Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
Interesting. Being termed "sentimental" I would consider it to have a lower value as a trend (or no value) which is why I don't really agree with it being a sentimental trend. Does this align with your belief as well?
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That's a good point, butI think that the sentiment behind these trends is so strong that is virtually unassailable from a point of reason.
So, I do think that Rube is fundamentally right. That there are certain groups of people that are falling further and further behind - indigenous people, especially, but more broadly a group of people that appears to be permanently poor. We don't know what is behind this trend, yet, but the group appears to share a pretty clear socio-economic profile - break-down of family, low participation on social institutions, etc... I've been through this before.
Clearly, classical liberalism has very little to say about these people. Indeed, with individual rights came a liberation of the individual from social institutions - ones that we are now finding out did a great deal to protect certain groups from total socio-economic collapse.
Rube seems to think that you can fix this problem by injecting bits of symbolic self-esteem, increasing public profile, and generally, increasing society's overall knowledge through a vague type of inductive education. We are now supposed to, as a whole, feel more pain for transgendered, indigenous, and mentally ill people. I actually don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - indeed, it sounds almost like that compassion thing I was talking about in another thread.
However, why I term these trends "sentimental" is because I believe the problem to be far worse than the sort of applied mimetics of emotion that Rube seems to endorse. Maybe it is right to repeat Cliff, and ask "well, let's see some numbers." Or maybe I could come up with a long list of counter examples to show that not all historically-marginalized groups in Canada tend to bow before the supposed weight of systemic discrimination? No one really talks about needing increased Indo-Canadian or Chinese representation in our universities - they seem to be able to get in on merit alone.
I think that in the long-term we are starting to see the fracture of the liberal social contract - where neither Cliff's nor Rube's perspectives make all that much sense.