February 7, 2013
February 6, 2013
Freedom and the expansion of government
Beyond some minimal level, a level that we have long since reached and surpassed in the United States, the expansion of the size and power of government renders us less free. It is frankly breathtaking that I live in an age when I need to even argue this point. Still, before launching into an analysis of why I have come to this conclusion, it is necessary to dispense with the philosophical preliminaries by saying a few words about what I mean by “free”.
Historically, freedom has gotten defined in quite a few interesting and often opposing ways. My definition of freedom, in the politically relevant sense, is the first (and in that particular instance less relevant) definition I mentioned in my essay on free will.
( http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/03/case-against-existence-of-free-will.html ).
“…[one meaning of “free will”] is that state in which one’s decisions can be realized in physical actions. In this sense, if one is physically constrained by devices, disease or other externally induced circumstances [including the actions of other humans] one is, to the extent of the constraint, deprived of free will.”
I believe the terms “freedom” and “free will” can be used interchangeably in this context.
An important aspect of this definition is that it defines freedom as something not only individually realizable, but as something which is solely individually realizable. Such a definition makes no allowances for abstract, collectivized notions of freedom (like Hegel’s for example) but plants the concept firmly in the realm of individual experience and action. Nations, races and other group entities can no more experience freedom than they can experience a collective migraine headache. Unrestrained action is the purview solely of individual conscious beings.
The real world is, of course, awash in constraints to our imaginable actions and desires. Gravity and a lack of feathers keeps me from flying like a bird, as does my unfavorable power-to-weight ratio. Obviously, when discussing freedom in a political sense, we can dispense with those constraints which are not attributable to the actions of other people. Neither the government nor anyone else forbids me to have feathers or suitable musculature – these are simply brute physical facts.
Another significant consequence of defining freedom as the ability to bring one’s desires to fruition is that it makes freedom, or the lack thereof, the product of one’s unique expectations. Freedom is not only something we experience individually, but something which, to a great extent, we define individually. We are neither free nor constrained because we meet someone else’s interpretation of freedom or constraint.
A problem with most definitions of freedom is that they attempt to make freedom an absolute good, and carve off anything unpleasant about it with some other term (e.g. “license”). I believe this is a mistake. The freedom to murder one’s neighbor in cold blood is still a freedom. By itself, freedom is amoral – it is merely the ability to act on our decisions. Any moral content must lie in the kind of decisions that one makes.
While one can be free without being moral, happiness and freedom are more closely correlated. It is possible to separate the two – one can be free to do something but habitually dissatisfied with the results – but in most cases we are happy when we can pursue our desires and unhappy when we cannot. It is, of course, possible for an individual to be happy with a very restrictive set of circumstances, so long as that individual’s aspirations are equally limited.
In any real society, it is impossible that everyone will be absolutely free in the sense that I’ve outlined above. Society, even at the molecular level of the family, consists of a set of obligations and behavioral constraints. We submit to such constraints ultimately because they are to our individual advantage. By “advantage” here, I do not necessarily imply any especially positive outcome; in the sense I intend, even slaves submit because it is to their individual advantage – it is better to serve than to be beaten or killed. Societies are the working out of all the varied and transient desires of their constituent individuals by whatever means. There are always relative winners and losers in this process, though some societies do produce more freedom (and more happiness) than others.
Governments, as one of the active organizational agents of societies, are by their very nature in the business of restricting freedom. Laws and regulations are obviously constraints, but really all government activity, to the extent that it is supported by some form of taxation, is a burden and a constraint to somebody. While government is inherently a check on freedom, it is an unavoidable one. It arises spontaneously wherever humans come together in any numbers, and it is obvious that without at least some government it would be impossible to have societies worth the term. The dream of the anarchists, in which, without the bosses, all persons would be naturally cooperative and everything would run perfectly in a state of total equality, is nothing more than a naïve fantasy. Humans are not angels. Societies must restrain the murderer and the thief. They must, at times, protect themselves from other societies as well. The dreams of pacifists are probably only slightly less illusory that those of the anarchists. These functions require governments, laws, and some amount of taxation.
