Initial Post - welcome

There is something called "polite society," or "society."

What it is --- is status. However, as to the real status --- that's truth --- and virtue. What kind of a society do we live in where the very word "virtue" is thrown away like it is rubbish?

What Isaiah Berlin might say we live in -were he alive -is "the modern." On the other hand it is important to note that there may be kinds of modernity. The idea is that there may be authoritarian ones (examples of which we have seen in the 20th cent. and still see today, in places such as Burma, China and any number of other states, including, very likely, certain parts of the terrible United States of America), and, "liberal" ones. This later is, of course, the Isaiah Berlin-endorsed system (which does not mean to imply that he had any such power).

Leftists say it is class that rules. What rules is polite society. What I mean by that hackneyed phrase is something like an informal concatenation: rules, gestures, manners, biology and other factors. That is what "polite society" is. Maybe this is not too difficult to understand.

The fact is that the truth is held by neither one class or the other. The job of the society itself -ultimately we have to talk about the upper class part here -is to uphold truth and virtue. Now, while a classless society is a worthy ideal what we have are the members of polite society, and, in all practicality what we need thim to do is not drop the ball on our behalf --- throwing the rest of us to the dogs.

All over the world, there are many intelligent persons in various and sundry places. The fact is: the ones ruling things are the ones of this polite society. They are the ones in control.

Not the sturdy peasantry.

There have been many debates, have there not? -- about what is the correct form of human society or human social organization? There are also theories that these things just work themselves out, independently, with no interference needed, of an intentional kind. Milton Friedman's ideas indicate that he wanted to have a minimal security structure -- some kind of public security structure -- and otherwise everything is to be "private" or based on what he and his wife in their tome "Free To Choose" describe as business -or "private" -profit.

What is not clear here, upon analysis, is just how big this limited government should be nor what limits its size. Enough about him. Anarchists -I find it odd that it works this way -are also holders of the idea, this idea that everything can just take care of itself. But otherwise we think that there has to be some actual government or other institutional structure that structures, stabilizes.

II

For example, right now (just barely into 2009) we are having a meltdown in what Soros calls one of two parts of the economy: the financial structure or financial sector --- as paired with the actual, physical economy. Most of us, other than the anarchists or Friedmanites, think that there has to be some strucural intervention.
But beyond that no one has very much to say. Obama claims he will better distinguish aid for the financial side of the economy from aid for the physical side of the economy, but, these are just claims coming from a person who, so far, has shown his ability to win elections. He has not made any decisive move yet to make his mark. He is, in fact, the latest member of the elite: the polite society. Just the other day he posed very politely, very nicely, with the other four living presidents and the current one, who claimed, at the photo op for a lunch that they say these guys had, that he too was an ex-president --- jumping the gun a bit.
That happens in 10 days, actually, Beaver.




endnotes:
the phrase "kinds of modernity" corresponds to the work of an English fellow named Gray, at the LSE --- John Gray. I am not particularly fond of this man, but he does use the concept as did I.