The Global Citizen |
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We make our friends. We make our enemies. God makes our neighbors. G.K. Chesterton
Is there a great moral nation, The Global Citizen is published in conjunction with The McGill Report, where international news is a good local story.
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12.4.2002
UNKNOWING PRISONERS OF OUR OWN EGOTISM: We've learned a lot since Albert Einstein penned his 1949 Marxist-flavored essay "Why Socialism?," which advocated planned economies as a panacea for social ills. He got the solution wrong, but he got the problem just right, and it's worth remembering: “The essence of the crisis of our time concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naïve, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only by devoting himself to society.” Social and political philosophers like Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, Wilfred McClay, Robert Putnam and Michael Walzer all take this problem as central and somehow, the evolving discussion about the possibilites of global citizenship has got to take it into account. Who out there has the passion and the brains to write a book connecting these two trains of thought -- the communitarian and the global -- to see what fruit their commingling would bear?
12.2.2002
FIVE EASY READINGS: 1. "Anti-Americanism" is popping up all over. Is it the new anti-Semitism? 2. What do facism, communism, and progressivism have in common? 3. "How should people committed to democracy, civil liberties, and equality deal with, join in, and resist Bush's version of the war on terrorism? There can't be any disengagement from the war against privelege and corruption, both of which are embodied in our current government." Michael Walzer 4. What Andrew Sullivan is thankful for. (Scroll to "A Thanksgiving Post" on November 27, 2002.) Amazing. 5. Another step towards the singularity (the day computers take over the world)?
 
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