ATTENTION ISI CAMPUS REPRESENTATIVES and all ISI members interested in furthering the cause of the intellectual conservative movement on campus. Now, there is an easy way, through the internet!

If you haven't heard of TheFacebook.com, Chris Kulawik of Columbia University has outlined all that you need to know about it here: http://www.isi.org/programs/membership/content/isifacebook.pdf

The 2-page guide that Kulawik put together also outlines how you can easily utilize TheFacebook.com to sign people up for ISI Membership on your campus. In just minutes, you will have everything set up and you'll be doing your part to futher the ISI mission of "educating for liberty" on your campus today! If you have any questions, feel free to email: members@isi.org

Perhaps this is a good opportunity to discuss whether Facebook, as some have it, represents one more step in the end of Western Civilization.

The great tragedy of modernism (perhaps its defining characteristic) is that all realms of distinctly human activity have been dehumanized. Only a few examples will suffice: the State has everywhere undertaken to provide security against all forms of human suffering and personal responsibility; the checker at the grocery store is no longer concerned with the prices of items (a computer determines all for him); finding a spouse is no longer a personal matter, but left up to a computer. Examples abound. Facebook has now moved the once-human activity of finding friends into the cold, inhuman realm of computing.

Assuredly, you now see the distinctly modern danger of Facebook usage. Do we really wish to make ISI a pawn in the movement to destroy all forms of human activity?

Responses welcome.

That seems to me a very abstract argument. It is wrong to use anything which allows for dehumanization? Then your comment, and mine, are all pawns in the game, (for few individuals here know one another personally) and even though you protest your voice is just another one added to the truth-generating machine of dehumanization.

I think we see where this argument is going. To say in a loose and casual way that dehumanization is the result of technology, and that both lead to a general loss of morality, is perfectly fine as a historical generalization. To say that there is causation there is to deny human free will as an intervening action in this chain, and to fall into the modernist trap of identifying evil with a "system" or any other non-personal actor which somehow manipulates, distorts or controls our own actions.

The fact is that in all cases men have moral choice. If there is a correlation between technology's dehumanization and moral decay it is their common cause in individual wrong choices. Specifically, they are based on the focus on profit or power in the first case, and on personal gain or abstract "goods" (as opposed to concrete morality) in the second.

As for Facebook, one can certainly use it to inhumanly look for cute girls or to waste time. But these are only slightly more efficient than their real-world immoral equivalents. I cannot see how an effort to find like-minded people and organize serious discussion or study could seriously be called concretely immoral.

Your argument is clever, Adam, but it’s a philosophical slight of hand. Watch closely, and the trick is revealed.

Your first argument is the most staggering. Like Facebook, this electronic forum is technologically advanced, but your suggestion that it is another pawn “in the game” is misleading. While it’s true that “few individuals here know one another personally,” that’s been true of this form of argument (that is, written argument) for thousands of very humane years. Surely you don’t personally know Aristotle, Russell Kirk, or JRR Tolkien, yet reading their arguments is, as Aquinas says of the contemplative life, “not properly human, but superhuman.” I don’t see that this debate is any less human simply because it is through an electronic medium.

Second, I never mentioned anything about morality. It might be – nay, probably is – true that dehumanization is linked to demoralization, but I did not make that leap. I simply say that the Facebook is another instrument for the dehumanization of particularly human activities – in this case, making friends, which is historically done in person. Thus, my primary argument is untouched, as far as I can tell.

Moreover, I suspect you are mistaken in saying that a “system” cannot exercise causation on human activity. Surely there are reasons why a particular “system” of laws is preferred over another; pro-life Catholics certainly think laws have some kind of causation. Are you prepared to defend the position that Aristotle and Aquinas were wrong in saying that laws teach moral lessons? Perhaps, if you are, we can talk about the “systems” of communism and socialism versus the free market. Surely it is no accident that human behavior varies widely under collectivist and free market “systems.” It seems that one of the first principles of conservatism is that systems, in fact, do exercise a kind of causation on human action – maybe not efficient cause, but some kind of cause. But I digress, defending an argument I never made.

I do concede that Facebook can be used carefully and humanely in the manner you suggest – to organize serious discussion. Just don’t go around “poking” folks. That’s another distinctly human activity that should be left in the physical world.

I see no need to respond. You have retreated from the untenable:

quote:

Assuredly, you now see the distinctly modern danger of Facebook usage. Do we really wish to make ISI a pawn in the movement to destroy all forms of human activity?

to the reasonable:

quote:

I simply say that the Facebook is another instrument for the dehumanization of particularly human activities

The first is a moral statement arguing that one should not participate in Facebook because its usage is inherently dehumanizing, where the second is a reasonable statement of the changed incentives which technology now forces an individual to choose between.