[quote:shhnampd]In building our civil soceity, we must be mindful of building it in a way that lasts, and is not prone to disintegrate. In particular, we must construct our governmental and social institutions in a way that promote unity over disunity, stability over instability, and that enable, when needs must, our government to have truly effective means of enforcing our laws against rogue citizens, or those who are involved in otherwise intractable disputes. Without stability, we are prone to disintegration, either by a failure of our central mechanisms, or by fractionation. Either would hamper our goal to create a true civil soceity in which the principles of community spirit, democratic participation in decisionmaking and the rule of law stand together to promote the interests of all. Disunity would break apart our community spirit, instability would undermine our democratic values, and lack of enforcability would render our law impotant and unable effectively to rule. Because of their importance to our ultimate goals, I will post separately on stability and on enforcability in due course. However, there can be little doubt that a united, stable, secure CDS, in which the rule of law prevails, with adequate enforcement mechanisms, is far more condusive to the goals of a civil soceity than a fractionated CDS, or an unstable CDS, or one in which there is no effective way of enforcing our laws. To work effectively, we need to be strong, resolute, and able to inspire confidence in outsiders. Only a combination of unity, stability and the effective rule of law stands any real chance of achieving that.[/quote:shhnampd]
Oh, dear. I've never seen such a collection of rigid, authoritarian concepts waved over the term "civil society" like a tomato and onion might be waved over stone soup.
Civil society, of course, has many definitions. All kinds of people from Gramsci to Havel to E.P. Thompson have written about it. Even the U.S. Government has now co-opted the term to mean basically "anything we fund out of our development agencies" and the UN NGOs wave it around to mean "our interest groups that were fortunate to get NGO accreditation at the UN".
People often forget that the term civil society means, well, civil society. That in some wider notions of it, it includes government, business, trade unions, and religious organizations.
In some contexts, in the autocratic executive-run situation we're in, in SL, civil society is "everything outside the state trying to carve out a state for itself." Ashcroft is always talking as if the harsh reality of Linden Lab and its owning of the servers doesn't exist; as if we can carve out some little stan in the sea of the Soviet Union where no one will notice us.
Everything he writes about this civil society lets me know that for him, it means "the binding ideology that creates the community I'm comfortable with."
So for Ashcroft, one always has to "build" civil society just like you had to "build" communism -- that is, according to a blueprint or plan that one man or a committee or an authoritative government builds.
But actual civil society is in fact a multiplicity of unplanned interests groups, civic movements, institutions, businesses, nonprofits, churches, temples, whatever. It's not something you can "build" for someone else -- it tends to build up itself from all directions when it has the right conditions of freedom.
Ashcroft is also very nervous that it "disintegrate" or "be built wrong" or "be unstable" -- though all these features are by their very nature characteristic of open societies. They always are disintegrating and reintegrating and being stable and tending toward entropy and then recreation. They are free systems. It's ok. Take a deep, cleansing breath now.
Now here's the kicker -- what civil society a la Ashcroft is all about -- control, control, control, My Way or the Highway:
"n particular, we must construct our governmental and social institutions in a way that promote unity over disunity, stability over instability, and that enable, when needs must, our government to have truly effective means of enforcing our laws against rogue citizens, or those who are involved in otherwise intractable disputes. "
Well...as always, we must ask: "what do you mean, "we," white man?"
But more to the point one must ask: whose unity? whose stability? Stability of what? The graveyard? The autocratic Ashcroftian rule?
Whenever I see someone yammering on with the word "effective," I generally have to reach for my gun (well, my pen and my letter pad for a letter to the editor). Effective...by whose lights? Just what ARE we up to here?
Who are these "rogue citizens," after all? People who transgressed Ashcroft's hilariously elaborate legal-beagle stuff about moderating the forums (which should be free)? And what are intractable disputes -- disputes that don't go Ashcroft's way?
"Need to be strong and resolute". Well, that's not what civil society will get you, in a transitional state in particular -- and a state where you are basically merely a kind of enclave to the larger political entity called Linden Lab, where your options range from a Chechnya to an Auland Islands in terms of political dependence or rebellion, with loss of your account and wealth always a distinct possibility.
What's to be strong and resolute *about*? Again, our Lindens, in their terribly brutal wisdom, have made a system that Ordinal Malaprop wisely called merely a weapon -- a gun. That's the land ban and the mute. These are guns. They don't parse, or wait for court orders or listen to reason. They are triggers to be pushed on the basis of emotion, hearsay, and practical self-defense -- in other words, weapons. So we're in a world already governed brutally by force.
What kind of civil society is there when the weapon is the chief form of dispute resolution?
