Combatting Conservative arguments

So far I have mainly written about what it means to be a New Age Democrat: accept that we are living in a new age that demands high reasoning capabilities to deal with information overload, and use our information, with the help of government as a central information processor, to promote the growth of communities at the local level.

I have also written about the many negative attributes of Religious Conservatives and Republicans.
Now, I must write about how to combat their ideas. The one thing Conservatives pride themselves on is being intelligent, and using arguments to combat liberals as "bleeding hearts". Liberals think of conservatives as unintelligent, but many times conservatives develop what seem to be good ideas. Here are two: (1) the virtue of private everything with an intense focus on individualism and self reliance, and (2) the existence of God as a way to establish moral bearings for an individual and society.

Privacy and individuality are the antithesis of community. Indeed, conservatives come down hard on the side of the individual in the philosophical debate of the individual vs. the community. Usually, conservatives argue that we are all individuals, we are all inherently competitive and at war with one another, and a community stifles that competition. These are the libertarians, and they want nothing less than to be left alone - by the government, by family, by friends, etc.

The best argument against privacy is that privacy as an actual fact no longer really exists. This is the first step in recognizing the existence of a New Age characterized by information overload. It is now possible to acquire information on any person. At the minimum, it is possible to found out a person's address and phone number, and probably the past 5 years of their life without ever meeting them. If your computer skills are good enough, you can find out much more. That's the positive argument against privacy. Before the New Age of information overload, privacy was a viable concept because it described fundamental features of society. Individuals could easily go incognito. Records were not well kept before the late 20th century, and the records that were kept were not easily accessible by the public. They were accessible by defense and police agencies, or corporations, but ordinary people had to rely on word-of-mouth to get information about each other. Hence, most people before the late-20th century lived in small towns around the world. There were urban centers of course, but most people grew up in small towns where everyone knew everyone else. This created the "rumor mill", and it was often difficult to escape the impact of those rumors. Now, we use the Internet and cell phones to get information on strangers. This increase in information has compensated for a decrease in community over the past 30 years so that we can no longer rely on continuous contact with a small group of people, except in an office, but we can keep track of people by using Google.

Thus, while we can still conceive of ourselves as individuals, we are increasingly empowered to act collectively. This has already started to happen. "Flash Mobs" were a type of faddish performance art in 2003. high school and college students use cell phone text messaging to communicate and coordinate activities as if they were in a bee hive. This has created a stronger sense of community online to replace the physical community that we lost over the past 30 years. The online community is now trying to restore the physical community through such web sites as Meetup.com.

The conservative argument for the existence of God is trickier to deal with because it ducks the important question that motivates the argument. The argument for individual self-reliance is motivated by the question: how shall we assign responsibility for our actions, and how shall we help those who have failed in their endeavors? The first part of the question is ethical since it tries to steer us away from irresponsible actions. The second part of the question is practical because it tries to steer us toware personal success and away from failure. Thus, the question of the existence of God is really a question about the quality of information that is available to us, and the ability to process that information correctly to make good decisions once we acquire the information. The premise is that, if God exists, we will have a continuous source of high quality decisions from a being who is able to process an infinite amount of information. Hence, we must accept that we have very limited abilities to process information, and that our decision-making abilities are limited as well. We are fallible, meaning we make bad decisions on limited information. God, as an all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent being, has the ability to provide us with the best decisions if we simply listen.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes a great deal about the nature of God. It is not necessary to make any of these assumptions. Even if such a being as God does exist, that God does not need to be all-powerful, all-knowing, or even benevolent. Indeed, much of what we think of as God is a simple projection of what we want God to be. We implicitly recognize that we live in a New Age of information overload, so we think there must be some Higher Power who is able to process all of this information for us. We feel that without such a Being, we will consistently make bad decisions on limited information.

The New Age response the argument for the existence of God is that we don't really need this type of a God to make our decisions. We simply need each other. A single person probably cannot process all the information that exists in the world, but that is why we have communities. All communities have economies in which people find areas in life in which they are good at processing certain types of information and then helping other people to make decisions with that information. A good parallel argument is the difference between supercomputers and distributed computers. Scientists and researchers once relied solely on supercomputers to analyze weather patterns, stock markets, infectious disease patterns, and many other complex phenomena. The supercomputers were needed because individual personal computers were not powerful enough in processing speed, and did not contain enough storage capacity, to analyze these complex problems. Times have changed. Based on Moore's Law, the processing power of a single personal computer today surpasses the processing power of supercomputers from 50 years ago. It used to be that personal computers were very personal: they could not share data easily or coordinate activity through communication. Now they can do both with the Internet. Consequently, instead of buying costly supercomputers with enormous processing power, many universities and researchers are using distributed computing. They let users download programs for processing data, and when the computers are idle they process little chunks of data and send the data back to a central unit. The rankings of supercomputers worldwide now include distributed computing networks. The networked computers collaborate on problems simultaneously and match, or surpass, the performance of supercomputers.

The same is true for individuals. Individually, we do not possess all the information or analytical ability to process every conceivable problem that we may face. Collectively, as a community, we share problems and develop solutions very quickly because we are able to distribute the reasoning ability. In other words, humanity is God. However, in order to act like God, we need to recognize that we have the abilities only if we organize our efforts collectively. The Conservative bases his economic argument on the notion of the "invisible hand", but the visible hand can be just as, if not more effective if we know how to recognize it.

Thus, community can be used as a complete and powerful counter-argument to both conservative arguments about self-reliance and the existence of God. It is time to start rebuilding those communities.