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Communitarian Letter #2
In this issue: New Endorsements! Privacy Laws: Europe vs. America EU Community Building Down with Neckties? Intelligent Design Feedback The Communitarian Calendar
****************************************************************************** Major Endorsements of Diversity Within Unity I am proud, privileged and honored to announce two major new endorsements for our Diversity Within Unity platform, rights and responsibilities of immigrants and their host country. The essence of our position is that immigrants have responsibilities to their new host country, its culture, identity and community. As immigrants live up to their obligations, their host countries can and should welcome them and their remaining particularities. Many thanks to George Vassiliou, former President of Cyprus and Director Emeritus of the German Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard visiting Professor Karl Kaiser for their endorsements. If you have not endorsed the platform yet, please consider doing so.
Information on a meeting on Diversity Within Unity can be found under the Communitarian Calendar at the end of this email or by clicking here
Praise for our report “Pre-Empting Nuclear Terrorism in a New Global Order”
“It addresses the most urgent question of nuclear proliferation to terrorists. It will be a very useful material for thought for us.” Nobuyasu Abe Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs United Nations ****************************************************************************** Security versus rights, a dialogue
We received many thoughtful replies to the issues raised in our last Letter, but one in particular deserves additional give and take. As the beginning of an ongoing series, Professor Mark Heyrman of the University of Chicago School of Law, wrote:
Your claim is that: "People give up on rights when they feel insecure and cherish them when they feel safe. Therefore, the best way to protect not merely lives but also rights is to ensure a reasonable level of security." However, your formulation is careful not to claim that we get our rights back when we feel safer--just that we cherish them more. Nor is there any evidence that our loss of rights has contributed to our safety. What is the benefit of seeing the videotape of suicide bombers produced for the gullible public after the terrorists and their too numerous victims are already dead. I see no evidence that the detentions and torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have improved our security. In defending some of the more egregious provisions in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department has actually claimed that they had never been used!! So apparently we are just giving up our rights for the sake of giving them up.
After World War II ended, we also ended the immoral and illegal detention of Japanese-American citizens and later apologized. This history might support your point. But in that war we were fighting against actual countries with governments, armies and physical territory. In declaring war on terrorism, we are not even fighting against a particular group of people. We have declared war on a tactic.
Professor Mark Heyrman, Clinical Professor of Law The University of Chicago School of Law
Dear Professor Heyrman, Your communication raises numerous important issues. I hope my response will lead to further comments by you and by others, in the spirit of clarifying the issues.
What say you?
Sincerely, Amitai Etzioni
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Privacy
An August 7 article in The New York Times carried a detailed report about data protection laws in Europe that are stronger than American ones (especially regarding limitations of collection by corporations rather than by the government). The article was careful to report that whether the corporations observe these laws is much less clear.
Indeed, every time I give a lecture in Europe on privacy, I wonder aloud if anyone in the audience was ever asked—as the EU laws call for—if information about themselves they disclosed to one party may be passed on to another. I have encountered only one raised hand so far; when I asked the person if he minded telling me which corporations it was, he uttered “Amazon…”
EU Community Building
I am the first to admit that the suggestion of how to reinvigorate community building in the European Union in the following brief essay is a far out one. However, I believe it serves to highlight the kind of moves needed. The essay can be found at http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/fp/cuse/analysis/etzioni20050727.pdf
Down with neckties
A study shows that people who work for a corporation, from the receptionist to the CEO, all “need” more income. Asked how much more they need to be satisfied, all responded “about twenty percent more.” Unless one buys out of the consumerism race, enough is never enough: hence the growing appeal of voluntary simplicity. For more discussion see several essays Daniel Doherty and I put together in Voluntary Simplicity: Responding to Consumer Culture, available here)
Not wearing a tie could do for the voluntary simplicity movement what burning bras did for the women’s movement: provide a visible symbol of one’s affiliation or sympathy for a simpler life that lacks nothing. Well, this is at least true for ties.
Intelligent Design: A common ground?
Progressives are up in arms about the movement to teach Intelligent Design in public schools. They depict advocates of ID as Machiavellians trying to sneak creationism into the curriculum. They roundly condemn these people.
At the same time, progressives are recognizing that many Americans are concerned about values in general, often religious, spiritual and transcendental matters. How was the world FIRST created? Where are we destined to go? Why are we born to die?
Attempts to answer such questions in solely scientific terms are not going to do the trick. Whatever science tells us, those of us who are looking for normative answers will not be satisfied. To tell a grieving parent that their child died because his heart failed does not address the question they are asking. Similarly, to tell people concerned about where we came from and where we are headed, that we came from apes and going to become worm feed, does not cut it.
Many scientists, when not in a confrontational mood, admit that there are normative questions science cannot and is not meant to address. Call these questions “otherwordly.” As long as ID advocates raise these questions and wonder if they do not point us to a master creator, there is no reason I can see to oppose them. However, if they proceed to claim that they have “The Answer,” and of course if they try to force creationism into the curricula, then the time is right to say “wait a moment, not in our public schools.”
What are your thoughts and comments on this topic? Please let us know by emailing your ideas to comnet@gwu.edu.
Feedback to a Previous Communitarian Letter
Robyn M. Dawes Carnegie Mellon University
Answer to "Cameras in public spaces -- the eyes of Big Brother?" A Communitarian Letter, Update #69 I am responding to your line: "How is liberty lost? Never in the way widely believed: the salami tactic of first trimming one right here and then one there."
People assess behaviors in terms of their deviations from a status quo. Each salami slice step up or down can provide a new status quo once it is accepted; moreover, the thinner the slice, the greater the probability of acceptance.
My response: Although it is true that the Nazis gradually implemented their program, THE turning point came with the regime change, when they took over the helm of the government. Same for Stalin and company, the French revolution and many others times throughout recent history.
Fred Scharf Political Economist Washington, DC
I found some of the responses to question #68 disturbing, most especially David Luban's.
Before I register my protests, I first want to say that I very much appreciated the response of Fred Foldvary:
"In a free society, all business transactions are voluntary. The USA and the states are supposed to be free societies, and so the owner of a pharmacy should have the legal right to sell or not sell what he or she wishes. A pharmacy employee should abide by the policy of the owner.”
I appreciate it because an awful lot of time and effort seems to go into figuring out how to control, regulate or otherwise exercise power over things. When power and control become the centerpiece of any discussion, treatment of an issue has gone astray. This seems to be a habitual pattern in the U.S. and I think it demonstrates a fundamental shift in our ways of thinking. Foldvary's quote intimates that power is more properly exercised in the doing rather than the preventing.
My response: Free does not mean do what you please. You need a licence to open a pharmacy, and the community has a right to set conditions for getting this privilege.
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Communitarian Calendar
Diversity Within Unity Speech and Panel Discussion
Berlin, Germany American Political Science Association - 2005 Annual Meeting Washington DC
“Preventing Nuclear Terrorism is a New Global Order” Thursday, September 1, 2:00 Omni Shoreham Hotel, 2500 Calvert Street NW Panelists: Robert Einhorn (Center for Strategic and International Studies), Mark Hemke (Office of Senator Richard Lugar), Laura Holgate (Nuclear Threat Initiative) and George Perkovich (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) Chair: Amitai Etzioni
“From Empire to Community” Friday, September 2, 4:15 PM Marriot Wardman Park, 2660 Woodley Road NW Panelists: Nikolas K. Gvosdev (The Nixon Center), James J. Hentz (Virginia Military Institute) and Leon Fuerth (The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs) Chair: Amitai Etzioni
These events are produced by The Communitarian Network in conjunction with the American Political Science Association |
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