Comments on A Note on Undifferentiated Unity

Familial love is scalable to the tribe, state, ethnicity, and nation. Our species must evolve past this sectarian approach to loyalty and expand our love to encompass all of global humanity. Otherwise we will become nothing more than ant heads fighting our dismembered ant bodies.

Charles,

I agree, and would note the many studies that ascribe the underdevelopment of southern Italy largely to this phenomenon.

Leaving aside the mafia aspect, when family bonds are paramount, the natural corollary is that anyone from another family is out to screw you if it will benefit them. This creates a great barrier to economic development, as businesses are nearly entirely family run, and generally don't expand beyond the workforce the family can provide.

Nepotism is a killer to economic success as well. Why bother working if your mother's cousin's brother-in-law has to employ you or risk pissing off the rest of the family?

Marx

"But does the amoral nature of the family not make it a bad standard for society"

Putting familial relations at a premium is not amoral, it's just a different moral configuration. It emphasizes social relations over ideology, manifestos, and useless intellectual abstractions. It knows that in the end, we all die.

apropos of what 2 said, i read an interesting article in the ny times some years back about how the social custom in iraq of marrying one's cousin precludes a civic society. in short, exogamous marriage is necessary for democracy, which why europe outlawed endogamous marriage in the middle ages.

So you're the one who wrote my friend's 200-level political theory paper the other week, eh?

But really, Charles, the premise that we must deliver compassion and, its inseparable counterpart, the social question, to the highest orders of politics will only destroy it and lead to terror. Call me Arendtian, but you replace human freedom with care and love and, well, post #4 put it all in one word...

The error of the family unit is precisely the same error of the narrative of the city, according to Matthew Stadler. This is the key to Stadler's new philosphy based on the zwischenstadt. Stadler is not saying, like Berkely, that one's perception molds reality, but simply that we have to reorienate our manner of thinking in order to get rid of the old order of city center/suburb/countryside/etc..., so that the true order will finally reveal itself, the social order, the public will, the being.

I have no problem with families. What I have a problem with are tribes. And what leaves me more and more apprehensive is the spread of tribal mentalities in the US. The national project is broken, or breaking fast, so we'll have to wait and see how the new tribalized America shakes out. My guess would be, not that pretty at all.