Review 2-'Age of Fracture'

The farther I have read in this book on American society and the evolution and fragmentation of political and economic thought in the United States since maybe 1960, the more I enjoy it. It should win a National Book Award. My undergraduate depth in philosophy and history allows me to appreciate the interdisciplinary scope’s intensity of analysis the Princeton History proff Daniel Rodgers brought to these essays on fracturing or pluralistic platooning of more simple and aggregate forms of social thought in economics, sociology, politics, race, gender studies and more.

I had not considered the fact before that the 1960’s anti-establishment libertarianism of anti-war, anti-draft, anti-government radicals synergized very logically into a 1980’s anti-big government, libertarian anti-state neo-conservative political philosophy. One finds innumerable interesting points in this book to support development of one’s own new political theories as one realizes better where America thought amidst elites has been and how it got to be where it is today.

Even the law has changed significantly on the basis for assigning value and compensation for plaintiff claims. Real social values of damages differ from narrow, proximal differences, and market values of claims damages differ as well with time as an element.

Individuals rather than social aggregations seem to be the present American point of view from which social corrections of class inequalities might be made, or rather, disregarded. If social classes are specious then corrections for class inequalities are as well. This book surveys changes in language and social power structures, from Foucault and on to the philosophies of Rawls, Rorty and Nozick. The contest between structure and destructuralism in social perceptions and power, in the pursuit for social justice and relation to the market comprise dialectical intellectual and political evolution that from my point of view fail to appreciate the frontier, phenomenal and voluntary nature of primitive human social aggregation for which good character seeking to assure freedom and the best possible way of life for all within available environmental resource limits would have a temporal propensity for redistributing wealth to the lowest class of society in order to increase opportunity until it became socially and economically counter-productive to do so.

At this point I will leave off commenting about Rawls’ philosophy and ‘The Age of Fracture’ and describe a better way of regarding society, briefly.

Anarchy, State and Utopia by Nozick was a libertarian reply to Rawls’ earlier book of social philosophy ‘A Theory of Justice’ helpfully summarized by Rodgers in ‘The Age of Fracture’. I have read the classical philosophers of political philosophy, yet not too much the more contemporary as I stayed with analytical philosophy, cosmology and occasional retro-readings (regarding time eg. Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Origin, Athanasius etc.) in theology. Readings in the analytic philosophy of W.V.O. Quine, P.F. Strawson, Cohen, and others led to a better understanding of the nature of language, words and objects and so forth. Because I view society as a phenomenal, evolutionary aggregation that creates its own linguistic and moral ontologies phenomenally and appropriate for various respective stages and circumstances, yet also believe in God and a natural structure of the Universe from its quantum level to a solid state level consistent with the concept of natural law, its rather simple to regard arguments about social roles, social and political power and so forth as also phenomenal historical circumstances. The ideal human society short of the arrival of God to supervise personally, would try to perpetually restore to human society the volunteer, equal access the fundamental material needs and freedom found in a healthy natural environment so far as possible.

In a very advanced society money as power is transcended and the individual has adequate power to provide for individual freedom. The primary political directive would be to prevent any kind of coercive subjugation of anyone else, such that all people would need to associate strictly on a voluntary basis.

Societies evolve and historically appear at any given place and time. Changing a social environment is always challenging and seldom is accomplished without discomfiture to significant portions of the population. When a society reaches a rational material balance with the ecosphere however, when technology becomes environmentally minimalist regarding displacement of the ecosphere and the economics of personal living needs are socially well advanced freeing society from direct needs to the preponderance of repressive competition or exploitation of the environment, then each individual should have enough energy to be creative and survive to prosper intellectually and physically without compiling power or energy in such a way as to be repressive of anyone else in society. In that advanced ecospheric social structure, one that incidentally is space-faring, money, energy or wealth would be freely available like water is to a primitive society in an area with lots of naturally flowing streams. In such a context of rational and socially prosperous economic management there would be no reason for anyone to try to dam up or compile excess water for-themselves anymore so than there would be a reason for a hundred wandering Indians living in Eastern Oregon 15,000 years ago to fence property.

Human civilization has existed for about 8,000 years, and the progress of human society in economics might be fairly measured by observing how it provides its members with food and other necessities of life. Before civilization, with a far smaller population, most of humanity had sufficiency in food. Human freedom was general as slavery largely is a consequence of organized social subjugation. With economic progress much of humanity is subjugated by bureaucratic and organizational structures requiring servitude in exchange for food, shelter and other necessaries. Medical advances are vast improvements over pre-civilization human conditions, yet they are not available to all and for many require a kind of financial bondage to get (debt). The advance of civilization will require a rectification of the deficiencies in these conditions.

One day when economic rationality has advanced far enough freedom from want for all of humanity may be a fact, and the ecosphere might simultaneously be restored. The prevention of crime and ecospheric unfeasibility vis demographics and continuity might be the sole coercive governance in a rational society with a productive economy of a lowest entropy condition.

Every individual might create a secure home as easily as flipping open a self phone that would disappear when flipped shut. No cause for permanent geographic displacement of ecosphere or geographic area would exist. Economic competition would stop. Quality technical progress could continue. Yet that would be more like the pursuits of knowledge that ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians pursued; knowledge for its own sake. Dialectical conversations would occur, and material fabrications could be accomplished when necessary for some particular exploration venture. Generally though the advanced society would have accomplished insinuation into the Earth ecosphere in the most energy efficient and effective way practical with barriers to travel overcome, communication ubiquitous, freedom defended and the economy renaturalized as an equivalent to nature able to cohere non-invasively within the ecosphere (nature).