I RECEIVED suggestions from three different people for this week's January discussion - corporations, feminism and freedom. That's an interesting range of ideas.
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In the first place, I agree with the global activist community that the question of freedom is one of the biggest challenges we face. How do we protect individual freedoms without sacrificing social unity? And vice versa: how do we protect social unity while still protecting individuality?
These are genuine questions, with no obvious correct answer. But I don't think their difficulty means we should duck them, and quite the opposite.
The idea of the corporation doesn't pose the same questions as for a society.
Corporations have a clear cut objective of bottom line profit, whereas a good society accepts a breadth of objectives.
Unlike the society, the corporation almost always has competitors, with a tight boundary around itself and a clear understanding of 'us' and 'them'.
Either you toe the corporate line or you're out.
Although corporations (and economists) would have us imagine everyone is perfectly mobile and unaffected by geography, that's not actually true in ordinary life.
A good society tries to be accommodating not exclusionary, recognising that whoever is in the society at this moment has rights which can't simply be denied.
That geographic difference is one reason why the trend to the corporatisation of politics is so dangerous and wrong-headed.
I think we're being fools to take the easy way by ignoring this difference, stupidly imagining we'll get good societies by reducing governments to bean counters.
On the other side of the fence, I think that one of feminism's most dangerous chants is the idea that you can 'have it all' and the choice is always yours to do whatever.
No sane person could agree with that statement without qualification.
In a good society, although everyone's free to be an idiot that doesn't mean one should act that way or even applaud it.
My suggestion for better answers to our deepest questions is greater subtlety in our thinking, making choices which respect difference and the rights of others, thereby refining what we understand as 'good'.