While I’m on the subject of various spectra of political thought, let’s examine for a moment the communitarian-libertarian divide, with a side trip to Monty Python.
On the one side we have the communitarian notion that "We live through institutions," the organizing assertion around which Robert Bellah et al. built their book, The Good Society. "Institutions" is understood here as anything from you and somebody you just shook hands with, to the family, to the Church, or your town council.
And in this corner, we have the libertarian notion of "the Virtue of Selfishness," which has been on my mind the last few days for two reasons: The buzz about the new book from former Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, and my having run across and reread her mini-novel Anthem. It’s a philosophy that might be summed up as "We don’ need no stinkin’ institutions."
All of which brings me to the obituary in this week’s edition of The Economist — a proudly libertarian publication that nevertheless chose, as the most interesting/important death of the week, the tale of "an ex-parrot" name of Alex.
I say nevertheless because the success of Alex — who had learned to speak with apparent meaning, not merely to "parrot" sounds — was based in a theory that the factor that promotes intelligence in animals is their social arrangements. In other words, "meaning" in the sense of intelligible communication, derives from one’s society — in other words, to the extent that we live as intelligently, we live through institutions:
The reason why primates are intelligent, according to Dr Humphrey,
is that they generally live in groups. And, just as group living
promotes intelligence, so intelligence allows larger groups to
function, providing a spur for the evolution of yet more intelligence.
If Dr Humphrey is right, only social animals can be intelligent—and so
far he has been borne out.Flocks of, say, starlings or herds of wildebeest do not count as
real societies. They are just protective agglomerations in which
individuals do not have complex social relations with each other. But
parrots such as Alex live in societies in the wild, in the way that
monkeys and apes do, and thus Dr Pepperberg reasoned, Alex might have
evolved advanced cognitive abilities. Also like primates, parrots live
long enough to make the time-consuming process of learning worthwhile.
Combined with his ability to speak (or at least “vocalise”) words, Alex
looked a promising experimental subject.
Interesting, I thought.
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A parrot owner once told me a story that indicated one of his birds spoke in metaphor, fitting words that served as a label in one situation metaphorically to another occurrence, something like the ex-boxer in “Batteries Not Included” who used only phrases he heard in television commercials.
But to my knowledge, his parrots have said nothing about Ayn Rand.
So here we sit, a flock of communitarian capitalists shooting the breeze. And there they sit, communitarians all, each with its own beak.
So community serves self. The larger the community, the brighter its inhabitants.
But that doesn’t translate to the bigger the government, the better it serves. Actually, government sometimes gets in the way of community.
How does being against theft (and other general violations of the rights of others) make a person selfish? On the contrary, selfishness is thinking your own goals are so important that it’s okay to steal from others to advance them. Sure, free education and health care are great. But that does doesn’t make it okay to force another human being to fund them if he doesn’t want to.
In a free society, those who want such charities are free to donate to them. The alternative is, others get to spend your money on e.g. war in Iraq, subsidizing oil companies and other large corporations, and fighting absurd and endless wars on drugs and “the tactic of terrorizing”.
Until you’re ready to let others tell you how to dress and spend your time, please do your part to sing the praises of liberty and capitalism.
Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
No man is an island…
No reasonable man would want to be…
No loving man could imagine it…
> No man is an island…
But I prefer to be a peninsula
WoW!,Doug,a variation on the Spencer Dryden line from “A Small Package of Value Will Come to You Shortly”.He was the drummer for The Jefferson Airplane.Bless your soul.
Heads up for Thomas and Doug. No parrot could have said it better.