First of all, my apologies for the continues light blogging. I remain restricted to dial-up, which makes keeping track of what's going on a bit harder; I'll follow up on your comments Real Soon Now (thanks for commenting though; I do enjoy reading your thoughts). An additional complication is that I am also trying to remember what time zone I am in and I am bit jetlagged, so my blogs may be even less coherent than usual. So here's a few short items for your amusement.

A "family pedagogue" at the University of Nijmegen has called for the state to provide television programs that would instill "socially desirable" behavior in children. It's to be targeted tp both children and parents. The professor sees it as modern way of providing the kind of social guidance that used to come from the church and other social activities.

What a creepy idea. Fortunately, I don't think there is much chance that it'll happen. I'd much rather have private and voluntary organizations take on this role than have a politically-driven government program. Who'll decide what is "socially acceptable" behavior? You can't force people to be good, and beaming propaganda on TV at them is not going to help much. Social norms have to be constructed from the bottom-up, and not imposed top-down. The Netherlands has become a society where it is taken for granted that the government does everything. Or at least, if there is a problem, it is the first port of call for those who want something done. I am not sure there's an easy way out. After all, it is comfortable for the government to do things for you. And if you've never known anything different, the prospect of being out on your own to deal with life is scary. How can there be order if there is none that is imposed? That's always been the siren call of collectivism as people seek order and stability in a society that has changed dramatically from the small-scale village life of just a century or two ago. It is this yearning for stability that underlies much of the thinking of the statists. The thought that systems can have emergent stability without constraining them to a single stable state appears harder to grasp. But stability for its own sake brings problems because it reduces the adaptability of the system. Japan has a stable social and political system, yet this very stability has condemned the Japanese economy to a decade of stagnation and recession. The complete absence of any constraints does not work either. A state of anarchy is the exact opposite of freedom. Theoretically you might be able design a fantasy society where anarchy works, but in practice it's always led to misery (remember Somalia?). Freedom and anarchy are not compatible. Anarchy means getting rid of rules just for the sake of it; it's bleak and nihilistic. For freedom to exist and be preserved you do need some rules, some form of authority that can help safeguard them. The state is inevitable. Making sure the state remains the guarantor of freedom is the really hard part. Perhaps somewhere, sometime we'll get it right.