This kind of crying foul that the government should not help the less fortunate is faulty on two counts. It rests on the assumption that ‘social justice’ is something that should be voluntary. This is particularly difficult for religious conservatives who tend to accept that humans are inherently ‘bad’ (whether it be moral corruption through Calvinism’s ‘Total Depravity’ or something similar). If humans are inherently bad (or at the very least morally cuplable), why should we accept that humans will reach through this fault and give willingly and unselfishly? In other words, humans are selfish (and I believe this is something implicit in my previous post on social justice). If it weren’t for humanity’s selfish nature, I could accept voluntary giving as a viable alternative.

The second assumption this line of thinking rests on is the assumption that ‘social justice’ is not part of the government’s role. This is problematic because equality for all people and the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ is written both explicitly and implicitly throughout the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. However, it has changed over the last century as the public sphere has degraded into a culture of opposition and war. In fact, I would go so far as to say that notions of the ‘common good’ have been superceded by the notion of the private consumer (the four part BBC documentary Century of the Self has a good analysis here). We can see this in a historical look at actions such as exorcism in which people were removed from communities because they were harmful to the community has become a battle between the many fragments of Self and Other within individuals. We’ve tried to erase the public sphere in order to protect our isolations, to protect our Selves from the Others. What we did not expect was to find that even individuals have many Selves and Others already from which an identity emerges. And now, we isolate ourselves so that we do not meet the Other face-to-face, we turn the mirrors away so that we do not see the Other within. Instead, we seek exorcism of the individual in the hopes that we will find a complete Self beneath the rubble, equally afraid that we will only see fragments! From this, we have transformed government into our own pet that should console us, pamper ourselves as individual Selves, and hide the Others from our sights. This is most evident in the lack of cooperation between political parties as all major votes now fall to partisan lines: as long as Our Party is in power, we can have our way and excise the Others from our midsts! ‘Social justice’ and ‘equality’ are within government’s role only if they benefit us! We don’t truly care for democracy, equality, liberty, or freedom; we only care for our own as we pay for it! We, as social-political creatures, have become consumers of rights! We should only have the right to buy; if one cannot pay the costs, one does not deserve it! If one does not deserve it, then that one is not of Us! — And all outsiders should be rejected lest they reveal our own inadequacies! The role of government is to continue to isolate Us from Them, equality and freedom be damned! Perhaps these opponents are using entitlement in terms of rights, but do they seriously want to contend that people have no rights whatsoever to healthcare? Only the right to consume is needed in our perverse consumer society where those unable to consume are less than human and worthless…

I think this kind of view turns government into a capitalist corporation. For the kind of thinking above, the best government is one which operates like a for-profit industry, subjugating people by marketing — as our present day capitalist corporations do — and to do so without concern or apathy. The documentary The Corporation did a good job in arguing that if capitalist corporations are persons (which the Supreme Court of the US just ruled), then they are amoral psychopaths. We want fascist dictators — not the kind that tell us directly what politics are right but the ones that tell us what to buy and use product placement to tell us which politics are good to buy!

This is, I believe the heart of the matter when it comes to criticising something as ‘entitlement’: it runs against the grain of capitalist consumerism. People are provided necessities not on the basis of their status as a consumer but on their status as a human who is part of the public sphere which haunts the consumer market. We’ve created many illusions of the public sphere (such as the American Idol phenomena in which we believe we get direct representation for once!) because we fear there may be a reality ‘out there’ in which not everything fits our utopian fantasy. Movies like Avatar are horrific because they’ve turn the Real into a fantasy which we consume as a brief foray into entertainment (‘it was a good movie with awesome effects, but the story’s been done before in Fern Gully or Pocahontas‘) before returning to our own fantasies that we mistake for the Real! Programmes like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and welfare need to be opposed because they don’t fit our fantasy of consumerism — and that is why many conservatives criticise the healthcare insurance reform as it interrupts our utopian consumerist fantasy and makes us look at Others for what they are: human beings.

1. Is “the sum of all human knowledge” even accessible? There are many subjects (especially the more abstract ones) which don’t have nice, clear-cut answers that make the sum of all knowledge rather silly.  In other words, these things are hotly debated and unless all viewpoints are explained, this project fails to realize “the sum of all human knowledge.”

2. Is Wikipedia this storehouse of information?  Probably not.  The best and wort part of a community like Wikipedia is that Joe the Plumber has as much credibility and influence on a Wikipedia article on Schroedinger’s Paradox as a theoretical physicist whose life’s work is on that exact subject.  Secondly, since Wikipedia does not allow people to promote their own research/understanding, all information must be, by default, secondhand at best.  Wikipedia is good in that it requires sources for “verification,” but looking at the topics which I am knowledgable, these sources aren’t even primary sources but already secondary sources with the opinions of the secondary authors.  I could go on a rant here, but it is not vital to this article.

3. Who gets to determine which information is valid for a Wikipedia entry?  In short, the Wikipedia community.  I’m not a conspiracy theorist who believes the bulk of Wikipedia is moderated by a small group of zealots.  However, I don’t expect the large majority of people to be experts on any given topic.  In other words, the experts on any given topic are always in the minority, which means their expertise is counted equally with the majority’s lack of expertise.

4. Who doesn’t have free access to Wikipedia?  I can think of two examples: those who lack internet access and those who are denied access to Wikipedia (either by governments or ISPs).  Both of these categories are things that the Wikimedia Foundation does not list in its goals.  What do they list?  In short, their own sustainability (check out the about page in the annual report).  Where does their money go?  The majority of the $5.6M goes to paying for salaries, travel, business-related expenses, and real estate.  In other words, they are an incarnation of “consumer-supported” products (such as PBS, public radio, etc).  “Free access” in their case means keeping them in business; everyone must provide their own avenue to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s fundraising here isn’t so that every single person on the planet has access to the sum of all human knowledge.  It is, instead, so that every single person on the planet–who has proer internet access–has access to a summary of information democratically chosen and edited primarily by average people with average understanding.

Last night I had a dream about reality.
It was such a relief to wake up.

I want to graduate and move on to a doctoral program, but I feel like I’ve just gotten a feel for my advisor’s work (which is right in my area…see the previous post over at Church and Postmodern Culture!).  I would love to collaborate with him in the future.

I enjoy reading way too much.  Nearly every book that I read leads me to three others that all look interesting.  I’m on a first-name basis with the circulation desk at the school library.

When I first started my MA program, I felt like I knew very little of everything.  Some of the links and connections in classes were so foreign (e.g. Deleuze!) that I had no idea how to understand them.  It wasn’t until a class I took last year that these connections were understood in rudimentary ways.  Now, I feel like every book I read is a new daybreak, a new revelation, a new idea.  Some of the more recent books I’ve read have found ways of connecting my interest(s) in technology and programming with philosophy and theology.

I have five weeks left to write my papers.  For my class on globalization, I want to explore the notion of identities as multiplicities.  For my class on Augustine and Origen, I want to tease out Augustine’s and Origen’s feelings on language and compare them to modern semiotics: their “rule of faith” as a crutch for language.

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don’t get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
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What American accent do you have?

Your Result: Philadelphia

Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you’re not from Philadelphia, then you’re from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you’ve ever journeyed to some far off place where people don’t know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn’t have a clue what accent it was they heard.

Not even close. i be from the South, dahlin’.