the most natural unit of organization is the community, rather than country or family. a community can have a unified set of institutions, culture, ethics, etc in a way that families and countries can’t. communities can and should have boundaries that keep out people who don’t meet the ethos of the community, as determined by the existing members, and nobody has any right to be admitted to a community that doesn’t want them as a member.
perhaps this is terminally classic liberal american brained, but imo countries should mostly serve as the container for communities to do their thing; the bootloader for diverse communities. they are the natural unit for defense, for the enforcement of laws, the levying of taxes, etc. the country should enforce boundaries to preserve the container—for instance, people who are violently insurrectionist, or who do not wish to respect the right for other communities to do their thing.
the most important part of american culture is that it is a good container for all sorts of different communities, and that cultural thing is important to protect. but otherwise, admitting people who are willing to uphold the container is a positive sum move that strengthens the US while also being a very effective charity move for those admitted. of course, it is often difficult to determine who is willing to uphold the container, especially with goodharting, and therein lies much of the difficulty. but it’s such an obviously good thing to do for everyone involved that much thought should be expended determining the way to admit as many value-aligned people as possible, and we should be sad that our current ability to screen people prevents us from admitting all of the like-minded people.
the problem with countries as a basic unit of organization is that countries don’t create the conditions of windfall; communities do. software engineers in silicon valley has a lot more in common culturally, ethically, and institutionally with software engineers in toronto or london, than with farmers in iowa. conditional on successfully protecting the basic freedoms that enable diverse communities to coexist in the same container, to the extent there is something worth preserving about the cultures that produce windfall and progress, the right boundary to protect is the community boundary.
also, due to the inherent properties of being a country, they cannot maintain their boundaries as well as communities can. most fundamentally, it’s pretty bad to kick citizens out of your country, because they have to move far away and uproot their entire life. whereas kicking someone out of a community is much less serious; they can keep living in the same apartment, have their kids go to the same schools, etc.
the family is also the wrong unit of abstraction. families are only genetically relevant, and modern society is mostly correct to atomize individuals. family-based societies get trapped in poverty because extremely successful individuals are a threat to the dominance of the family, so there is strong crab bucket mentality.
kicking someone out of a community is much less serious; they can keep living in the same apartment, have their kids go to the same schools, etc.
this is true if by ‘community’ you mean, like, a bridge club (or philosophy fan forum). but it’s dangerously false if you mean something more like ‘mormonism’. the way the rest of the post is written, it seems like you want ‘community’ to be more like the latter—i don’t think a bridge club is an offering competitive with a country.
there are certain things that a (higher involvement) community can offer that are incompatible with excommunication being unserious.
by community i mean centrally things like mormonism. i don’t care about bridge clubs. being kicked out of mormonism is a lot less serious than being kicked out of the US. for one, you don’t have to immediately vacate your location of residence. if you work somewhere that isn’t Mormon controlled, you don’t have to terminate your employment, whereas you would no longer have legal work authorization for if you ceased being a citizen. if you don’t have a dual citizenship, you would become stateless, which extremely sucks and can trap you in legal limbo for years if not forever.
It sounds like one relevant concept is civil society institutions, which includes religious groups but also charities, clubs, activist groups, volunteer organizations, trade unions, blogging circles, etc.; broadly, all the social institutions that are not government or business.
(x-posting my tweet in response to Richard Ngo)
the most natural unit of organization is the community, rather than country or family. a community can have a unified set of institutions, culture, ethics, etc in a way that families and countries can’t. communities can and should have boundaries that keep out people who don’t meet the ethos of the community, as determined by the existing members, and nobody has any right to be admitted to a community that doesn’t want them as a member.
perhaps this is terminally classic liberal american brained, but imo countries should mostly serve as the container for communities to do their thing; the bootloader for diverse communities. they are the natural unit for defense, for the enforcement of laws, the levying of taxes, etc. the country should enforce boundaries to preserve the container—for instance, people who are violently insurrectionist, or who do not wish to respect the right for other communities to do their thing.
the most important part of american culture is that it is a good container for all sorts of different communities, and that cultural thing is important to protect. but otherwise, admitting people who are willing to uphold the container is a positive sum move that strengthens the US while also being a very effective charity move for those admitted. of course, it is often difficult to determine who is willing to uphold the container, especially with goodharting, and therein lies much of the difficulty. but it’s such an obviously good thing to do for everyone involved that much thought should be expended determining the way to admit as many value-aligned people as possible, and we should be sad that our current ability to screen people prevents us from admitting all of the like-minded people.
the problem with countries as a basic unit of organization is that countries don’t create the conditions of windfall; communities do. software engineers in silicon valley has a lot more in common culturally, ethically, and institutionally with software engineers in toronto or london, than with farmers in iowa. conditional on successfully protecting the basic freedoms that enable diverse communities to coexist in the same container, to the extent there is something worth preserving about the cultures that produce windfall and progress, the right boundary to protect is the community boundary.
also, due to the inherent properties of being a country, they cannot maintain their boundaries as well as communities can. most fundamentally, it’s pretty bad to kick citizens out of your country, because they have to move far away and uproot their entire life. whereas kicking someone out of a community is much less serious; they can keep living in the same apartment, have their kids go to the same schools, etc.
the family is also the wrong unit of abstraction. families are only genetically relevant, and modern society is mostly correct to atomize individuals. family-based societies get trapped in poverty because extremely successful individuals are a threat to the dominance of the family, so there is strong crab bucket mentality.
this is true if by ‘community’ you mean, like, a bridge club (or philosophy fan forum). but it’s dangerously false if you mean something more like ‘mormonism’. the way the rest of the post is written, it seems like you want ‘community’ to be more like the latter—i don’t think a bridge club is an offering competitive with a country.
there are certain things that a (higher involvement) community can offer that are incompatible with excommunication being unserious.
by community i mean centrally things like mormonism. i don’t care about bridge clubs. being kicked out of mormonism is a lot less serious than being kicked out of the US. for one, you don’t have to immediately vacate your location of residence. if you work somewhere that isn’t Mormon controlled, you don’t have to terminate your employment, whereas you would no longer have legal work authorization for if you ceased being a citizen. if you don’t have a dual citizenship, you would become stateless, which extremely sucks and can trap you in legal limbo for years if not forever.
It sounds like one relevant concept is civil society institutions, which includes religious groups but also charities, clubs, activist groups, volunteer organizations, trade unions, blogging circles, etc.; broadly, all the social institutions that are not government or business.