[ExI] Political Relativism (was very informative)

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Anton Sherwood:

> On 2020-12-27 11:10, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:
>> Thanks for that billw. ?What Prager describes as liberal is something I
>> have always thought of as libertarian.? I agree with everything he said
>> in that video.? You and I are liberals.
>
> So freedom of movement across artificial boundaries is not a libertarian
> position?  Well, not gonna argue that here.

National borders are no more artificial than property lines.  
Regulating traffic across national borders can be justified by similar  
arguments as having locks on your doors and fences around your yard.  
Living in denial that the collective has its own needs, its own will  
to survive, and its own emergent intelligence is a very poor defense  
of ones individual liberties against it. Statism and nationalism are  
emergent properties of the rule of law. While the ideal of political  
anarchy is that people will grow wise enough someday to self-regulate,  
the harsh reality is that without strict enforcement by governments,  
laws are ineffectual, and natural ape hierarchies manifested by feudal  
warlords and continual violence emerge.

All of the greatest accomplishments of civilization from the Great  
Pyramid, to the Roman Coliseum, to the Apollo Moon Landings were  
collective achievements. That the few individuals that led these  
endeavors profited more than the rest is evidence that individualism  
and collectivism are interdependent on one another and can co-exist.  
Insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock for the purely selfish  
motives of a great many individuals, but once they form, they have  
their own properties not manifested by any individuals.

> Prager also seems to have a statist post-hoc concept of nationalism.
> Historically, nationalism was about what we might call "natural"
> nations, tied by culture and kinship, as OPPOSED to the borders created
> by wars and the homogenizing campaigns of authoritarian regimes
> beginning with radical republican France.
> Would Prager say "Basque nationalism", for example, is a contradiction
> in terms because there is no sovereign Basque state?

But war is a major mechanism by which culture and kinship evolve over  
time. The main reason there is such a thing as France today is that  
Caesar's legionnaires lumped the Vasconi tribe (ancestral Basques) in  
with the rest of the Gauls and taught them Latin in exchange for their  
tributes of gold, land, and daughters. What allowed a bunch of  
primitive and disparate tribes to form a nation was ultimately their  
fear and hatred of outside oppression. It is telling that when Basque  
nationalism started to re-emerge fairly recently, they took to writing  
their native language in the Latin alphabet of their ancient oppressors.

Note that none of this should be construed as support for Prager's  
views. I am trying to make a larger point which is that any and all  
political positions are necessarily selfish, subjective, and relative.  
However, this is not to say that political positions that are reached  
from rational arguments are invalid. Instead I am taking a major cue  
from physics here in saying that contradictory and even diametrically  
opposed political views can both be completely correct from the point  
of view of the people espousing them.

Consider what I call the "Parable of the Proton":

Once upon a time there was proton who was drifting along at some  
velocity parallel to a wire from left to right. The proton was happily  
in its own inertial reference frame and so was the wire when suddenly,  
someone closed a switch and an electrical current started flowing  
through the wire. Now there were electrons drifting through the wire  
in the same direction and at roughly the same speed as the proton and  
the proton found itself shoved away from the wire by an invisible force.

When questioned about the nature of the force, the wire and the proton  
gave contradictory answers. The wire, for its part, insisted that the  
proton was shoved by a magnetic force which arose as a result of the  
charged proton moving through the magnetic field that happened to be  
induced by the wire minding its own business and conducting an  
electrical current.

The proton however vehemently disagreed. The proton insisted that it  
had been shoved away from the wire by the purely electrical force of  
the positively charged protons in the wire. The proton explained that  
what had happened was that when the circuit was closed and the  
electrons started moving along the wire with nearly the same velocity  
as the proton, it caused the electrons in the wire to move much slower  
relative to the lone proton than the positively charged protons in the  
wire. Therefore the wire's length was contracted relative to the  
outside proton and the co-moving electrons causing a local  
overabundance of positive charge which shoved the proton away from its  
rightful trajectory.

Therefore it is concluded that even in a domain as rigorous, factual,  
and objective as physics, two observers can attribute different  
contradictory causes to the same event and yet both be absolutely  
correct based on their respective frames of reference.

If there is that much wiggle room for subjectivity in physics, what  
hope do we have for finding objective truth in something as sloppy as  
politics? Is it any wonder then when asked what is the cause of  
poverty amongst black people you might get differing answers from  
either side of the political spectrum as well from the black people  
themselves?

> If right and left have any consistent meaning in different places and
> times, I'd say the right seeks social stability and the left seeks
> social equality.  Both of these terms are quite broad, and within them
> the emphasis varies pretty widely.  But neither has much room for
> anti-authoritarianism, for a contractual social order as against a
> status order.

Right and left are meaningless without specifying a frame of  
reference. A conservative Christian living in the U.S. might have very  
different, perhaps even incompatible, values than a conservative  
Muslim living in Iran. But you are correct in that extremists on both  
the left and the right become increasingly authoritarian the further  
out on their respective wings they are.

Stuart LaForge