From Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations":
“That which is not good for the bee-hive, cannot be good for the bee.”
Human beings are interesting creatures. We are, I think, inherently social creatures. We created societies all over the world in vastly different geographic areas, under vastly different economic and natural resource constraints. And while these societies are not all identical, there was no place on Earth where human beings decided to live separate lives without interacting with their neighbors. I'm not sure what it is in our nature that causes us to glom together, but it's there, and we've been at this society building activity for tens of thousands of years.
Whenever people come together in a society there exists a natural tension between the rights of the individual and the rights of the society. As some authors, like Rousseau, have put it, individuals give up certain freedoms collectively for the benefits derived from being part of the collective. In some societies, the balance favors society (or the government), and in others it favors the individual. We (in the United States in the 21st century) live at an interesting juncture. Our culture is highly polarized, and we tend to be both hyper-individualistic as well as, confoundingly simultaneously hyper-collective. On the one hand we extol personal choice/freedom (the right to an abortion, the right to live with anyone, the right to have any kind of personal relationship I want, the right to live wherever I want, the right to go to school wherever I want [provided I can get in or afford it], etc.), and on the other hand we have a vast network of entitlement and welfare programs (Medicare, Medicade, Social Security, Unemployment, Food Stamps, etc.), the cost of which is crippling our budget and causing us to take on vast amounts of (mostly) foreign debt.
Sometimes, it feels as though we want to have our cake and eat it too. I'm not sure how we got here as a society, and I'm not sure where we're headed. But our current position seems philosophically, socially, and economically untenable. It seems to me that at some point, we're going to have to decide whether we want to be a predominately individual society in which people take care of themselves and their families and the government is relegated to making sure clean water comes out of the taps and funding the army, or whether we expect our government to do more for its citizens, and what freedoms we might have to sacrifice to make that fiscally feasible.
But if Aurelius is right, then we may need to consider what is good for the bee-hive, and not just what's good for this bee.
“That which is not good for the bee-hive, cannot be good for the bee.”
Human beings are interesting creatures. We are, I think, inherently social creatures. We created societies all over the world in vastly different geographic areas, under vastly different economic and natural resource constraints. And while these societies are not all identical, there was no place on Earth where human beings decided to live separate lives without interacting with their neighbors. I'm not sure what it is in our nature that causes us to glom together, but it's there, and we've been at this society building activity for tens of thousands of years.
Whenever people come together in a society there exists a natural tension between the rights of the individual and the rights of the society. As some authors, like Rousseau, have put it, individuals give up certain freedoms collectively for the benefits derived from being part of the collective. In some societies, the balance favors society (or the government), and in others it favors the individual. We (in the United States in the 21st century) live at an interesting juncture. Our culture is highly polarized, and we tend to be both hyper-individualistic as well as, confoundingly simultaneously hyper-collective. On the one hand we extol personal choice/freedom (the right to an abortion, the right to live with anyone, the right to have any kind of personal relationship I want, the right to live wherever I want, the right to go to school wherever I want [provided I can get in or afford it], etc.), and on the other hand we have a vast network of entitlement and welfare programs (Medicare, Medicade, Social Security, Unemployment, Food Stamps, etc.), the cost of which is crippling our budget and causing us to take on vast amounts of (mostly) foreign debt.
Sometimes, it feels as though we want to have our cake and eat it too. I'm not sure how we got here as a society, and I'm not sure where we're headed. But our current position seems philosophically, socially, and economically untenable. It seems to me that at some point, we're going to have to decide whether we want to be a predominately individual society in which people take care of themselves and their families and the government is relegated to making sure clean water comes out of the taps and funding the army, or whether we expect our government to do more for its citizens, and what freedoms we might have to sacrifice to make that fiscally feasible.
But if Aurelius is right, then we may need to consider what is good for the bee-hive, and not just what's good for this bee.
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