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JonathanBoyerFirstPaper 6 - 27 Apr 2010 - Main.JonathanBoyer
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*UNDER CONSTRUCTION* | | | "Children cannot be expected to understand why they are compelled to go to school, nor the ignorant [or dumb] - that is, for the moment, the majority of mankind - why they are made to obey the laws that will presently make them rational. 'Compulsion is also a kind of education." . . . You want to be a human being. It is the aim of the state to satisfy your wish. 'Compulsion is justified by education for future insight.'" | |
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< | Given some necessary degree of educational compulsion, ultimately these disputes over rationality, dumbness, and apathetic Nirvana boil down to a divergence in basic assumptions about concepts of liberty and despotism. Do humans have "one true purpose"? Is that singular purpose underpinned by "rational self-direction" such that "all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern"? | >
> | So then, given some necessary degree of educational compulsion in society, ultimately these disputes over rationality, dumbness, and apathetic Nirvana boil down to a divergence in basic assumptions about concepts of liberty and despotism. Does human society have "one true purpose"? And is that singular purpose underpinned by "rational self-direction" such that "all rational beings must of necessity fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern"? Can rationality truly be reduced to a single criterion such that value monism reigns over value pluralism in favor of a "standard of judgment that derives from the vision of some future perfection"? On some primordial level, visions of future perfection have a kind of irresistible emotional lure -- like a self-exalted manifest destiny -- but the implementation of any such vision can only be justified by an authoritarian, one-size-fits-all concept of positive liberty, which arguably reeks of paternal pollution. Now, in the face of the potential pollutants abound monism and positive liberty, we circle back to pluralism "with the measure of 'negative' liberty that it entails":
"To assume that all values can be graded on one scale, so that it is a mere matter of inspection to determine the highest, seems to me to falsify our knowledge that men are free agents, to represent moral decision as an operation which a slide-rule could, in principle, perform . . . [Pluralism] is more humane because it does not (as the system-builders do) deprive men, in the name of some remote, or incoherent, ideal, of much that they have found to be indispensable to their life as unpredictably self-transforming human beings." | | | **Note: All unlinked quotations were taken from Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" |
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