Beyond the realm of protecting life and property from the gross depredations of other individuals or other nations, the necessity of government becomes more suspect. Again, as government just is the working out of power relationships, both within a society and between societies, it can restrain and regulate almost without limit. What I am referring to above is not what it can do, but what can be justified as essential to a society’s stability and continuity. On the less contestable side of the grey area we have such items as roads, sewers, and various other public works. While some constructions and institutions of this sort might arise spontaneously through private enterprise, it is hard to imagine an entrepreneur who would wish to undertake the construction and operation of a pay-as-you-go sewer. Some things that clearly benefit virtually everyone only get done by governments. It is also probably true that the more complex and populous the country, the more such institutions must be organized and operated by the state. Nevertheless, a necessary erosion of freedom is still an erosion of freedom. If it turns out that the only way to maintain a huge population is by surrendering to totalitarianism, we should not pronounce totalitarianism good because particular circumstances make it necessary. While people can get used to very severe constraints, and learn not to feel them, I do not see how we can count this as a good outcome. In a sufficiently restrictive society, I could not write this essay – nor could you read it. In a true totalitarian state, we would lack the capacity even to understand it.
When government strives to make all citizens equal before the law it is striving not to favor certain groups or certain individuals. When it strives to make them equal economically it must, in practice, do just the opposite. Such a government presumes to compensate not only for the inequities brought about by history, but also for the inequities that result from differences of ability and effort. A government that undertakes this task is no longer merely protecting its citizens, but is attempting to re-engineer their beliefs, desires, and activities to conform to a particular ideal. To call such an effort an extension of freedom is absurd on its face. One is not made free by being forced to conform to someone else’s ideal. Such policies may advance the interests of a few selected groups of citizens temporarily, but only at the cost of surrendering the personal liberty of everyone to the whims of a handful of planners. In assuming such powers, the government is transformed from a limited undertaking that keeps society viable, to an eternal overbearing parent that presumes to always know what’s best for everyone.
The condition I have sketched above is not the worst case of what an expanding governmental power might do, but actually the best case. I have presumed, so far, that the people who administer government are selfless idealists, bending their entire effort toward their particular utopian ideals. If even such well-meaning Platonic guardians would take our liberties away, then how much worse would we suffer under the rule of ordinary, selfish, capricious human beings? This question is amply answered by history.
The chief purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to limit the power of government. This is the document’s very essence. If America is a grand experiment, it is an experiment in creating the maximum degree of individual freedom that a society can tolerate without disintegrating. As Thoreau said, “That government is best which governs least.” The opposite experiment, that of seeing how much government can curtain individual sovereignty without producing a rebellion, has been tried repeatedly – and we can expect a repetition of this experiment to yield predictable results.
The left will plead and whine ad nauseam about fairness, about it all being the will of the public as expressed through the elections, etc. Unfortunately, individual freedom is not preserved by the simple right of suffrage, but only by a broadly held belief that such a freedom is worth preserving. Lose that value, and you take a grand step toward political irrelevance. A populous prepared to surrender individual sovereignty for either an illusion of security or a temporary ration of relief renders the democratic franchise a mere formality. A state ruled in secrecy by celebrity politicians, unelected experts and academics is neither a democracy, nor fair, nor free. It may appeal to some, at least until the real bill comes due, but I, myself, would rather risk the consequences of a free life than to beg for charity from any set of masters.
Historically, freedom has gotten defined in quite a few interesting and often opposing ways. My definition of freedom, in the politically relevant sense, is the first (and in that particular instance less relevant) definition I mentioned in my essay on free will.
( http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/03/case-against-existence-of-free-will.html ).
“…[one meaning of “free will”] is that state in which one’s decisions can be realized in physical actions. In this sense, if one is physically constrained by devices, disease or other externally induced circumstances [including the actions of other humans] one is, to the extent of the constraint, deprived of free will.”
