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Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
I don't know anything about Rawl. I agree that the idea of a natural right is not relevant in our times. However, I object to the suggestion (but maybe I misunderstood your meaning?) that we don't need to do any political thinking, in the sense of thinking about how our political system works or should work. We may not be overthrowing kings or beheading anyone (and I hope we'll keep it that way), but I think democracy is in a very dangerous crisis and needs to be reinvented. Is being reinvented, whether we like it or not.
In 2002 in France, many people didn't bother to go to the voting booth. Supporters of the right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen did. As a result, the second round of the election was between two right-wing candidates, one of them being Le Pen. Everyone was shocked. For two weeks people (the same people who hadn't bothered to vote) demonstrated in the streets to show how opposed to Le Pen they were, and how much they didn't want him as a president.
A few weeks later, there was another election. Granted, it was a minor one. Nevertheless, you'd think these people would have learned their lesson. You'd be wrong. They still didn't bother to vote.
The current democratic system, built in centuries when political and economic knowledge was mostly restricted to an elite, when communication was slow and information took a long time to reach the leaders and even longer to reach the rest of the population, is not working in our world. Many people feel they know better or as well as our presidents or PMs how to run the country. It's an exageration, but it is true that they are much better educated and informed than they used to be. And now they get almost the same information the president or PM does, and just as fast.
I am very attached to democracy in principle, and to representative democracy since it's basically the only one we have so far, but it's increasingly obvious that it's no longer working, at least in the form we have inherited from the 18th-19th centuries.
We need to start doing some thinking. Call it philosophical or political, I don't care. But we need to start thinking before we wake up one morning and find the change has happened anyway - well, that's usually how it works anyway, so maybe we can just relax and watch - I don't know.
But anyway, I do think political changes must and will happen. I just hope it happens in a way I can still recognize as democracy. And I hope nobody gets beheaded along the way.
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Let me be more fair to Rawls. I credited him for taking a narrowly pragmatic turn late in his career but I also think he was insightful for pointing out that we need to start thinking collectively of justice in terms of shared or "overlapping" values rather than our individually-held "comprehensive moral and religious doctrines."
But my problem with Rawls is that deriving justice as such is obsolete. Or, as he points out himself, only relevant during a constitutional crisis or the formation of a new nation. I really don't care about deriving justice as such, but rather I think the issue is how ought we to collectively create, rather than derive, more just conditions. The Rawlsian model of the authority deriving, once and for all, some transhistorical conception of democratic justice itself enacts an aristocratic form inquiry which necessarily excludes the citizen.
I, of course, much prefer the model of inquiry offered by John Dewey where the philosopher creatively offers a cosmology which encourages democratic participation, tries to clarify the problems that the public faces and the tools that they can then use to ameliorate them. As Dewey pointed out, the intellectual energies of some our brightest folks have been misdirected toward the relatively artificial problems of the academy. Meanwhile the common citizen gets the distinct impression that he has no part in the sort of serious work that only the professional intellectuals can handle.
So I agree with you about the significance of cultural lag. We are Lockean liberals by nature, and that inheritance has significantly confounded the advancement of democratic politics in America certainly. We still act as if our problems can be solved my moving west or waiting for the aristo/technocrats to take care of it. As far as I'm concerned, Rawls just continues that aristocratic pattern of inquiry.
I think the future of political thought has to be or ought to be at least somewhat Deweyan in the sense that focus on democratic institutions has to be secondary to the focus on building up the critical intellectual and moral resources of the citizenry. In other words, first and foremost, democratic thought has to become about how to a foster a moral community capable of collectively managing the procedures and institutions, and then only secondarily and collectively about the specifics of how we are going to engage in institutional transformation. For a long time we've been putting the cart before the horse to no effect.