The core of human nature is fundamental and rigid. Human nature tends towards disorder. Institutions in Society exist to avert this tendency towards disorder. Societal institutions are there to work with human nature to maintain order.
| |
The recognition that the failure to build up a human nature conducive to a self-sustaining, orderly society is an extrinsic rather than an intrinsic failure. The failure does not come from within (human nature itself) but from without (human nature formation via institutions). So rather than have institutions focus on human nature formation, human nature itself becomes the focus of institutions.
“That the sociobiological model of human behavior is a great advance on its predecessor, the cultural determinist theory, which held that our behavior is entirely determined by the cultural environment in which we are raised. The leading lights of this theory were such people as Margaret Mead and B. F. Skinner, who believed that humans are infinitely malleable. .….. Contrary to the assertions of cultural determinists, sociobiology teaches that men and women are psychologically different. For one thing, men are by nature more promiscuous than women because this way they can increase the number of their offspring; the same is not possible for women, so having multiple partners does not secure them an evolutionary advantage.”(National Review, 70)
|
We are barely moral animals is our predisposition for killing one another. As animals go, humans are above all prone to kill one another, particularly in group conflicts and wars. Indeed, our only rivals in this regard in the entire animal kingdom are the ants. Sociobiologists have concluded that the human inclination for warfare and even genocide is biologically programmed. The explanation is that if we can exterminate other groups, we can move into their territory.
Conservatism has support in common sense, and this common sense has its roots in the observation of the actions of our fellow men. It is precisely because of the congruence between conservatism and common sense that we may confidently predict the confirmation of conservatism's factual premises through biological analysis.
Criticism of Fascism
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini first used the expression fascism in 1919. The term comes from the Italian word fascio, which means “union” or “league.” It also refers to the ancient Roman symbol of power, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound to an ax, which represented civic unity and the authority of Roman officials to punish wrongdoers.
Click to Order a Custom Term Paper Now...
Fascist movements emerged in most European countries and in some former European colonies in the early 20th century. Fascist political parties and movements capitalized on the intense patriotism that emerged as a response to widespread social and political uncertainty after World War I (1914-1918) and the Russian Revolution of 1917. With the important exceptions of Italy and Germany
Fascism is a type of extreme right-wing ideology that honors the nation or the race as an organic community transcending all other loyalties. It stresses a myth of national or racial rebirth after a period of decline or destruction. To this end, fascism calls for a "spiritual revolution" against signs of moral decay such as individualism and materialism, and seeks to eliminate "alien" forces and groups that threaten the organic community, thus leading to ethnic cleansing.
Fascism celebrates masculinity, youth, mystical unity, and the regenerative power of violence. Often, but not always, it promotes ethnic persecution, racial superiority doctrines, imperialist expansion, and genocide.
Click to Order a Custom Term Paper Now...
Fascism's approach to politics is both populist--in that it tries to find to activate "the people" as a whole against perceived oppressors or enemies--and elitist--in that it treats the people's will as embodied in a select group, or often one supreme leader, from whom authority proceeds downward.
CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM
The expression is associated with Karl Marx who declared that capitalist societies suffered from two irresolvable problems that lead to both social discord and prevent a stable economic life. Marx understood that the competitive processes of a capitalist market society would lead to a concentration of capital ownership in fewer and fewer hands. He built this opinion on the assumption, which he holds in common with laissez faire economics, that a competitive economy must lead unavoidably to the elimination of some producers by others, there will be winners and losers and the winners would grow increasingly large. Capitalism, contrary to the general assumption of laissez faire economics, Marx argued, had an intrinsic propensity towards concentration of capital in oligopolies and monopolies. The concentration of capital involved, first, the displacement of the handworker and the craft worker and increasing domination of factory-based technology. An industrial proletariat of wageworkers emerged, and grew larger, as independent producers are eliminated by factory-based competition. Capitalist corporations grew more concentrated and larger; the number of individuals owning the means of production became fewer.
This leads to polarization of class structure and the economic and social conditions of the two classes become more contrasted, this leads to political foundation of the working class and extended clash with the dominant middle class through political and industrial organization. It is this social polarization that presents the unsolvable social or relational contradiction of capitalist society.
Click to Order a Custom Term Paper Now...
While capitalism revolutionized the means of production by encouraging the greatest economic development in human history, its class structure focused the capacity to consume in a tiny minority of the population. This according to Marx showed the inherent weakness, instability, or anarchy, in the whole capitalist system of production.
Culture Theory
The effect of culture on the societal behavior and the environmental effects on humans become increasingly apparent as we progress. The obvious impact of media and the popular culture on whole generations is quite significant. The influence of the culture cannot be undermined in any way, because it effects on the mindset of the society and how it deals with different events.
A cultural study at its best is sociological. Yet, in the continuing cross-disciplinary dialogue that has characterized the field of cultural studies in the decade or so of its progress in the United States, the discipline of sociology has been notably absent. At the same time, within the field of sociology, the study of culture has expanded enormously in the last twenty years among sociologists of culture, and among those who have more recently been calling themselves 'cultural sociologists,' which is not the same thing. Some of these sociologists have themselves adopted the term "cultural studies" to describe their work, thereby both claiming mistakenly, to have pre-empted the newer field, and ignoring the possibility of a productive encounter with cultural studies in general and with related developments in the study of culture in the humanities. Within the past couple of years, this has begun to change; some of the newer work that begins to bridge the hitherto radical divide between sociology and cultural studies.
Click to Order a Custom Term Paper Now...
Democracy - various definitions
The term democracy originated in ancient Greece to assign a government where the people share in managing the activities of the state, as distinct from governments controlled by a single class, select group, or autocrat.
|
"... Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." James Madison
|
Democracy literally means the rule of the people, a concept that will not admit any limitation in the political power. A Republic signifies an organization dealing with affairs which concern the public, thus implying that there are also private affairs, a sphere of social and personal life, with which government is not and should not be concerned; it sets a limit to the political power." Isabel Paterson
Click to Order a Custom Term Paper Now...
The father of the world wide democratic movement is Karl Marx. He believed that the rise of the working class would create a social democracy. Marxism (most governments today are rooted at least partially in Marxism) proposes that people normally must be controlled to have a generous society, based on humanism’s (God is Science) moral code. Social structure and social securities are the business of the government. Society is to be directed by powerful controlling governmental mechanisms.
Democracy becomes socialism or even moves towards the extremes of communism (socialism maintained by force).
In conclusion, democracy at it purest is more nearer to socialism then to capitalism but in all modern governments, it is present in one form or other.
Click to Order a Custom Term Paper Now...
Work Cited
Essay 1.
Lynn, Richard.Vol. 47, “Wright and Wrong” National Review, 03-20-1995, pp 70.
Essay 5.
All Quotes taken from:
http://darren.lib.utah.edu/democracy.htm
Democracy. Perkins Darren. May 1998. Univ Utah. 1 may 1998