I believe the terms “freedom” and “free will” can be used interchangeably in this context.
An important aspect of this definition is that it defines freedom as something not only individually realizable, but as something which is solely individually realizable. Such a definition makes no allowances for abstract, collectivized notions of freedom (like Hegel’s for example) but plants the concept firmly in the realm of individual experience and action. Nations, races and other group entities can no more experience freedom than they can experience a collective migraine headache. Unrestrained action is the purview solely of individual conscious beings.
The real world is, of course, awash in constraints to our imaginable actions and desires. Gravity and a lack of feathers keeps me from flying like a bird, as does my unfavorable power-to-weight ratio. Obviously, when discussing freedom in a political sense, we can dispense with those constraints which are not attributable to the actions of other people. Neither the government nor anyone else forbids me to have feathers or suitable musculature – these are simply brute physical facts.
Another significant consequence of defining freedom as the ability to bring one’s desires to fruition is that it makes freedom, or the lack thereof, the product of one’s unique expectations. Freedom is not only something we experience individually, but something which, to a great extent, we define individually. We are neither free nor constrained because we meet someone else’s interpretation of freedom or constraint.
A problem with most definitions of freedom is that they attempt to make freedom an absolute good, and carve off anything unpleasant about it with some other term (e.g. “license”). I believe this is a mistake. The freedom to murder one’s neighbor in cold blood is still a freedom. By itself, freedom is amoral – it is merely the ability to act on our decisions. Any moral content must lie in the kind of decisions that one makes.
While one can be free without being moral, happiness and freedom are more closely correlated. It is possible to separate the two – one can be free to do something but habitually dissatisfied with the results – but in most cases we are happy when we can pursue our desires and unhappy when we cannot. It is, of course, possible for an individual to be happy with a very restrictive set of circumstances, so long as that individual’s aspirations are equally limited.
In any real society, it is impossible that everyone will be absolutely free in the sense that I’ve outlined above. Society, even at the molecular level of the family, consists of a set of obligations and behavioral constraints. We submit to such constraints ultimately because they are to our individual advantage. By “advantage” here, I do not necessarily imply any especially positive outcome; in the sense I intend, even slaves submit because it is to their individual advantage – it is better to serve than to be beaten or killed. Societies are the working out of all the varied and transient desires of their constituent individuals by whatever means. There are always relative winners and losers in this process, though some societies do produce more freedom (and more happiness) than others.
Governments, as one of the active organizational agents of societies, are by their very nature in the business of restricting freedom. Laws and regulations are obviously constraints, but really all government activity, to the extent that it is supported by some form of taxation, is a burden and a constraint to somebody. While government is inherently a check on freedom, it is an unavoidable one. It arises spontaneously wherever humans come together in any numbers, and it is obvious that without at least some government it would be impossible to have societies worth the term. The dream of the anarchists, in which, without the bosses, all persons would be naturally cooperative and everything would run perfectly in a state of total equality, is nothing more than a naïve fantasy. Humans are not angels. Societies must restrain the murderer and the thief. They must, at times, protect themselves from other societies as well. The dreams of pacifists are probably only slightly less illusory that those of the anarchists. These functions require governments, laws, and some amount of taxation.
Beyond the realm of protecting life and property from the gross depredations of other individuals or other nations, the necessity of government becomes more suspect. Again, as government just is the working out of power relationships, both within a society and between societies, it can restrain and regulate almost without limit. What I am referring to above is not what it can do, but what can be justified as essential to a society’s stability and continuity. On the less contestable side of the grey area we have such items as roads, sewers, and various other public works. While some constructions and institutions of this sort might arise spontaneously through private enterprise, it is hard to imagine an entrepreneur who would wish to undertake the construction and operation of a pay-as-you-go sewer. Some things that clearly benefit virtually everyone only get done by governments. It is also probably true that the more complex and populous the country, the more such institutions must be organized and operated by the state. Nevertheless, a necessary erosion of freedom is still an erosion of freedom. If it turns out that the only way to maintain a huge population is by surrendering to totalitarianism, we should not pronounce totalitarianism good because particular circumstances make it necessary. While people can get used to very severe constraints, and learn not to feel them, I do not see how we can count this as a good outcome. In a sufficiently restrictive society, I could not write this essay – nor could you read it. In a true totalitarian state, we would lack the capacity even to understand it.
