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but it is remarkable to me---something about being american, about the ideology of being american---results in a kind of inability to come to terms with consequences that outstrip the reach of an atomized individual--if you can't go to a building, sign a piece of paper and do something to "make up for" a problem, then that problem has to be swept away, ignored. a country built on genocide apparently acquires this quirk as a gift from its history.
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this doesn't denigrate individual actions, things done by nice folk to make the world a bit more bearable.
i have a very close friend who politically is way to the right who runs a halfway house for men with substance abuse problems and has done more to help people than most of the academics i know put together---but because he is dealing with *social* consequences of the existing order at a level of *social* action, what's happened is that is effective everyday politics have moved well away from this kind of petit bourgeois niceness to a system-level critique of social exclusion. this because he sees the *social* consequences of exclusion every day---and experiences the limits of an individual trying to be nice and help folk all the time. it just turns out that the everyday politics and general statements about politics are out of phase with each other, in his case. we talk about this alot--he is bothered by his inability to reconcile registers of statements, which is to say his inability to reconcile his own experience and its implications with the higher-order generalities that orient him in terms of conventional politics.
i think this is a very interesting process that he is moving through.
i think what generates it is that he has passed beyond the barrier of doing stuff to make himself feel better about a fundamentally brutal and irrational social order and maybe help a few folk along the way to seeing that the problems he is up against are systemic.
this is the recognition that seems problematic for alot of americans. that there is something FUNDAMENTALLY fucked up about the social system as a whole, and that these fundamental problems are expressed in such stark and brutal ways: differences in mortality rates within the united states that are STRICT functions of class position.
this goes way beyond individual charity actions--which is not to say anything about such actions in themselves. certainly it is not to say don't do them--but i do not see how you can move from this to anything more general.
a utilitarian calculation--which is what the free-marketeers routinely indulge to render "ethical" the consequences of the class system--simply repeats the problem that this report--and thread---are about. by arguing that markets "do good for the greatest number" you are also arguing, like it or not, that those who are excluded from the game of markets are purely and simply fucked--and worse still that you see no problem with that. a second order of problem with utilitarian arguments in the hands of free marketeers is that they tend to neutralize the effects of social context/order up front. this is not ok. this is the kind of thinking that leads to the problems outlined in the who report AND to their avoidance---it enables folk to think "i am individually ok" in the context of a system that is fundamentally not ok--so utilitarian thinking is in this sense a coping mechanism, not an effective politics.
i'd try to head off the obvious move here---"so you mean that the greatest good for the greatest number is a bad thing" by simply saying that it is a stupid line of argument, given the above.