The plan, which he calls ‘The American Nations,‘ and explains in the comic-strip form that is becoming his calling card, is to have people politically organize online around certain social and economic issues, essentially creating ‘virtual nations‘ that provide specific policies and services sought by their respective members (e.g., discounted medical coverage).

The plan is simple in spirit: bypass the political posturing, the self-and-corporate-interested dealing, and ideological enmity that warps the discourse and decisions of the professional political class and give more power to ‘the people.’  If there are people willing to sign on to a single-payer health care system, let them group themselves together and do so.  Those preferring some form of non-profit cooperatives as the balance to private insurers could do the same.  And why not?  Why must they both have to settle for the  sausage – distasteful to each for different reasons  – their ‘representatives’ ultimately served up?

Settling for far less than our particular ideal is something to which we have collectively become accustomed.  That is part of being a  member of a democracy, especially a very large, demographically and philosophically varied one.  The immediate, intuitive appeal to the American Nations plan is that it side-steps this factional variety and redraws the political map with borders based on needs and preferences, thereby eliminating much of the need for national debates (traditionally conceived) about the proper form federal (re: one-size-fits-all) programs are to take.  In virtue of the nature of self-selection of ‘national’ identity, there is much less cause for compromise.  As a result, ‘citizens’ of the various nations get policies much closer to their ideal.

Getting the goods and services you want, in the way you want them, is something that one would expect to appeal across the political spectrum.  But I would think that something along the lines of the American Nations plan would be especially attractive to those inclined to intone against the evils of ‘big government’ and the stultifying tendencies of over-grown bureaucracies.  Anti-federalists might find this an even more amenable framework than the mere call for greater state autonomy, as many states are sufficiently fragmented (e.g., California, Florida, New York) to dysfunction as microcosms of the nation at large.

Perhaps communitarians and ‘localists,’ or ‘regionalists‘ would be attracted to it as well if it weren’t merely virtual.  (Interestingly, Tevis’ virtual plan seems to be a descendant from an earlier version that was more substantive, based on the idea of ‘domestic nations‘ as allowed for in the Constitution.)  Likewise those in the process of developing sustainable local economies with more equitable distribution of prosperity.  When it comes to political efficiency, ‘political’ in the largest sense, size matters; smaller communities, built on a more tangible and immediately and easily recognizable conception of a common good, hold out the hope of not only of actually being self-governable and more economically just (in a distributional sense), but of realizing the conditions for civic flourishing.

There is another, somewhat aesthetic appeal to an ideologically cohesive, physically real fragmentation of America: the possibility of truly diverse cultural development. Cultural diversity, as it is often formulated (and experienced) in America, is a matter of assimilation and absorption.  This is the result of the enormous pressure exerted by the national consciousness and that of an ‘American’ culture, in the singular.  Among the primary sources of this consciousness (and the culture that reflects it) is the culture industry itself.  The most influential aspects of the industry’s infrastructure (i.e., network and cable television, ‘Hollywood’) are calibrated to achieve national (if not global) appeal, the success of which demands national tastes. Of course the most effective means to creating (and sustaining) national tastes in a society as large and diverse as America’s is to find an all-too-common denominator.  The larger the audience/market, the lower that denominator.  Fragmentation’s cultural promise lies in the hope that smaller societies, with economically regional reference-frames, might eventually incubate new, peculiar variants of the American type that will be less susceptible to large-scale commercial pressures and so be provided with the opportunity to mature to the point of bearing ripe, distinctive fruit.

Simple plans are often branded naïve, and I have found from discussing it with others that the intentional fragmentation is no exception.  Some claim that the U.S. are too economically integrated both with each other and, collectively, with the larger global economy to permit any substantive inward turn.  Perhaps, but I believe that a growing number of Americans (not to mention other citizens of the world) are becoming convinced that it is in less, rather than more integration that a truly prosperous future is to be found.  In any case, fragmentation needn’t be understood as leading to miniature isolationism or even nativism (though nothing necessarily prevents that either).

The greatest obstacle to an American Balkanization is rather the very idea of America, that shining city on the hill.  In the land of the free and the home of the brave, the ideal of America captures both our cultural and military pride.  We are a tribe of artists, occupying a land of infinite creation, a place unencumbered by either history or tradition; and we are warriors, a nation of brothers willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice to defend freedom and resist tyranny, be it the English, the Germans, Soviets, or Islamists.  For each side of ourselves, to divide America is to diminish it.

America embodies the promise of reinvention; here multitudes have come to begin anew. Perhaps now is time for us to return the favor and reinvent America itself; to let the seeds of liberty sown over two centuries take root and grow in the peculiar ways local conditions permit.  Of course something would inevitably, irretrievably be lost.  But, as Mr. Tevis wanted to tell us, much might be gained.

http://faculty.felician.edu/khawajai/

The practical effect of this was to render the pursuit a decidedly private affair and the principal mechanism for achieving it was the development of a structural division of labor for serving human interests.  Civil authority  (essentially the ‘government’ and those social institutions for which government is needed to maintain )  became charged with the responsibility of ensuring the ‘public welfare,‘ – securing the community, that is to say, against external threats and internal unrest, needs few, if any, individuals could adequately secure on their own.

