Circumstantial Evidence

Stolen entire from JMSmith:

Circumstantial Evidence

“Society has always the Scylla and Charybdis of Socialism and Individualism on its right hand and its left, and it is never without danger from the one or the other. It is sometimes, of course, in much more danger from the one than from the other” Robert Flint, Socialism (1906)

Robert Flint (1838-1910) was a Scottish theologian and philosopher who was neither a socialist nor an individualist.  As he very helpfully explains, a healthy society balances society’s need for cooperation and the individual’s need for elbow room. A sane and sensible man therefore inclines to socialism or individualism when he believes his society or local circumstances have drifted too far in the opposite direction.  

I incline to socialism if my neighbor has taken to keeping twelve howling wolfhounds chained in his back yard; I incline to individualism if he demands that every house on the street fly four American flags on the Fourth of July.

There are, of course, absolute socialists who would like to see everyone perfectly equal and entirely the same.  There are absolute individualists with imperial egos that will be curbed by nothing short of guns and fists.  But between these lunatics the mass of humanity aims to sail between Scylla and Charybdis in a society that blends sociability and freedom to maximize the good.

Flint’s explanation helps us to think sanely about all sorts of ideological positions.  A sane man inclined to “authoritarianism” when his circumstances give every sign that canibal orgies are about to break out in the streets, but that same man will incline to “libertarianism” if a meddlesome harpy phones the police because a whiff of cigar smoke has drifted over her backyard fence.  A sane man inclines to “ritualism” when gibbering energumen are rolling in the aisles of his church, but that same man will incline to “charismatic enthusiasm” if a dull and precisian priest allows cobwebs to be spun between the sagging shoulders of parishioners and the pews.

Our ideological positions are, in other words, circumstantial and not absolute.  In whatever direction we may be inclined at the moment, a shift in circumstances can (and should) cause us to change.