When government strives to make all citizens equal before the law it is striving not to favor certain groups or certain individuals. When it strives to make them equal economically it must, in practice, do just the opposite. Such a government presumes to compensate not only for the inequities brought about by history, but also for the inequities that result from differences of ability and effort. A government that undertakes this task is no longer merely protecting its citizens, but is attempting to re-engineer their beliefs, desires, and activities to conform to a particular ideal. To call such an effort an extension of freedom is absurd on its face. One is not made free by being forced to conform to someone else’s ideal. Such policies may advance the interests of a few selected groups of citizens temporarily, but only at the cost of surrendering the personal liberty of everyone to the whims of a handful of planners. In assuming such powers, the government is transformed from a limited undertaking that keeps society viable, to an eternal overbearing parent that presumes to always know what’s best for everyone.
The condition I have sketched above is not the worst case of what an expanding governmental power might do, but actually the best case. I have presumed, so far, that the people who administer government are selfless idealists, bending their entire effort toward their particular utopian ideals. If even such well-meaning Platonic guardians would take our liberties away, then how much worse would we suffer under the rule of ordinary, selfish, capricious human beings? This question is amply answered by history.
The chief purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to limit the power of government. This is the document’s very essence. If America is a grand experiment, it is an experiment in creating the maximum degree of individual freedom that a society can tolerate without disintegrating. As Thoreau said, “That government is best which governs least.” The opposite experiment, that of seeing how much government can curtain individual sovereignty without producing a rebellion, has been tried repeatedly – and we can expect a repetition of this experiment to yield predictable results.
The left will plead and whine ad nauseam about fairness, about it all being the will of the public as expressed through the elections, etc. Unfortunately, individual freedom is not preserved by the simple right of suffrage, but only by a broadly held belief that such a freedom is worth preserving. Lose that value, and you take a grand step toward political irrelevance. A populous prepared to surrender individual sovereignty for either an illusion of security or a temporary ration of relief renders the democratic franchise a mere formality. A state ruled in secrecy by celebrity politicians, unelected experts and academics is neither a democracy, nor fair, nor free. It may appeal to some, at least until the real bill comes due, but I, myself, would rather risk the consequences of a free life than to beg for charity from any set of masters.
February 1, 2013
Seidman v. The U.S. Constitution
CBS news recently aired the opinions of Georgetown Professor Louis Michael Seidman, available at the link below:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57566014/professor-take-our-country-back-from-the-constitution/
The article is short, and summarizes a 176-page book, but I think it lays out Seidman’s key points. His advice, in brief, is that we dispense with the US Constitution as a law and consider it only as an “inspirational” document.
Seidman argues:
“…most of our greatest Presidents -- Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and both Roosevelts -- had doubts about the Constitution, and many of them disobeyed it when it got in their way.”
This is true, but it hardly seems a compelling reason to abandon the Constitution. FDR, for example, ignored the Constitution by interning Japanese Americans without due process, and attempted to subvert the Constitution by packing the Supreme Court with additional Justices. Is Seidman arguing that, because history portrays FDR as a great man, that such draconian actions were good things – and that they should have gone unimpeded? Is he arguing, in other words, for a rule of men (or women, as the case might be) over the rule of law?
He continues that, while the Constitution offers much that is inspiring…
“…the Constitution also contains some provisions that are not so inspiring. For example, one allows a presidential candidate who is rejected by a majority of the American people to assume office. Suppose that Barack Obama really wasn't a natural-born citizen. So what?”
