DrYouth wrote:
If we could roll back western liberalism... where to.... and what would be the cost/benefit trade off.
I wouldn't so much "roll back" Western liberalism, or time, to a specific historical point, but there is a point in time I think present day liberalism should learn more from.
When the original liberal thinkers, both the English and French philosophers as well as the eventual framers of the US constitution created and developed their ideas, they did so based on a high degree of personal education and informed basis. A degree of personal education and information that was exceptional and a (genuine and in the proper sense of the word) privilege only reserved for the few. In a free society, where government is governed by, and by the will of the citizens of the state, the people are only free for so long as the government convinces them to hand back their freedoms by persuading them of foreign and domestic threats, or by putting hard to understand papers to sign in front of them, with the fine print saying they know are subjects - and no longer citizens. Or in other words:
Thomas Jefferson wrote:"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."
Wether through private or public education, teaching children to be critical of authority and information, to teach them how to
verify a story's authenticity, source criticism, iow how to avoid fake news and how to detect and look past possible biases in news that's not fake, but still guilty of deception by omission. If your country sends your sons, husbands, fathers to war... but you never heard about the place they're going, are you able to determine if they
should be in that country? Should people take you seriously, if you don't even know that? That's the sort of thing education should be able to prevent, by building up knowledge of one's own country, and a basic knowledge of foreign countries. But simply knowing how your country works, how do you as a citizen fit into the State, what powers do you have, how do you use them, what are your obligations, what does your taxes go to, etc.
But also, staying informed about current events and what politics affects you is important, and I'm leaning towards that not becoming easier today. But as maligned as the internet is these days, I think it has sharpened people's critical skills through sheer volume. Everyone knows by now that there's alot of BS out there. Here you get school classes teaching critical source method, learning how to better searches. Newspapers prior to that, had for some years had headlines about students handing in copy-paste Wikipedia pages, or kids quoting websites that they had no idea were satire sites, conspiracy websites or pseudoscience sites. A well-informed citizenry is a citizenry well-armed against tyrannical seductions.
Fame is not flattery. Respect is not agreement.
