If Only The Romans

[Mudhammam]

Common sense is often cultural, and almost always nothing more than a coarse set of heuristic rule s of thumb based on a limited, and biasedly chosen, set of experiences, and reasonably applicable only to a limited set of circumstances, but which intrinsically encourages the less thoughtful to regard them as both universal and fundamental.

What's that? A justification for any ethically and culturally inferior system of rule? Yeah, that's a nice abstraction about diverging traditions and contrasting forms of civilization, but I rather care to think about the well-being of actual people in the actual world.

We openly and commonly acknowledge only the most rudimentary exceptions to our rule of thumb - shouting fire in a crowded theater, probably because we have so little diversity of common experience. But in practice we often strongly discourage many forms of expression or conscience. But by culturally based habit we overlook our own inconsistency. The Germans based on experience of 1933-1945 deemed untrammeled freedom to advocate nazism, as well as some cults like Scientology, to menifestlygood not be a good idea. So they are open about more exceptions than we are, but politically we find it inexpedient to challenge them. The Chinese probably have more diverse range of well remembered collective continuous cultural and sociological experience than anyone else in the world today. They deem it not adviseable to tolerate any significant evangelizing apocalyptic cults. But we feel the fact they have their act disturbingly together threatening, and find it politically expedient to highlight the fact that they do not conform to how we would like to represent our own principles.

Mind you they have neither now, nor through most of their history, been hostile to all what we might call cults. But they clearly have had a distinct set of very painful experiences with evangelizing apaclyptic cults which drew their special attention. The last such apocalyptic cult that advocated a heavenly kingdom whose putative rules trumped those of the actual Civil authority attempting to run a real country on earth and which the central government failed to promptly suppresse ended up costing 40 million dead in China less than 160 years ago. Nor was that by any means a singular experience. They associate the failure to suppress similar such cults throughout history with subsequent failure of central authority, deadly civil war, failure of nationally run public works such as flood control and irrigation, and widespread famine and misery since about 280 AD.

I would not challenge their judgement based only on some contemporary political philosophical theory, especially when their judgement have appearently enabled them to, in defiance of our political philosophical theories, chalk up the single largest and fastest movement humanity out of poverty into modernity through all history.

So, if a government can ensure that everybody is employed, then it should also be able to discriminate what beliefs people are allowed to practice, even when those beliefs don't necessarily interfere with anyone else's well-being. This is a silly argument. I don't even know why I'm wasting time talking to someone that would have federal agents barge into people's private gatherings if their decorative ornaments do not adhere to official regulation, perhaps hauling a few to jail and confiscating their reading material. Someone has to be a quite dense to argue that such a scenario is conducive to human flourishing.