But the state’s role as guardian of the public good goes beyond its efficiency in securing the social-material means the people need to adequately exercise their natural right.  What is required is not merely the power of the state, but its reserve: only if the government renounces any role in deciding for individuals how they are to undertake that pursuit, let alone dictating to them what they must find, can it legitimately be protected.  The pursuit of the good and the true must be left to the liberty of each.

The modern divide still defines much of the Western social-political landscape even as we debate about how best to leave modernity behind.  Indeed, that the divide itself now strikes many as perfectly natural is neatly illustrated by the following.  Richard Rorty’s hoped-for ‘postmodern liberalism’ has Mill (whose On Liberty provided the most eloquent restatement and refinement of the modern divide) informing  our stewardship of the public good while (a sufficiently neutered) Nietzsche inspires our private ‘poetic self-creation.‘  But if this vision of postmodernity is insufficiently ‘classical‘ for your taste, you might consider a contemporary mindset dubbed ‘postmodern conservatism,‘ which urges “John Stuart Mill in the public sphere and Aristotle in the private.”

Now this version of the conservative/liberal debate is actually interesting, if for no other reason than it fits nicely into Alasdair MacIntyre’s narrative that takes late modernity’s central question to be ‘Nietzsche or Aristotle?’.  What I am more interested in, however, is the very plausibility of a postmodern public-private divide.  Why not think it a (dated) product of its time?  We certainly have reason to wonder about its cogency, as this book notice makes clear.  (I agree that it isn’t but the incoherence of a philosophical view is only so much of a liability.)  More troubling is the charge that the real effect of the divide has ultimately been pernicious, undermining the very well being of the community and the individual both.  It’s time to consider whether the modern project of making meaningfulness the work of ‘the many’ was not itself the most profound tragedy of the commons imaginable.

(The author discusses Socrates’ putative ‘atheism’ here.)

The two would appear tethered together by truth.  When our beliefs are true they ‘correspond’ to reality, when they are false they don’t.  But can any of you deny that this tether is so short – each in one’s own case, at any rate – as to be barely noticeable?  Every occurrent belief corresponds with reality as we understand it (and how else can ‘reality’ be meaningful?) as a matter of course.  The measure of our beliefs reality might well be, but that does not preclude it from being their resulting (and ever shifting) totality.  To identify a proposition that does not jibe with reality is to identify a proposition one does not believe. We may always harbor doubts, of course, that any or all of our beliefs do indeed track reality, but our inescapable reality, qua believers, is that our realties always track our beliefs.

I assume the thought is familiar enough, for you’ve heard it from Davidson,

If meanings are given by objective truth conditions, there is a question of how we can know that the conditions are satisfied, for this would appear to require a confrontation between what we believe and reality; and the idea of such a confrontation is absurd.

and you’ve heard it from Nietzsche,

The true world—we have abolished.  What world remains?  The apparent one perhaps?  But no!  With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

We trouble and triumph within the reality of our own confinement.  That is our inescapable starting point.  Our hopes for the future are satisfied, not when the relevant states of affairs obtain, but when we believe them to be; our anger arises in relation to believed offense and recedes in the face of believed reparation.  And we believe in something beyond our beliefs when we believe there is something beyond them to believe.

And believe in a beyond, to say it again, most of us do.  Mostly we can do no less.  From the very beginning our ever expanding belief set has been subject to unremitting revision, breeding that distrust of belief we call doubt and the learning of the words ‘mere‘ and ‘mistaken.‘  From this visceral seedbed of memory and expectation, recrimination and regret, we cultivate in hope the really real.  We bring forth the normative order and we see that it is good.

The lives we lead are replete with such counterpoised believing and means to distinguish, effectively and easily, such beliefs have developed.   Those means essentially involve–indeed, are undoubtedly founded on–the introduction of the truth-predicate: the contents of one’s own (current) beliefs–what immediately constitutes, for each believer, ‘reality’–can always be identified by appending ‘is true’ to their (sincere) assertion.   Believing, as the saying goes, is believing true.

Tracking doxastic conflicts is not the only service a truth-predicate might be called upon to perform. The truth-predicate is invaluable in enabling both indirect (i.e., ‘blind’) and compendious reference to belief-contents.  Indeed, it might well be that the truth-predicate is essential for such endorsements, there being no other device in natural language adequate to the purpose.  Yet these latter uses seemingly become pressing only in a context where doxastic conflict is possible.  No speaker (or community) would need to make any endorsement, indirect or otherwise, if there were guaranteed uniformity of belief.

The truth-predicate, and so that notorious nominal, ‘truth’, are psychic solutions to an ongoing and insistent psychic difficulty: we have to settle the reality within which we each must act.