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3 Responses to Roundtable on Authority & Rebellion

  1. I’ve Scott’s book a while ago and attended a discussion where he talked about that book, so I don’t remember if this is from the book or from the discussion, but somewhere I heard him mention that some people waited at red lights just in case there were children watching, on the assumption that children should learn, for their own safety, to wait at red lights and the adult example would help.

    I don’t know what I think of Scott’s overall argument. It seems to run at cross purposes, as I recall. Sometimes he insists on the importance of engaging in the “calisthenics” of rule-breaking: learning how to break minor rules so that we will be able to break major (and unjust) rules when the time comes. But he also seems to favor a sort of unplanned acting in the moment based on human sympathy. He discusses a group of French protestants who sheltered Jews from the Nazis. Those protestants were fearful of offering shelter and were reluctant to do so, but finally acceded when presented with the actual people needing shelter/aid right away.

    And for this:

    One good thing is to teach them not to begrudge someone else’s harmless rulebreaking.

    That’s one problem I have. It’s hard for me not to do that, even if I sometimes break what I think are (relatively) harmless rules. I’m temperamentally a “rules are there to be followed” type of guy, even if intellectually I know that can be dangerous.

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