In the first place, who is Seidman to determine for the rest of us that the presidential birth status is irrelevant? It is not an egregious limitation to individual freedom to exclude a naturalized citizen from the presidency. It is reasonable to require that the president not be unduly attached to some other nation or culture. The criterion is not perfect in assuring such attachments don’t exist – but neither is the legal driving age a perfect assurance of adult responsibility.
On the matter of the Electoral College system, there is already a slow but growing momentum to amend this by the normal Constitutional process. The Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times. Nothing I’m aware of has fatally undermined the amendment process. In any case, the purpose of the framers was not to create a popular democracy, but to create a system which balanced a number of competing interests, including the sovereign status of the states themselves. One can make the argument that a direct popular vote would be better, but one can’t just take it as a given that this is so. Popular majorities have voted for some very nasty things, and are not infallible themselves.
Finally:
“…But what happens when the issue gets Constitutional-ized? Then we turn the question over to lawyers, and lawyers do with it what lawyers do. So instead of talking about whether gun control makes sense in our country, we talk about what people thought of it two centuries ago.
Worse yet, talking about gun control in terms of constitutional obligation needlessly raises the temperature of political discussion. Instead of a question on policy, about which reasonable people can disagree, it becomes a test of one's commitment to our foundational document and, so, to America itself.
This is our country. We live in it, and we have a right to the kind of country we want. We would not allow the French or the United Nations to rule us, and neither should we allow people who died over two centuries ago and knew nothing of our country as it exists today.”
One has to wonder how Professor Seidman imagines such issues would get resolved in the absence of a Constitution. One can almost smell the “national conversation” phrase bubbling up from underneath. Unless you are one of a select few, you would not be invited to that sort of discussion. In practice, what would happen in the absence of a restraining body of laws is not a mass meeting of the public in which everyone would get to weigh in and have his or her interests fairly considered, but the triumph of the strongest political faction. In de Tocqueville’s time you would have gotten a tyranny of the majority; today, we would be lucky to get a result even that agreeable.
The Constitution, as it actually functions, has little to do with making society perfect. It has everything to do with preventing ambitious leaders from abusing their power. It is true that the founders knew nothing about nuclear weapons, gay marriage, or many other features of modern society. The Constitution, however, is neither a weapons treaty nor the Defense of Marriage Act. The founders’ achievement was not to forecast technology or social mores, but to understand, with remarkable if not quite perfect clarity, the dangers posed by unbridled political power. Seidman is making the case that, ultimately, he and people like him know what’s best for you, and can be trusted with unlimited authority over your life.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57566014/professor-take-our-country-back-from-the-constitution/
The article is short, and summarizes a 176-page book, but I think it lays out Seidman’s key points. His advice, in brief, is that we dispense with the US Constitution as a law and consider it only as an “inspirational” document.
Seidman argues:
“…most of our greatest Presidents -- Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, and both Roosevelts -- had doubts about the Constitution, and many of them disobeyed it when it got in their way.”
This is true, but it hardly seems a compelling reason to abandon the Constitution. FDR, for example, ignored the Constitution by interning Japanese Americans without due process, and attempted to subvert the Constitution by packing the Supreme Court with additional Justices. Is Seidman arguing that, because history portrays FDR as a great man, that such draconian actions were good things – and that they should have gone unimpeded? Is he arguing, in other words, for a rule of men (or women, as the case might be) over the rule of law?
He continues that, while the Constitution offers much that is inspiring…
“…the Constitution also contains some provisions that are not so inspiring. For example, one allows a presidential candidate who is rejected by a majority of the American people to assume office. Suppose that Barack Obama really wasn't a natural-born citizen. So what?”
In the first place, who is Seidman to determine for the rest of us that the presidential birth status is irrelevant? It is not an egregious limitation to individual freedom to exclude a naturalized citizen from the presidency. It is reasonable to require that the president not be unduly attached to some other nation or culture. The criterion is not perfect in assuring such attachments don’t exist – but neither is the legal driving age a perfect assurance of adult responsibility.
