Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Constitutional Issues Smoking in Public and Whose Rights are they?

Ardy. The Renaissance was the result of the Enlightenment of self expression. I believe it triggered the concept of Natural Rights that our founders wanted. I also believe that Evolution of the human brain gave us the ability to form collective groups for our own safety without giving up our natural rights over any state authority.

Humans are not pact animals although some on the planet think they are. America is reverting back to this idea that we are simply animals under the control of the top dog. Religion helped this along by trying to make us under the control of One God or Top Dog. This is what drives Italy which was at one time the center of enlightenment and where the Renaissance lit up the world. The Pope became top dog just as America is also looking for one to take control.

In the last 40 years, some organizations have been formed that will open up the discussions of individual expression. Most of us believe America is going downhill due to the loss of individual thoughts and actions. One can see it here at Reader Rant.

I was invited to join one of these groups and will soon walk away from CHB again. My interest is saving America from collectivism and it appears to be a world wide problem. Who knows maybe my group will be able to restart the motors of individual thoughts and actions.

I took a class from Hayakawa at UCLA back in the late 40s and the words "thought and action" were clearly placed in my brain as his subject was Language. I went from there into the world of Ayn Rand. Her essays followed the same line and made it necessary to define our terms when entering into any debate.

Americans are not communicating their ideas on a level where they can be defined as a whole. I tend to blame religion for removing our individual concepts of man. We apparently are only a grain of sand in many churches. Until we wake up, and appreciate the human brain, many of us are better off heading elsewhere.

Dang it. A major stumbling block to rugged individualsim, is it not?

Considering how many treaties have been written, agreed to, and subsequently broken, I'd have to wonder at that remark.

But seriously, Sandy, my rudimentary acquaintance with anthropological history leads me to believe that you are engaging in wishful thinking there. Humans are indeed (I assume you meant) pack animals.

Another thing. Bearing in mind that I am not the most widely read nor well-educated person in the world, but I was under the impression that the Renaissance came first, and the Enlightenment thereafter, and that the former was triggered by the discovery and resurgent popularity of Roman and Greek philosophy.

One final point of confusion. Wasn't the Pope "top dog" [i]prior to" the Renaissance?

Sandy/Issodhos
Sorry if I seem a little pedantic on this issue. I was just trying to figure out if we are talking about a cultural artifact of recent European history... or something more generally exhibited through out human history (and pre-history).

As Issidhos noted, humans have been communicating for some good long time. But so have whales and many other creatures. So this is itself is not fundamental to human nature. Nor does it have anything to do with our discussion of human nature as the root of individualist political philosophy.

In any case, can we now agree that the "natural law" that is the foundation of individualist political philosophy is a social artifact of recent European history? Or perhaps you can correct my formulation which only attempts to recapitulate what you both have written rather than to force my own obtuse definition on this noble idea.

Have you read Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape?

AFAIK, virtually all animals exhibit some kind of social grouping behavior - from the rigidly structured world of ants, bees, termites, wasps, etc., to the largely solitary life of the cougar. To say that humans do not exhibit some similar type of behavior(s) is to wilfully ignore the facts. As mentioned above, try The Naked Ape.

No flies on you, Steve!

As I learned it, the roots of the Renaissance start in the Reconquista. Spanish clerics find among the booty of al-Andalus Arabic translations of the major Greek and Roman writers of the classic age. From Spain, the works and the knowledge move to Italy in the early 14th century, and it is there that one of the two seminal events creating the modern West begins to unfold.

Italy produces the Renaissance - the rebirth of learning - that places emphasis on the secular and humanistic aspects of life in opposition to the weakening spiritualism that carried so much of the West for the previous five or six centuries. It is the fulgence that henceforth illuminates Western art, literature and philosophy and that races out from Italy to the rest of Western Europe over the nextthree or four centuries.

Spain is the spark, Italy is the fuze, and all of Europe is the powder keg awaiting intellectual detonation.

And I seem to recall that the Baroque era marks the formal end of the Renaissance in the arts, and that the Enlightment marks the end in terms of philosophical inquiry.

The Papacy fell on hard times that reached their nadir in the middle of the 19th century. It is with Leo XIII that the Church again attemts to insert itself into the political life of the West.

The Papacy lost its last political and geographical war with the ejection of French and Austrian interests and the formation of the modern secular Italian state after Garibaldi. In fact the Italian government and the Vatican did not reconcile their differences until 1929, when Mussolini concluded the Lateran agreements with Pius XI.

Perhaps then it was your friend Mr. Ambiguity that communicated it, as I have not seen where you have used it in the context I wrote of.:-)
Yours,
Issodhos

No. I do not know what you mean by "rugged individualism". I am writing in regard to the political philosophy of individualism --not simple social interaction.

By the way, you could have an island filled with thousands of political individualists and they would engage in robust and healthy interactions forming and disbanding temporary associations, establishing and participating in organizations --social, economic, and political -- and in so doing, never violatethe Rights of each other.

In contrast you could put one peasant and one worker on the island along with collectivists Mao, Engels, Marx, Galbraith, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Hillary, and Kucinich, and they would be tearing at one another's throats to see who would be the one to control the lives and actions of the peasant and the worker.;-)
Yours,
Issodhos

It has been another 16 hour workday so I am afraid I will have to keep things short, but please note that I have tried to be careful in my wording. What I wrote is "is there a time in the known history of man when it was not the nature of man to communicate ideas?" Note the word I italicized. It is indeed key.


The natural Rights? No. Though it is within Western Civilization that such Rights were recognized and used to formulate and formalize a political theory. Unless, of course, yor are suggesting that non-Europeans function mentally at the level of the lesser animals.

One other thing, Arnie, I am not a part of a tag team. Please do not attempt to associate my posts with anyone else's or me with anyone else.
Yours,
Issodhos

Now that is just plain good, Ron. Of course, it makes one wonder who let those darned Western Christians play with matches in the first place.:-)))
Yours (in a mood),
Issodhos

Oh! Lordy! They could live in - aaarghh! - anarchy and not violate the rights of others.