(re)Defining the social contract? January 1, 2009
Posted by Dan Herman in Current Events, Economics, Politics.Tags: Immigration, Values
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th century French philosopher and one of the fathers of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution once wrote, “L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Rousseau believed that a true citizen was one that put aside his or her private interests in reverence to the will of society. Man was, in essence, chained to his fellow man. And so developed society through this period of moral and social enlightenment.
Such societies, however, were by and large ethnically, racially and linguistically homogeneous. The following two centuries saw further dissolution of the remaining empires in Europe, and outside of our more recent moves towards integration, saw a steady return to small, individualistic nation states which used such social and cultural cohesion to develop strong national identities.
But how does this concept of a social contract evolve in countries where the composition of the population, notably its ethnic, racial, religious and linguistic participants begins to become more heterogeneous. Do the ties that helped create national identity and social cohesion in its former form become weaker in this multi-cultural model?
Or, given our insistence on unfettered freedoms, is a social contract a realistic possibility in today’s global world? Rousseau feared chaos would takeover should man operate without one but perhaps times have change. (more…)
Net Nations or Global Gov? July 28, 2008
Posted by Dan Herman in Demographics, Geo-politics, Internet, Technology.Tags: china, Economics, Internet, Technology, Values
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Interesting statistics announced today by the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) that 253 million people in the country are now online, meaning China now has the world’s largest number of Net users in the world (topping the US’ 223 million). These numbers are still much inferior to the country’s stock of mobile-phone users (500 million) but nonetheless, the continued growth of China’s online participant community bears watching. Least of all because the current user-base represents a penetration rate of only 19% suggesting that as the country develops, and as infrastructure spreads West throughout China, it will dwarf the rest of the worlds (i.e. start publishing/marketing in Mandarin). CINIC projects the number of Chinese users to grow to 490 by 2012.
The growth of China’s online community has been acknowledged by many within the Chinese Communist Party, including the country’s most powerful leader, Hu Jintao. In mid-June he took part in an online web-chat at the People’s Daily website that marked the first time a senior party official publicly engaged with internet users. While commentators noted that “there was no real substance to the online conversation,” it has since been referred to as symbolic of the central governments acknowledgement of the internet as an important source of public information and public opinion. (more…)