On the matter of the Electoral College system, there is already a slow but growing momentum to amend this by the normal Constitutional process. The Constitution has been amended twenty-seven times. Nothing I’m aware of has fatally undermined the amendment process. In any case, the purpose of the framers was not to create a popular democracy, but to create a system which balanced a number of competing interests, including the sovereign status of the states themselves. One can make the argument that a direct popular vote would be better, but one can’t just take it as a given that this is so. Popular majorities have voted for some very nasty things, and are not infallible themselves.
Finally:
“…But what happens when the issue gets Constitutional-ized? Then we turn the question over to lawyers, and lawyers do with it what lawyers do. So instead of talking about whether gun control makes sense in our country, we talk about what people thought of it two centuries ago.
Worse yet, talking about gun control in terms of constitutional obligation needlessly raises the temperature of political discussion. Instead of a question on policy, about which reasonable people can disagree, it becomes a test of one's commitment to our foundational document and, so, to America itself.
This is our country. We live in it, and we have a right to the kind of country we want. We would not allow the French or the United Nations to rule us, and neither should we allow people who died over two centuries ago and knew nothing of our country as it exists today.”
One has to wonder how Professor Seidman imagines such issues would get resolved in the absence of a Constitution. One can almost smell the “national conversation” phrase bubbling up from underneath. Unless you are one of a select few, you would not be invited to that sort of discussion. In practice, what would happen in the absence of a restraining body of laws is not a mass meeting of the public in which everyone would get to weigh in and have his or her interests fairly considered, but the triumph of the strongest political faction. In de Tocqueville’s time you would have gotten a tyranny of the majority; today, we would be lucky to get a result even that agreeable.
The Constitution, as it actually functions, has little to do with making society perfect. It has everything to do with preventing ambitious leaders from abusing their power. It is true that the founders knew nothing about nuclear weapons, gay marriage, or many other features of modern society. The Constitution, however, is neither a weapons treaty nor the Defense of Marriage Act. The founders’ achievement was not to forecast technology or social mores, but to understand, with remarkable if not quite perfect clarity, the dangers posed by unbridled political power. Seidman is making the case that, ultimately, he and people like him know what’s best for you, and can be trusted with unlimited authority over your life.
January 25, 2013
The Efficacy of Banning Guns
The gun control controversy has raised its head once again, and though there has been more heat than usual, there has been a typical lack of serious reflection. Let’s consider the issues underneath the slogans.
Let’s imagine, for sake of argument, that the most extreme regulatory measures could be enacted into law – a full repeal of the 2nd Amendment and a Federal ban on the possession of any firearm by any private individual in America. In such a scenario, many law-abiding people would undoubtedly turn in their guns. Many other basically law-abiding people would not, and would thus become felons on principle. The percentage who would choose to disobey the law is impossible to estimate accurately, but unquestionably some firearms would be taken out of circulation and, presumably, would be destroyed.
The NRA has always put forward the argument that criminals would not turn in their guns. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption. If a person makes a living by illegal means, he is certainly not likely to meekly give up his pistol either because “it’s the right thing to do,” or because the possession of it is made a crime. Still, one might expect a certain gradual decline in gun crime, simply through attrition. Guns do get seized in arrests, they break, they get lost, ammunition gets consumed or goes bad through improper storage, etc. So, although gun crime would not stop immediately, it would have to dwindle away eventually – right?
For better or worse, I believe that answer, at least in America, is almost certainly “no.” Consider guns as a market commodity like any other. As long as there is a demand for a commodity that someone can profitably supply, that commodity will be supplied. For example, a great variety of narcotics and other drugs are illegal in the US, but decades of law enforcement efforts have failed to put an end to their use, or even come close to doing so. The same would be true of firearms. There is no reason to assume that a narcotrafficker with the means of smuggling cocaine and marijuana into the country in large quantities either could not or would not engage in gunrunning if such a market came into existence. Indeed, the customer base and distribution networks created for narcotics would serve narcotraffickers well for distributing illegal guns and ammunition. It is reasonable to assume that gunrunning would more than compensate for the attrition one would expect through breakage and confiscation. Criminals would not only ignore the law, but would have a fairly reliable source of illegal supply. Gun violence might decline slightly due to the inflation of prices resulting from a restricted market, but would probably still plateau at a high level. To the extent that criminals find guns desirable for their mystique alone, banning them would only make them more attractive by endowing them with more prestige.
