brianp@shark.UUCP (Brian Peterson) (08/11/84)
X Ah, Brian, but you didn't keep asking why!
I got nothing for a long time, and then long articles.
X Now you are off and talking about ``society defining itself''.
X Where did this come from? I can tell you one thing -- soceity does
X not go about defining itself -- somebody makes some generalisations
X about society, publishes them, and that gets to be what society is
X about.
(200 million people will simultaneously say "our society is ..." :-)
What can define society? Something external to it, like our anthropologists
describing >other< societies. Who describes us?
Subsets of ourselves can be describers, as you say. Society as a whole
can define itself, in the same way that society as a whole can exist,
in the same way that society as a whole can act, can have characteristics.
The definition is not neccessarily >explicit<. It is revealed by the
actions of the society.
X Is there really ``the ME generation?'' what about ``the silent generation''?
X William Buckley says that he is a member of the silent genration, and he
X sure isn't silent.
You expect 200 million people to be alike? We are not clones. That
is not what it means to be a society.
X So we need a definition of society. How about this:
X
X A society is a collection of individuals who are held
X together either by force or threat of force by certain
X ruling individual(s), or by voluntary association.
X
X Not that that was not an ``xor'' up there. Now you have a definition
X of society which does not go about asking whether every individual is a
X member. You can assume that all teh members of a society are there
X either because they are forced to be there whether they want to or not,
X or because they want to be there.
Almost anything can be a society. A cub scout pack, a bridge club,
a radical political group on campus, all humanity, etc.
I infer that to be a member in your "society", there must be some
explicit quality which can be easily detected.
Fetuses aren't "voluntary", and they aren't threatened with force,
so they aren't in a "society" of your definition. Aborting a fetus
places it in a "society". But WHICH "society"? One of aborted fetuses?
That raises the question of different "societies".
>Society< is a very fuzzy term, and a loose definition trying to be
more explicit doesn't help.
X I do not know about the Unites States, but in Canada it
X was calculated (by someone I do nopt recognise and who may
X be lying) that if all the money that was spent by the various
X provincial public health agencies was combined with the
X money which the Pro Life groups have spent on promoting their
X cause there would be enough money to raise every aborted fetus
X in Canada, with a good bit left over.
Is this raising them to 18 years old? What about everyone's health?
--> Why aren't the pro-lifers spending money adopting and raising
those fetuses NOW? Why are there unwanted children, poor children,
homeless children? The pro-lifers should finish with the ones we
already have, before asking for MORE!!! <--
X Of course, the figures will we as inexact as such figures always
X are, but it makes you stop and wonder. How much are those
X unwanted fetuses actually going to cost us anyway?
X Laura Creighton
X utzoo!laura
If you think in $$$, the cost is whatever it takes to raise one baby to
healthy adulthood, able to support itself. If you think in terms of
ecology (long term), it is the cost of overpopulation. What about
the social costs? Can we assure that more than twice the babies now
born can find a nice place in the world, and >get along with< other
people??
Brian Peterson {ucbvax, ihnp4, } !tektronix!shark!brianplaura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (08/16/84)
Brian, you are right that ``we are not clones''. So when you speak of yourself as ``a member of X society'' then you are only identifying the elements of the society with which you would like to be identified. These elements may even be specious generalisations for all we know. The problem arises when a few people say the same words over and over so that people become aware of a label and begin to think that the label is the people. So everybody knows what ``the ME generation'' is supposed to be from media coverage. The problem is that there are a lot of people who do not fit the stereotype of ``the ME generation'' just as there are a lot of people who aren't stereotypical Blacks, White Southerners, Policemen, you name it. ``Society'' is just a catch-all stereotype. And when someone says things like ``Society demands X'' what they are actually saying is that ``Certain people, who claim to be representative of ``society'' demand X''. It will be interpreted as ``everybody wants X'' or ``everybody who is not a nut-case wants X'' to the extent that one believes that those certain people actually do represent ``society''. But this is more a matter of ideology and propeganda than anything else. If Joe Elected-Member-Of-Government stands up and says ``I am elected and therefore representative of society and societey wants me to vote yes on issue foo'' a whole lot of people will say yes, he does represent society. What they do not uinderstand is that Joe Elected may never have mentioned issue foo during his last campaign, or that he may have, and most constituents wanted him to vote no, but more than that they really didn't care about issue foo and voted for him because his opposition were unattractive in some way, or even that it is likely that more than half of the members of his constituent who were eligible to vote either did not vote or voted against him so that he was in by a plurality alone. So Joe may not be representing that much after all. The problem is that the more speeches Joe gives the more people will come to believe that Joe is actually representing society, simply because they hear it so often. This causes disgruntlement among the members of the society which Joe claims he is representing (if they do not think that their actual desires are being put forward) and causes outsiders to think that society is what Joe says that it is. So if Joe says ``Christian society demands that evolution be thrown out and creationism taught in schools'' he has done several bad things. In the first place, he has got the Christians who are not fundamentalists and think that creationism is wrong upset with him. In the second place he has got the Fundamentalists who are arguing for equal time with evolution upset with him. The Fundamentalists who agree with what Joe says may be estatic, but the rest of the non-Christian world gets another indication that Christian=that subset of Fundamentalist Christians. Not good at all. But it is the nature of democracy that the people interested in making the rules give as their justification for making the rules that they are ``doing the will of the people''. Mostly, of course, this is a big con and they are only ``doing the will of some of the people -- inparticular enough to keep me elected''. The number of issues on which all members of any ``society'' agree is so small that the usefulness of the word at all is very questionable. It suggests a unity where there is actually none. So why use the word? I know that politicians use it to intimidate people who disagree with their proposals (under the ``society says means if you do not agree you are a nutcase'' interpretation) and I see media people using this form of argument by intimidation all the time. Assuming that you do not want to intimidate another into backing away from his beliefs out of fear of humiliation, what other purpose is served by this word? besides being short enough for newspaper headlines? Laura Creighton utzoo!laura ps -- who says that ``being well liked'' or ``fitting in'' is something which should be guaranteed before a child is allowed to exist or grow up? There are a lot of people out there who, rightly or wrongly, believe that they are not well liked and do not fit in...but they are still happy to be alive.
brianp@shark.UUCP (Brian Peterson) (08/25/84)
Laura's recent ~80 line article says that what most people mean
when they refer to "society" is different from what the whole
bunch of people really is. (that whole is the "society" I was trying
to get at, not the kind of >conception of society< Laura was describing)
ps: The "life is bad but I still want to live, thank you" argument
is not appropriate, in my opinion. The desire to live is meaningless
if one never was. Abortion is an attempt to prevent another person
from happening. (Yes, it's a living homo-sapiens. We all know that)
Person-hood is NOT a black and white matter. That is why the abortion
problem is so difficult to solve. Life IS almost black and white.
You are either alive or dead. (for the most part, I think :-)
Brian Peterson {ucbvax, ihnp4, } !tektronix!shark!brianp