What is REAL !

[Shimatoree]

I would recommend reading the following authored by Robert Nisbet.


At the present time we are suspended, so to speak, between two worlds of allegiance and association.
On the one hand, and partly behind us, is the historic world in which loyalties to family, church, profession, local community, and interest association exert, however ineffectively, persuasion and guidance.
On the other is the world of values identical with the absolute political community- the community in which all symbolism, allegiance, responsibility and sense of purpose has become indistinguishable from the operation of centralized political power.
In the Western democracies we have moved partly into the second, but no wholly out of the first. In this suspended position lie both our danger and our hope.
Our hope because we have not yet become separated wholly, as have many European populations, from the social sources of freedom, and because our will have not yet become anesthetized into moral passivity; our danger because manifestly these sources have become weakened and the spell of the political community has become ever more intense. We are dealing with a problem that demands a new classification of States, one that is relevant to the actual conditions of order and freedom in the contemporary world. Traditional labels – democratic, republican, capitalist, socialist, et cetera- have by now become nearly as archaic as older classifications of monarchy and aristocracy.
Of what value now are differentiations in the extent of electorates, in frequency of elections in mass participation in politics?
Government of, by, and for the people, for all its verity as an abstract proposition, becomes nearly irrelevant in a world where all despotisms rest upon foundations of mass acquiescence and where all the arts of political propaganda are employed to sink the roots of government deeply in popular consciousness and participations.
Equally illusory and irrelevant is socialism. When Sir William Harcourt declared, at the end of the nineteenth century, “We are all Socialists now,” his words had a prophetic quality that he did not quite intend.
For most of the cherished goals of nineteenth-century socialism have become accepted procedures of democratic and totalitarian governments alike.
We must conclude that all States in the future will be able to demonstrate and will have to demonstrate, attributes of socialism.
But, by themselves these will promise nothing in the way of freedom
What are the terms by which free and unfree societies in the contemporary world may be distinguished?
Merely to ask the question is to reveal the poverty of present political vocabulary in this respect. We are still operating with words and phrases drawn from a day when the lexicon of freedom bore meaningful relation to the rise of the people in politics and to the emancipation of individuals from inherited social structures. In plain fact we have no set of evocative terms at the present time that correspond to our realities in the same way the words “people” and “ individual” and “change” corresponded to the realities and aspirations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
There is the kind of state that seeks always to extend its administrative powers and functions into all realms of society, always seeking a higher degree of centralization in the conduct of its operations, always tending toward a wider measure of politicization of social, economic, and cultural life. It does not do this in the name of power of freedom- freedom from want, insecurity and minority tyranny. It parades the symbols of progress, people, justice, welfare and devotion to the common man. It strives unceasingly to make its end and purposes acceptable- through radio, newspaper, and document- to even the lowliest of citizens. It builds up a sense of the absolute identity of State and society- nothing outside the State, everything in the State.
Increasingly, in this type of State, the basic needs for education, recreation, welfare, economic production, distribution, and consumption, health, spiritual and physical and all other services of society are made aspects of the administrative structure of political government. This process of transfer comes to be accepted by almost everyone- by businessmen in search of guaranteed production and profit, by educators in need of funds, by labor in the interest of guaranteed jobs and living wages, and by liberal reformers in the interests of housing programs or other projects. Autonomous areas of economy, education, and other spheres of culture shrink constantly. Invasions of minority rights are defended, as are invasions of social authority and responsibility, and limitations upon right association in the name of people, of social justice, of preparedness for war against poverty, ignorance, disease and external national enemies.
Such a state may well call itself democratic and humanitarian. All contemporary totalitarian states so refer to themselves. Such a State may found itself upon the highest principle of virtue, even as did the Republic of Plato. There can be such a thing as democratic totalitarianism even as there can be, as we have learned in disillusion, socialist totalitarianism. The design of totalitarianism, as Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor has taught us, can be infinitely varied and in human can proceed from the formal veneration of God as easily as from the hatred of God. The impersonal despotism of virtue, as someone has said, is not the less despotic because it is virtuous.
But there is also the kind of State that seeks, without sacrificing its legitimate sovereignty grounded in the will of the people, to maintain a pluralism of functions and loyalties in the lives of its people. It is a state that knows that the political absorption of the institutional functions of an association, be it family, local community, or trade union, must soon be followed by the loss or weakening of psychological devotions to that association. It is a state that seeks to diversify and decentralize it’s on administrative operations and to relate theses as closely as possible to the forms of spontaneous association which are the outgrowth of human needs and desires and which have relevance to the economic, educational and religious ends of cultures. Is seeks cultural diversity, not uniformity. It does not make a fetish of either social order or personal adjustment, but it recognizes that the claims of freedom and cultural autonomy will never have recognition until the great majority of individuals in society have a sense of cultural membership in the significant and meaningful relationships of kinship, religion, occupation, profession and locality. It will not spurn the demands of human security but it will seek means by which such demands can be met through spontaneous association and creation rather than through bureaucratic rigidities of formal law and administration.
Either type of State may be labeled democratic and humanitarian. But the difference between the two types is infinitely greater than the differences between capitalism and socialism, or between monarchy and republic. The rest type of state is inherently monolithic and absorptive and however broad its base in the electorate and however nobly inspired its rulers, must always border upon despotism.
The second type of State is inherently pluralist and, whatever the intentions of its formal political rulers, its power will be limited by associations whose plurality of claims upon their members is the measure of their members freedom from any monopoly of power in society.

[Mirza Ghalib]

I did like the two concluding paragraphs of this article in which the author clearly states the difference between an "inherently monolithic and absorptive" State and a second type which would be "inherently pluralist and, whatever the intentions of its formal political rulers, its power will be limited by associations whose plurality of claims upon their members is the measure of their members freedom from any monopoly of power in society." It's a pity the latter kind has not yet seen the light of day, but the 21st century is in its early stages. Over time perhaps! In any case, there is no need for any of us to give up before we have given the alternative a proper try.

[Shimatoree]

http://www.humansofnewyork.com