Progressive social policies, proposed and realized, are always described as experimental treatments.
The default setting for governance and social life, as it is described, is one of no regulation, no intervention, non-existent spillover effects and externalities, not a single public good worth investing in. An empty space of individual bodies that do not collide but simply move through space around each other, seamlessly, gliding.
But what about norms? Primary institutions? What about social psychology? Is it really the modus operandi of humans, or any living thing, for that matter, to exist as individuals?
I would think not.
As bizarre packets of biology that need one another to reproduce, we are inherently social. We interact, at minimum, to conceive, and as societies have become more complex, to survive. I might be a loner, but I, my identity would not exist, the concept of identity would not exist were it not in relation to another. (Sorry, Rousseau.) I would not exist or have made it to the age of 28 without the relationship of my biological parents, and subsequently, without the attention of my family and other significant persons I have encountered along the way. Even those of us who flaunt the titles of misanthrope, introvert, independent -- not the same, by any means, but all engaging sentiments of individuality or aversion to others -- these descriptors would mean nothing without a body of social beings to which to relate ourselves, from which to distance ourselves.
So perhaps it is the conservative rationalism, the abstinence from intervention, the revering of solitude and isolation, the romanticization of absence and empty space where a society once stood, perhaps it is all this that is unnatural, perhaps this, this is the experiment.
