[ExI] Political Relativism (was very informative)

[Anton Sherwood]

> Quoting Anton Sherwood:
>> So freedom of movement across artificial boundaries is not
>> a libertarian position?  Well, not gonna argue that here.

I did not mean here to insist that libertarianism *requires* open
borders; only to question the assertion that libertarianism is not
*compatible* with open borders.

On 2020-12-29 14:47, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote:
> 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.

Feel free to attempt it.

If a state finds it not worthwhile to filter visitors,
does that make it tyrannous?

> 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.

I deny that the state's emergent drives have moral weight,
but certainly not that they exist.

> 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,

Formal laws are largely redundant where people have the habit of peace,
and impotent where that habit is absent.  Or do you never turn your back
on a stranger unless a policeman (or automatic surveillance) is nearby?

When the enforcers are overwhelmed, as by natural disaster, people
generally don't take the opportunity to murder each other.  On the
contrary, the Proper Authorities can generally be counted on to obstruct
non-state efforts to help strangers.

> and natural ape hierarchies manifested by feudal warlords and
> continual violence emerge.

Such violence is at least partly driven by the belief that it is inevitable.

> All of the greatest accomplishments of civilization from the Great 
> Pyramid, to the Roman Coliseum, to the Apollo Moon Landings were 
> collective achievements.  [...]

I would not use emperors' monuments to themselves as arguments for the
necessity of the state.

Emphasis on Big Conspicuous Projects ignores the much greater 
contributions to the general good by the innovations of individuals and 
voluntary groups of all sizes (with and without conscious coordination).


>> 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.

After the legions went away, for about a thousand years no single state 
controlled (for more than a generation) most of the territory of modern 
France; nor will you find France's northern border on a map of Roman 
provinces.  (France's other land borders are mountains and the Rhine.) 
Thus, France is not Gaul.  Nor is it a linguistic unity (even 
disregarding Basques and Bretons): the line between langues d'oïl and 
langues d'oc cuts across the boundary of "France" through most of 
history, and Venetian is reckoned by at least some scholars to be more 
closely related to both than to Standard Italian.

> What allowed a bunch of primitive and disparate tribes to form a
> nation was ultimately their fear and hatred of outside oppression.

Oh, like Switzerland?  When was that?

> 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.

Nearly every written language uses a script borrowed from a neighbor,
whether or not that neighbor was loved.  It is due to the Church, not to 
the campaigns of Caesar, that Europe's scripts diverged less than those 
of India.  (Thus I sometimes say that anarchists who use the Internet 
are as hypocritical as Protestants who use the alphabet.)

> 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.

Okay.

-- 
*\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org