Poll: "no such thing as society"

[Evangelicalhumanist]

I live in Melbourne, Australia.
I'm not suggesting community is universally great at looking out for each other, or even commonly so.
But families aren't either.

Community can act as a safety net for the most vulnerable, and enhance the richness of life for the rest.

If your philosophy is humanism -- and if you mean it (there are lots of fakes, as with anything else) -- then safety net is a natural part of your thinking. Almost every humanist I've ever known or heard of has been a (lower-case) liberal.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

It would be interesting if you can name one like you describe. Even indigenous communities are not even as close.

I'm guessing you're setting the bar high based on what comes to mind when you imagine family, but sadly that's not always the case.

A former neighbour of ours found the whole COVID lockdown experience too much, both socially and economically, and it (bluntly) broke their family unit. The father became physically abusive and the family struggled to avoid foreclosure after he left.

I'm sure you're aware, I'm not religious, but the church community supported the family with food, helped repair and improve the house for sale, allowing the remainder of the family unit independence, and let them feel there were people on their side without wanting anything in return.

I'm a former primary school teacher, and have seen lots of instances of school communities providing support best provided (but sometimes absent) by families.

If you have a strong family...and extended family...this becomes icing on the cake. But some people don't really have a cake.

At a personal level, we have a family of friends who are closer and more supportive than our families, despite us having good familial relationships. To.all intents and purposes these people are family, despite a total lack of blood connection.


I'm not really suggesting 'it takes a village to raise a child'. But it does if the family unit was broken, and it can make it easier for anyone.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

If your philosophy is humanism -- and if you mean it (there are lots of fakes, as with anything else) -- then safety net is a natural part of your thinking. Almost every humanist I've ever known or heard of has been a (lower-case) liberal.

I don't think of myself as a humanist, although that's splitting hairs. But I do think of myself as a small l liberal, and have worked with kids both professionally or as a volunteer through my life. It's impossible to ignore how many kids need support above and beyond what their family provides.

(And that is 'need'...once you get to 'want' it's much closer to universal in my experience)

 

[Sand Dancer]

Margaret Thatcher famously said "there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families"

Was she right or was she wrong?

And why????

This is what I think:

I don't think you can have "individual men and women" without a "society"

As humans are social beings

I believe that human beings are to societies as honey bees are to honey bee colonies

"there is no such thing as honey bee colonies. There are only individual honey bees"

This is laughable and nonsensical

It denies reality

Also, she contradicts herself

Families are a unit of social organisation

A family is a kind of social group

The social and the individual are mutually constitutive, to understand humanity and individual humans you need to consider both

It makes no sense to deny either the social or the individual

Maybe, as a conservative, she was stressing the individual over the group and wanted to lessen the influence of groupthink. I don't know...

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Maybe, as a conservative, she was stressing the individual over the group and wanted to lessen the influence of groupthink. I don't know...

Well, the problem is that her thinking is also groupthink, because she is saying that humans are a group of individuals and no other version of group apply.

 

[PureX]

Maybe, as a conservative, she was stressing the individual over the group and wanted to lessen the influence of groupthink. I don't know...

Or, as a toady for her capitalist cronies, she wanted to stress the phony righteousness if selfish individualism. Reagan was a dolt, so in a way I can excuse him for being manipulated into it by the brutal capitalist Neocons in his administration that were telling him how to think. But Thatcher was not a dolt. She was fully capable of recognizing the forces she was promoting, and the damage they could do her country's ecomonic culture. And Reagan was an economic and cultural disaster in the US. Once he opened the door to the "greed is good" ruthless capitalism crowd, they've done nothing but rob and pillage the rest of the country ever since.