This is the place to post random thoughts, right? I have been thinking about what kind of community I would least regret living in until the singularity comes along. (Without deadening my faculties with drugs, etc. Optimal means "least bad" as well as "most good", right?)
I recently read this article about the origins of analytic philosophy: http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/Polish_Philosophy.pdf It says that analytic philosophy was born in states where there was no "official culture", but there were multiple ideological factions whose clash created a space for the existence of individuals whose only motivation was to speak the truth as they saw it.
So perhaps my ideal polity should have multiple potentially conflicting factions, but it would be managed in such a way that instead of giving rise to armed violence, their ideological clash would create a space for the individual's creative freedom. The presence of ideological conflict is a feature, not a bug. It becomes a bug when people end up feeling like they have to express these differences through violent or extremist means.
The question is, is it a case of hopeless idealism to ask people to set up nonviolent culture wars and have every side lose them forever while at the same time ensuring that no victims come to any real harm? If that is too extreme a formulation, then a toned-down version of the idea just coincides with bog-standard "diversity politics" liberalism, doesn't it?
If that is too extreme a formulation, then a toned-down version of the idea just coincides with bog-standard "diversity politics" liberalism, doesn't it?
There days people who speak for "diversity" quite often advocate policies like hate speech laws that reduce diversity of voiced opinions.
Pluralism seems to me the better label.
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