The left believes that the Mexican drug cartels acquire their weapons at American gun shows. I doubt this happens often, but even if it does it is merely a supply of convenience. People with the resources to control whole regions of Mexico have the resources to import weapons from the international market. Likewise, evidence that gun crime has declined in England and Australia is inapplicable. Neither England nor Australia have the border issues that America does.
Another common argument against banning guns, the argument that an armed public is a deterrent to crime, is harder to prove. Armed citizens do successfully stop or prevent crimes occasionally, but the argument that this is statistically relevant is still the subject of some controversy. There is at least one credible study that shows that armed citizens reduce the rate of street crime (see John Lott, 2000). The argument has to work to some degree – being practically certain that a homeowner would not have a gun wouldn’t make a home invader less likely to break in. Statistics comparing the US with gun-free England do support this. You can play this argument off against the rate of gun accidents and other considerations, but, with regard to violent crime, being armed must give a person at least some advantage over being unarmed.
The final common argument against gun control – and against a ban on militarily useful firearms in particular – rests on the belief that the public itself should have the capacity to throw off tyranny, foreign or domestic, by force if necessary. This is an entirely different kind of argument – an argument for a specific kind of individual liberty, not an argument for more effective crime prevention. It is a romantic notion for some, and a terrifying one for others. A look at popular uprisings and insurgencies around the world, including those we have recently faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, shows that this is not a wholly unworkable idea. Still, professional military forces are formidable things, and only an extremely lucky private militia would survive a single battle against one. Whether one finds the idea of a violent revolution heroic or unspeakable, any honest look at history reveals all wars to be brutal, ugly, and indiscriminant. Revolutions are sometimes inevitable, but what follows them is usually worse than what preceded them. Ginning up a civil war is not something that should be taken lightly by anyone, but utterly stripping the people of the capacity to resist oppression should not be taken lightly either.
It is plain that the present furor over gun control has little to do with guns and even less to do with the unfortunate children who died in Sandy Hook. Neither side wants a repetition of that, but neither side has a viable solution. Politically, the Sandy Hook massacre is just the latest flash point in the conflict between liberal and conservative cultures. The liberal culture believes it is the role of government to protect us not only from imminent harm, but from the very possibility of harm – not only from each other, but from ourselves. Conservatives wish chiefly to be left alone, and chafe under the progressive erosion of individual freedoms. This division is at times quite explicit. During a speech announcing his state’s recent passage of particularly stringent gun laws, Governor Andrew Cuomo harangued his audience -- “This is New York, the Progressive Capitol! – You show them how we lead!” Statements like this have nothing to do with the merits of a particular public policy. Public policies do not have Capitols – separate peoples do.
It must be said, too, that one particular argument for gun control is particularly alarming. That argument was stated very succinctly by Nancy Pelosi years ago, and has continued to reverberate through the confrontation ever since. “No one needs a gun.” In one sense, this is a simple fact. No one, even a soldier or a police officer, will immediately drop dead without a gun. The problem with this argument, however, is that it sets the threshold for government intervention not at the limits set by the US Constitution, nor even by a standard of public safety, but at the bare threshold of need. It is equally true, for example, that no one needs a motorcycle. They are noisy, they are prone to accidents in which innocent people are sometimes killed, and they have social associations with lawlessness and antisocial behavior. Would we not be better, as a society, if we got rid of them? If we go very far with a standard of bare need, we can start throwing books into the fire as well. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in Rye has topped the reading list of an alarming number of killers – why not ban it as a precaution? No one needs to read it.
