What makes a good society?

Post Reply New Topic

Good fences make good neighbours is the one part of Frost I appreciate

Part of good manners is staying on one's own side of the fence.

ruveyn

And apparently misinterpret Read the poem and catch the real meaning.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there,
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There were it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having though of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Good fences make good neighhbours is the one part of Frost I appreciate.

Frost, while more intelligible than most of the establishment endorsed poets, and much less objectionable than Whitman, Thoreau or Emerson, does not speak to my condition and it is amazing I can find one line I can use.

Frost I put pretty much in the same box as Carter - I can appreciate his apparent sincerity and respect intentions and efforts, but when the dust settles both strike me as helpless hapless.

As the poem indicates quite clearly, "Good fences make good neighbors" is ridiculed and attacked as the thought of an unthinking person. To not catch that meaning reveals an astounding lack of reading comprehension.

Speculation. Potatoes, not subject to speculation, did not have their prices bid up and as such the price of potatoes remained stable. A food bubble was created for Goldman to make money. The play on the futures markets.

A good society exists when people of the tribe see everyone else as part of their own extended family and have compassion for them.

As a wise man once said: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer".

And the Jews were not part of everyone else?

No, they weren't in Germany but they are now in Israel. Is there any difference between then and now?

You can hardly call a society that chooses to exterminate large groups of it's own or anyone else's population a "good society"

A good society looks for the value in others and takes responsibility for itself.

Awsomelyglorious, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this issue.

I suppose my essential argument can be simplified to this:

Take a kid and teach him well, help him learn skills that will be useful in life and he will do better than if you lock him in a closet and teach him nothing.

I think anyone looking at this argument would say "well, duh!" or something to that effect. My arguments above were perhaps a little more sophisticated, but essentially said the same thing.

Yes, and your arguments all missed the mark completely. You don't seem to have a conception of an actual education system. Without that, your point is just dead in the water.

Only individual people can do that. Society is a collective.

ruveyn

Thanks for providing the full poem. I had never read it before, but I really like the idea behind it. It seems to me that it's saying that we build walls because it's what we've always done, but we forget to question why. There are times when walls are useful, like for keeping cows out of gardens, but there are other times when walls are nothing more than a habit, a protection against an imagined problem.

I think it makes a point about good societes. We often take a position of distrust first and build defenses against imagined enemies. I think if we start out with more trust and we make the assumption that the other person is probably going to behave honorably, they probably will.

A purely anecdotal example is my own situation where I live. I often take walks through downtown Los Angeles at night. There are a few people who live in my apartment building who ask "aren't you frightened?" There are many homeless people and some people with very obvious psychological issues. I don't tend to be frightened because I have never, in the 12 years I've lived here, felt threatened. I think this is because when I interact with people I nod or smile or otherwise treat them as if they were decent human beings. Also a person who doesn't appear fearful, who feels confident to treat others as possible friends rather than possible enemies, comes across as someone who knows he can take care of himself it a problem comes up.

I was walking once and a huge guy yelled at me "I'm bigger than you!" Now that may have been his idea of a joke, but I suspected he was sizing me up to see if he could mug me. I just yelled back, "Yup. You sure are" as I continued to walk toward him. I smiled, passed him up and nothing further happened. If I had cringed or turned and walked away, he might have taken offence or seen a weakness in me that he could exploit.

By not building a wall, by not turning and running away, we both could continue on our way and no one was any less for it. Boundries are useful, but I think there are times when we are too quick to build walls when perhaps we should be assuming our neighbors are just as decent as we are.

I see your point, of course.

Myself, in parts of major and even minor cities I know I walk at speed and only in daylight, and I will always agree with Frost's neigghbour. When I drive along an American street and see unbroken if not always uniformly maintained expanses of lawn, with no fences or walls or hedges, it bothers me.

For me, better a London semidetached with a good stone wall around a small and scraggle garden than an American suburban "home" with a front and back yard I cannot use because there are no borders.