Just before Christmas I was involved in an event to protest the mis-information campaign being waged by Exxon, against Global Warming, and I got a few nasty phone calls when my number hit certain mailing lists. One of the callers asked me if I was a "global warming fascist". I blew that off and went on with things.


A little later my friend Dennis posted an article about The Philosopher's Stone and it really got me thinking ...



The Peak Oil community is many things to many people, and I suppose there may be 'fascists' lurking about who see coming troubles as a chance to impose themselves upon us.



Alternatively, the libertarian who called me, may see anyone who advocates a restriction of individual liberty ... (which ultimately we need to address) as a fascist.



One way or another, the term will be bandied about by both sides.



As an alternative to the rhetorical term fascist, I have found this passage on coercion from The Perversion of Autonomy, by Gaylin & Jennings, which I think begins to place the rights of the one into the context of the needs of the many. They both work for The Hastings Center, a bio-ethics sort of think tank. This work stems from the matter of autonomy trumping humanity, and opens with the chronicle of a homeless man whose rights were respected to the point of his demise. It approaches the boundary between individual rights and our moral role as a society, and this discussion is long overdue. (IMHO)



Their viewpoint is more conservative than we're used to in San Francisco, but please remember that in a more interdependent world we need to be cognizant that we will be living in closer quarters, and may need to accept some constraints on the freedoms we've grown used to.



Per Gaylin & Jennings:
" The culture of autonomy is prompting a cultural backlash, which began in the 1990's and is continuing today, particularly on the political right and in fundamentalist religious communities but also among liberal and progressive thinkers who often refer to themselves as "communitarians". The reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, temporarily cast the culture of autonomy in a dim light, but is too early to tell how deep seated and lasting that reaction will be. Autonomy cannot simply be replaced by community or, much less, by unquestioning patriotism. The culture of autonomy calls for something much harder: a critical response that is pluralistic in outlook and pragmatic in spirit. One does not have to reject the entire liberal tradition in order to reject the culture of autonomy and the libertarian turn that liberalism has taken in America.



If the moral and social challenges America faces today (particularly in the behaviorally sensitive areas of health and medicine, social welfare, crime and drug use, education, and support for families and children) are to be met, we must recover - and articulate anew - a conception of freedom that is more civic and communal in orientation than autonomy or a libertarian conception of freedom. We must not accept the culture of autonomy on its own terms; we must confront that culture with an ethical discourse attuned to the human and moral significance of interdependence, mutuality, and reciprocity. In particular, we must explore the moral justification of state action and social coercion with a broader framework than that offered by autonomy liberalism, which is able to politically motivate and ethically justify the restriction of individual choice only in order to prevent harm to others.



In order to do this one must explore moral terrain beyond autonomy by examining other values that coexist with autonomy to make up social conditions within which human beings can flourish, realize their potential, and partake of both the individual and the common good. These other values relate to the human condition of interdependence, and they find a basis for a fabric of life together in precisely those aspects of life and experience that the culture of autonomy disdains and ignores. Foremost among those aspects are need, vulnerability, frailty, weaknesss, and mortailty. Autonomy forgets that the human being is incomplete without the mutuality of others.



It is from these characteristics of our selves that the social emotions first develop, and it is to them that the social emotions first develop, and it is to them that the social emotions are primarily attuned. The vulnerability and dependence of the other call forth in us a moral response. The social emotions orient that response; they guide and sustain it. That moral response elicited by the vulnerability and morality of others and our connectedness with them is what we have referred to aas our moral common sense. It is a sense of shared humanity and a sense of our own vulnerability and mortality; moral common sense is a sense of what we have in common with other members of the human moral community. Without these values that pertain and respond to interdependence autonomy alone does not provide an acceptable moral understanding of the human good, or the fabric of our lives as moral beings. The social emotions are not symptoms of moral childishness; they are the signs of moral engaement, embeddedness, and maturity. Persons without shame, guilt, pride, and conscience are not admirable - they are morally malformed. That is nothing to celebrate. In a culture and social order that deliberately and systematically tries to produce such people, there is little to praise.



America today faces the paradoxical task of combining seeming opposites. We must learn to use coercion for the sake of autonomy, and appeal to autonomy to reach a form of moral life richer than one autonomy alone can supply."



The authors go on to offer a framework of six principles to consider when restricting autonomy to promote the common good:



* A society should be arranged that it responds to the needs and vulnerability of its members.



* A society should protect each person from violence and exploitation.



* A society should actively promote mutual assistance and socially beneficial cooperation.



* A society should give its members equal protection of the laws and a hospitable culture of equal concern and respect.



* Public policy should sustain institutuions that make it possible for people to make the best use of their interdependent condition, to make shared moral life self-fulfilling and beneficial for each person as an individual.



* Policies should reform institutions and counteract concentrations of power that impede this activity.






So does that make me a Fascist? or a Communist?
I hope it makes me a realist that knows that that we face inevitable social changes as we descend to a lower energy order.



Mike