seeing what it feels like not to be “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, Christian,” and, to a lesser extent, male. Just once, try it. Or, more accurately, imagine really really hard.
Tyranny of the majority makes a whole heck load more sense when you’re firmly a part of that majority.
Okay, mini-rant over. Just one more thing.
Lots of people in the US don’t realize what a wonderful document the constitution is. It ensures that some things just are not up for a vote. Or, at least, it tries to. To those who consider things like Prop 8 a perfectly reasonable representation of voter rights, I recommend you consider the reasoning behind your country’s constitution a little more closely. There are many things I don’t love about the US. But, as an adopted US resident (and citizen), I’ve gotta say the constitution is one thing I do. If you take it for granted, don’t. Look it up, read it, remember it, and, most importantly, keep it in mind when these sorts of things come up in the news.
Just my thought for the day folks.
I’m not dead…
Sorry guys, I can only blame about 6 weeks of this rather large posting gap on losing internet, the rest of it was just me being disorganized… This is just a quick check-in post to let y’all know I’m still around, catch y’all up, and point you to some other places I will be posting.
So over the last 2 months, other than finishing up my job in France and getting a precious 5 days back home on British soil, I also spent a week in the Middle East/North Africa visiting three prospective unis in Cairo and Beirut. As my first actual trip to the ME/NA, it was a really amazing experience, and I have to say I’ve fallen in love with Cairo. Having been stupid enough to rent a car (not something I would usually do but, with the university an hour outside of Cairo and no reliable transport that I could find to get there and back, I didn’t see much choice) I got the wonderful experience of getting thoroughly lost, finally giving up on the car, parking on the side of the road in some part of Cairo that had probably never seen a tourist, and then exploring for the next couple of hours. I got to really stretch my (almost non-existent) Arabic, enjoy some great local food, and get a great feel for the place. I also got to experience the wonders of Cairo traffic, but we won’t go into that!
Beirut, on the other hand, struck me as more like a cross between New York City and LA. To be fair, this is largely because I was staying in the coastal area which was all rebuilt after the war and is now the hip/foreigner district. Even walking and taxiing out to the center and more southern areas which certainly don’t resemble NYC, it just didn’t seem to me to have the life Cairo does. Probably just my preference for chaos shining through…
Long story short, hour long commute or no, it looks like I’m headed to the American University in Cairo in the spring to finish my BA there (that’ll be 3 semesters to go at that point).
As for this semester, I am now comfortably ensconced in my ex-closet of an apartment in NYC (is there anywhere else in the world where someone can charge you $800 a month to live in their closet?), attending classes at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, and interning at the NYU Center for Dialogues: Islamic World – U.S. – The West. As part of my Reporting in International Affairs course I will be writing articles for the online journal BardPolitik and blogging with them here. Pop in and have a read once we get started for the semester (things should start getting posted some time next week).
So that’s it for today. I’ll try and post again soon on slightly more interesting topics. I’m hoping that being in NYC is going to provide me with plenty of those!
Practicalities of the Libertarian Ideal
I have spent the last month chasing around after the 4 and 7 year old children of the family I’m an au pair for in Paris (live-in nanny + language classes, for those of you not familiar with the term). This occupation leaves me with time to think, if not the energy with which to do so. I’ve also found it has presented me with a surprising amount of food for thought.
I tend to hold that the best approach to both parenting and politics is a relatively libertarian one. By which I mean that if you give people freedom they tend to use it wisely and that this also stands true for children (within reason). Indeed, I’m coming to realise that my commitment to this libertarian ideal largely springs from my own, very libertarian, upbringing. My parents’ general approach was that I could make my own choices and if I made mistakes or got hurt then I would learn from that. I did make mistakes (still do, lots of them…) and I did get hurt, but I also did learn a lot and I feel that by the time I left the nest (rather earlier than most people) this had helped me prepare for life in a way that no other upbringing could have. But that’s not the point of this post, the point of this post is the part of my childhood I had forgotten and which taking care of other people’s children is slowly helping me remember again.
The truth is that by age 12 or 13 my parents didn’t give me rules anymore because they didn’t need to. From day one it had been required that I be polite, that if I did or did not want to do something I discussed it rather than scream about it, and that I clean up my own messes. Failure to follow these rules inevitably had me sent to my room to “find a better mood”. These were the ground rules which fostered an ability and predisposition to make my own rules to govern myself in other areas. And these are the ground rules the kids I’m currently taking care of just don’t have.
Without these ground rules I’m coming to realise that giving these kids any degree of freedom just isn’t practical. Not only do they not have the experience necessary to know what to do with that freedom (something which would be solved with time), they don’t have the necessary base on which to build their own set of rules in the place of those an adult might give them. Without someone imposing an outside set of rules on them, these kids wreak havoc, destroy the house, and injure one another.
Now my point here is not to say that adults acting within a society are the same as 6 year olds at home. Rather, it’s to convey the gnawing doubt in the ability of a population to go directly from extensive rule of law to a very minimalist, libertarian, legal system without some sort of step in the middle that contemplating this analogy has given me. And it isn’t a perfect analogy by any means, there are glaring differences between the needs and abilities of children in a home setting and adults in a societal one. Still, it raises an important question. Is a libertarian approach to the law possible? And what is necessary to make it so?
I’d had some sort of a vague idea that a libertarian legal system would be a mess at the beginning and then sort itself out over time as people got used to having freedom. I’d never fully bought into this idea, but never found an alternative for it either. Now I’m beginning to think that one really is necessary.
If we look at the alternative as instilling a set of ground rules, what does this mean on a societal level, and is it even really possible?
Reading back through this I can see that it might sound somewhat elitist, as though there there is some group the ‘people’ of six year old intelligence who need to be educated by the elite group, the ‘adults’. I want to make clear that that wasn’t my intention at all. Indeed, this is at the heart of the whole complexity of the issue. Here there are no ‘adults’ (and no ‘children’ either), there are just people in society some of whom take it upon themselves to try and organize that society. Those who control the law try and place it as some sort of ‘adult’ in the playground of life, but the truth is that the people behind it are just the same as everyone else there in everything other than what they have chosen to do with their lives. Still, we can accept our own place in the playground and still work to find the most practical model for the law, the two are not mutually exclusive.
3.. 2… 1… Takeoff
So, after much deliberation, I now bravely go where countless others have gone before me… into the blogosphere.
More seriously… Hi and welcome to my little blog. I’m going to be posting here on and off over the next few years as I make my way around the globe, and through life, with pretty much absolutely no destination in mind. Time will tell if I actually have anything interesting to say.
