Outlawing Fascistic Racist Speech: Biblio-fetishism

[Dace]

>>>> "Dace" <edace at flinthills.com> 03/24/00 12:37PM >>>
>That's not it, Charles.  The reason we protect freedom of speech is not for
>the good of society but out of respect for the individual.
>
>*********
>
>CB: When you say "we protect..," the "we" is society, not an individual.
The First Amendment of the Constitution is "society" protecting speech not
an individual protecting speech. The "individual" does not protect the
"individual's " speech. If you want to protect speech , you must give a
rationale for SOCIETY to protect speech. Otherwise, why should society
protect individual speech , if you don't give a social, political rationale
for it ?

You're using "we" in the singular.  I was using it in the plural.  We *each*
possess unmediated knowledge of the value of individual autonomy, so we get
together and protect that autonomy.
>
>_________
>
>
>Grammatical
>language is a product of consciousness, which exists only in the individual
>mind, not in society as a whole.
>
>_________
>
>CB: There is no collective conscious mind, but grammar is a social product,
the product of a society of minds, not an individual mind.

True, but without individual consciousness, it could not have come about.
It's a dual product.

Actually, your point is extremely significant.  Consciousness and language
evolved strictly within the context of social interaction.  (See Nicholas
Humphrey, Robin Dunbar, and Stephen Mithen.)  A quarter of a million years
ago, when we had a core, grammatical language, everything outside of social
interaction was just background noise.  We paid no attention to toolmaking
or our interaction with nature.  These tasks simply proceeded instinctively
like they always had.  All that existed, as far as we were concerned, was
each other.  Language developed in the context of people (subject) doing
(verb) things (object).  When we later expanded our attention to nature, we
superimposed onto the world-at-large this way of talking and thinking.
Let's take a simple sentence: The tree falls.  In our minds, the tree is the
subject and is therefore a person.  In our people-centered consciousness, we
saw peopleness everywhere we looked.  This is animism, which got refined
into a belief in gods, which got narrowed down to one god, which became, for
Protestants, the mechanic of the universe, and remains to this day,
disembodied, as physical determinism.

Stephen Mithen argues that racism and sexism are also rooted in this
historical development.  We used to have separate domains of thought.
Consciousness could be confined in the realm of social interaction, because
this domain was separate from both the "natural history" domain and the
technology domain.  But by 100,000 years ago, they had all blended together
under a general program of intelligence, i.e. the intellect.  We could
therefore think of things as people (anthropomorphism) and people as things.
While this doesn't explain why we would invent racism and sexism, it does
explain how we could be so stupid in the first place.

Ted