The civil society

The civil society is a certain type of ideal where people meet and discuss issues that affect them all and try to reason out solutions that they all can live with. Notice especially that this ideal is based on reason -- the human capacity to deal with reality in the abstract, to discern cause-and-effect relationships, to project the future consequences of actions taken now. It's also closely related to the concept of "rule by law, not by man." That is, dispassionate, objective law, not the subjective, arbitrary (though maybe empathetic) personal preference of an individual authoritarian.

The Enlightenment is the historical period that made a virtue of reason. It's even called The Age of Reason. Some people believe reason has failed, but it only fails when we fail to exercise it.

And when reason fails, what are we left with?

People grabbing a gun and going down to the Holocaust Museum, or the local Army recruiting office, or an abortion clinic to fix things on their own. I could go on naming particular issues, but hopefully you get the drift.

The US government in particular is very special creation. If government in general -- any government -- is a given society's method of making decisions that are binding on all members, then the US government was devised to make such decision-making as fair and open a process as possible. The Constitution describes a government that provides a forum for reasoned and fair decision-making in areas that constitute "public" life.

The US government was never intended to serve as a moral authority in the same way that religion or philosophy is. It was never supposed to micro-manage everyone's lives, rather only to protect our ability to make personal decisions for ourselves.

Right now the US is involved in a broad argument about how extensive the reach of government should be. The argument has gotten away from the issues enumerated in the Bill of Rights, so that now apparently whatever personal decisions we are allowed come under the vague and changeable heading of The Right to Privacy.

This is pretty much the opposite of what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The public space -- that part of life that's controlled by governmental authority -- was supposed to be kept relatively small in its scope, but that's not what's happened over time.

Conservatives want government limited to one degree or another. Liberals want government expanded to control as much as possible. Everyone seems to have some hobby-horse that they believe requires the compulsion of government control. The Founding Fathers talked about "toleration," or letting others be, even if you believed they were wrong. Now special interest groups of every stripe own one or another issue that they claim needs to be legislated one way or the other for the good of all.

But you see, when you try to extend governmental -- or really any kind -- of social control, you only generate ever-accelerating controversy about what is "good" for all people, since all people will be forced to live with it or under it. Non-conformists, including creative people, often feel the pressure first, feel that they're being pushed into places that they don't want to go.

The alternative is to agree to disagree. In other words, abandon attempts at control and simply tolerate behavior that might be repugnant to us personally. As Jefferson said, "It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg...."

The conflict is not incidentally between right and left, Democrats and Republicans, socialists and capitalists. The primary source of the conflict is between individual rights and social control.

So not only is there is a loonie firing randomly (?) at visitors at the Holocaust Museum, but the killing of Dr. Tiller, who performed abortions, and also of a US soldier by a radical muslim, all over the last couple of weeks.

Seems people of every political shade are abandoning law, since the law just isn't working out in their favor. Or maybe the law has become less and less reasonable, less and less tolerant, and more and more oppressive -- for everyone. Maybe there's just too much of it.

As government control increasingly becomes social control -- that is, polticizing every aspect of human life and carving out laws of behavior for every person in every possible situation -- there's only going to more of this kind of thing. People feeling pressured and abused, yet helpless to save themselves in any other way but to strike out at whomever they perceive to be "the enemy."

In public relations Lesson #1 is: Don't corner your opponent, because if you push them up against the wall, they have no option but to attack you.

Exactly when and who they attack is pretty much up to them, and no amount of government control and additional legislation will ever change it. In fact, harsher control only makes it worse.