>From Sunday evening, when Kelley started this thread,...
Does no one have any response, or did Chuck convince everyone so thoroughly of his central thesis, the destructiveness of the pursuit of any ideal good, that they had nothing to say?
Carrol
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Thanks for the nudge and plug, Carrol.
This gives me an opportunity to trash civil society some more in any event. I referred to the trackless wastes of civil society, because I was thinking about Augustine and the deserts of North Africa.
I worked for years in the political wastes and trackless deserts of university and community based organizations that struggled for money, had absolutely sterling goals, and were the very heartfelt center of what is supposed to constitute civil society. Some were well run and others were a mess and some survived the various winds of economic and political change in some mutation of their origins. They were constantly exposed to the worse of arbitrary and grueling budget climates from inscrutable funding sources. All had to combine public money, private sources, donations, and fees for service (a really obnoxious attempt to legitimatize capital). While these programs and organizations improved the individual lives of those who participated (via the payroll) and those who used their services, in my opinion they also provided the public excuse for public institutions to do nothing and refuse to change. The people involved were also seriously compromised and deterred from more threatening and more progressive actions to organize and change conditions. In short they were a fig leaf. Check out Doug Henwood's great expose of how funding sources compromise the goals and impact of community organizations.
While I can always claim the work I did was better than nothing, in the end, I am not so sure. Perhaps with nothing, at least the oppression of existing conditions would have had to stand butt naked with no place to hide.
A much better answer is to tenaciously pursue government to gain access to public power and implement programs and policies articulated by the self-identified communities of interest and so those most effected. This is the point that gets tricky. You erase the ideal with the real--as defined by the people most directly effected. The theory is that everybody is an expert on their own needs.
At any rate, let the Right, their neo-liberal shadows, and the Christians wonder in the desert of civil society for a while and see how they like it. They claim to hate government. Fine, then get the fuck out.
Chuck Grimes