Reminds me of Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society."
Social ontology doesn't mean an 'entity'; it's a shorthand description
of the patterns of human behavior. The simplest example is language.
In theory, any human being could learn any language, but in practice
people learn the language they're around--parents, importantly, but
also neighbors. Same goes for other kinds of interaction, moral
development, etc., etc.

The insight of structuralism, writ large, was that patterns of
behavior pre-exist individual identities; we're born into
circumstances that already have form and momentum, and we have to
adapt ourselves to them. The weakness of structuralism was a belief
that social structures determined everything, leading to a kind of
scientism, a faith that we could figure out in advance how to change.

The whole point of reform movements like Progressivism was that some
of those social patterns had ill effects not only on the individuals
who suffered but on others as well (think externalities, so to speak),
and the rapid pace of change characteristic of modernity was
aggravating the problems.

To restrict our thinking about Margaret Sanger to eugenics, for
instance, is to ignore her main goal of making sex education and birth
control available to women. That puts her in a trajectory of feminist
social action that links to the history of economic thought, such as
Adam Smith's reflections on the uselessness of any but domestic
education for women and Thomas Malthus's horror of birth control by
any means except moral restraint, with the notable exception of John
Stuart Mill's argument against the subjection of women. (Regarding
Mill, btw, Hayek produced a compilation of Mill's and Harriet Taylor's
correspondence and agreed with Mill's pronouncement that Taylor had
influenced his economic thought.)

I would say the strength of conservatism is its respect for tradition,
but its weakness is blindness to the problems inherent in some of
those traditions.


Paul Turpin
University of the Pacific


On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 8:11 AM,  <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> One need not be an intellectual to hold to a philosophy based on social
> ontology.  Nor does one need even to know what that is!
>
> Do you really believe that, to the Progressive, "individual suffering
> matters"?  Does forced sterilization ameliorate human suffering?  Did Carrie
> Buck suffer less because she was denied the ability to have children?  As
> such a thing was advocated by some of those Progressive voices, your
> depiction is grossly inadequate, unless by "human suffering" you mean the
> suffering of those who must live with people of such presumed mental or
> physical deficiencies.
>
> Your definition of conservatism is confused, perhaps deliberately so, as the
> conservative most certainly does not think in terms of the "end of the
> betterment of society," as society has no existence above its members.
> There can therefore be no "end."  It is the Progressive (who later co-opted
> the badge of "liberal") who maintains that teleology, that society, which
> they assert exists independently of its members, has an end which we must
> strive to advance.  Your definition, therefore, is patently false.  As to
> cultural elites, they are typically self-appointed and tend to advocate
> social control to maintain their positions -- i.e., they tend to
> Progressivism!
>
> What the older Popenoe did is irrelevant, given the period with which this
> discussion has been concerned.
>
>
> CM