CDR: Shunning, lesbians and liberty (was: Re: <nettime> Rebirth of Guilds)

[Sampo A Syreeni]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, David Honig wrote:

>>So how do you feel, for instance, about bullying in the form of cooperative
>>isolation of someone by his/her peers? Certainly everybody has the /right/
>>not to speak to someone...
>
>Freedom of association includes freedom not to associate.

I know, I know. It's too bad all these nice ideas of liberty and freedom
always seem to bump into contradictions when people actually go and apply
them to their full extent.

>>Only that sort of thing harms people more than an occasional, physical
>>punch, something which few liberty-advocating people would say is tolerable.
>
>Exclusion harms you only if it bugs you ---you have to want to be a 
>homosexual atheist boyscout for their exclusion to matter.  Non-consensual
>violence always harms.

I do not agree. I think shunning harms you regardless, if it is organized
well enough. Say, you do something which causes your whole town to shun
you. Where do you suppose you get food, shelter, whatever from there
on? You'd say 'just leave', here, right? What if you do not have the
means? You just die?

I also think I'm not totally wrong if I claim that even when the physical
necessities of life have been taken care of, social contact *can* be
essential to the survival of people raised up to be/genetically predisposed
to being social or dependent, as modern people tend to be, on the
surrounding society for survival. If this holds, shunning someone then
becomes precisely as 'violent' as physical violence. Even if psychology
isn't the hardest of sciences, it does suggest that isolation does
significantly more than simply 'bug' people.

>>I think liberty should carry a pricetag of tolerance.
>
>No, liberty is absolute, and probably not being exercised if *someone*
>isn't offended.

I doubt that. Besides, that someone can be offended all s/he wants, s/he
just shouldn't be allowed to do anything about it. (Except, of course, what
the freedoms of expression/thought/association/whatever guarantee.)

>Your suggestion to "play nice" is quaint but irrelevent when talking about
>sovereign adults.

I don't see it quite like that. In order to have meaningful freedoms one
needs to have the possibility of enjoying them. When someone claiming
their rights in so doing limits the rights of others, I tend to resolve the
conflict by limiting the rights themselves. In this case, demanding that
people indeed 'play nice'.

This is precisely why freedom of thought and expression are so important and
why they are usually thought of as inalienable - thoughts do not usually
just jump out and start killing people. They are easy to protect since
conflicts between other people's similar rights rarely arise. This is not
the case with liberties involving physical violence, property et cetera.

(Really, this is simply the age old debate about positive liberties as
opposed to negative ones. In other words, a can of worms. Should we close it
before more nasty things crawl out?)

>Tolerance means tolerating intolerant groups.  The latter-day euros (germans
>and french esp.) don't get it.  When you burn nazi literature you have become
>them.

I agree. But the way I see it, tolerance applies to the intangible side of
things, not the physical. I.e. you can hate and insult the somali or the
Finnish all you want and webcast as much hate speech as you want but once
you start beating people, you're off. Similarly, you have to tolerate the
speech but not the actions. In the case of our proverbial lesbians, you have
to tolerate their 'deviant ways' and even the occasional kiss, while they
have to tolerate you speaking behind their back, insulting them and whatever
else nasty you can do with ideas alone. What you do not have to tolerate is
a lesbian kissing you (a bit of a bad analogy since you're male), or a shop
owner throwing you out for a public display of love.

The argument of private vs. public services, I think, is a bad one - in a
society in which practically everything can be privately owned it puts the
rights of everybody in the hands of those with the dough. Against this
background your view of rights being absolute sort of dries up.

Of course one valid attempt at resolving the problem would be to limit
private ownership of things somehow essential to the preservation of
people's liberties. I think I better not go there, right?

Sampo Syreeni <decoy at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university