Culture THOUGHTS ON “POST LIBERALISM” (I)

[JagerIV]

An interesting blog post from the blog "The Scholar's Stage" which has a ring of truth to me, but I haven't thought about it all that much yet.

Thoughts on “Post Liberalism” (I)

The political project of the “post liberals” is not my own. Many of their critiques of contemporary American life and politics mirror what I have written; many of their suggestions for the future o…

scholars-stage.org

Thus the popularity of Stoicism and Epicureanism. Thus the worship of Isis, Dionysus, and Cybele. Thus the spread of the Pythagorean and Orphic Cults. Thus the transformations of Second Temple Judaism. To explain this all Metzger quotes historian Peter Green: “The record we have… speaks with some eloquence to the dilemmas that faced a thinking man in a world where, no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul.”7

Masters of fate and captains of souls. That is the choice. Humans find meaning in agency. We wish to act, not only to be acted upon. Those denied all chance to meaningfully shape the form and fate of their community—we once referred to this as “self government”—will seek agency elsewhere. As Hellenes deprived of communal independence refocused their souls on individualist self-cultivation, so late 20th and early 21st century Americans, long denied a meaningful role in governing their society, instead seek meaning and esteem in the expression of their identities.

7 Peter Green, The Hellenistic Age (New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2008). Kindle location 545 quoted in Metzer, “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self.”

Certainly not a wholly unique idea, the difficulty that the loss of the frontier may play, but if nothing else a point of comparison rarely seen.

 

[Cherico]

One solution is federalism to take away power from an increasingly corrupt and innept national buracracy and put more of it into smaller more local governments.

 

[KilroywasNOTHere]

One solution is federalism to take away power from an increasingly corrupt and innept national buracracy and put more of it into smaller more local governments.

I thought that was anti-federalism. Doesn't federalization mean more centralization and bigger government?

 

[Cherico]

I thought that was anti-federalism. Doesn't federalization mean more centralization and bigger government?

America has a history of naming a policy after some thing good and then having the actual policy be its god awful opasit.

See the partriot act.