To return to my original scenario, it does seem likely that a total ban on firearms would reduce the frequency of mass killings like Sandy Hook in the short run. Typically, the people who shoot up schools and theaters are disturbed, isolated, middle class young men. They are not hardened criminals who would have access to guns smuggled over the border. They get them from gun stores or family members. Mass shootings per se could be expected to decline.
In the long run, I suspect that even this benefit would be fleeting. The killer who shot up the theater in Colorado last year also built a substantial collection of bombs, but didn’t use them. The Oklahoma City bomber did spectacular damage with a bomb, and the largest criminal massacre of American school children in history was the product of a bomb. It isn’t reasonable to think that whatever motivates mass murders would disappear with the elimination of firearms. Firearms are merely one means to an end. Bombs, too, are effectively immune to any sort of ban. The formulas for bomb making are widely disseminated. The component materials are so common and varied that they cannot be effectively regulated or monitored. Further, I have little doubt that in the wake of another serious bombing some enterprising filmmaker would make bombing “cool,” and some equally enterprising software company would make a video game on that theme. Grandpa’s favorite shotgun would be chopped up, but unless that is an end in itself very little would be accomplished.
Lesser measures, like limiting magazine capacity or banning guns that look especially scary to certain people, will, of course, be even less effective in reducing both types of crime than a total ban on firearms would. But then – stopping crime is really not the point. Welcome to the culture war.
Let’s imagine, for sake of argument, that the most extreme regulatory measures could be enacted into law – a full repeal of the 2nd Amendment and a Federal ban on the possession of any firearm by any private individual in America. In such a scenario, many law-abiding people would undoubtedly turn in their guns. Many other basically law-abiding people would not, and would thus become felons on principle. The percentage who would choose to disobey the law is impossible to estimate accurately, but unquestionably some firearms would be taken out of circulation and, presumably, would be destroyed.
The NRA has always put forward the argument that criminals would not turn in their guns. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption. If a person makes a living by illegal means, he is certainly not likely to meekly give up his pistol either because “it’s the right thing to do,” or because the possession of it is made a crime. Still, one might expect a certain gradual decline in gun crime, simply through attrition. Guns do get seized in arrests, they break, they get lost, ammunition gets consumed or goes bad through improper storage, etc. So, although gun crime would not stop immediately, it would have to dwindle away eventually – right?
For better or worse, I believe that answer, at least in America, is almost certainly “no.” Consider guns as a market commodity like any other. As long as there is a demand for a commodity that someone can profitably supply, that commodity will be supplied. For example, a great variety of narcotics and other drugs are illegal in the US, but decades of law enforcement efforts have failed to put an end to their use, or even come close to doing so. The same would be true of firearms. There is no reason to assume that a narcotrafficker with the means of smuggling cocaine and marijuana into the country in large quantities either could not or would not engage in gunrunning if such a market came into existence. Indeed, the customer base and distribution networks created for narcotics would serve narcotraffickers well for distributing illegal guns and ammunition. It is reasonable to assume that gunrunning would more than compensate for the attrition one would expect through breakage and confiscation. Criminals would not only ignore the law, but would have a fairly reliable source of illegal supply. Gun violence might decline slightly due to the inflation of prices resulting from a restricted market, but would probably still plateau at a high level. To the extent that criminals find guns desirable for their mystique alone, banning them would only make them more attractive by endowing them with more prestige.
The left believes that the Mexican drug cartels acquire their weapons at American gun shows. I doubt this happens often, but even if it does it is merely a supply of convenience. People with the resources to control whole regions of Mexico have the resources to import weapons from the international market. Likewise, evidence that gun crime has declined in England and Australia is inapplicable. Neither England nor Australia have the border issues that America does.
Another common argument against banning guns, the argument that an armed public is a deterrent to crime, is harder to prove. Armed citizens do successfully stop or prevent crimes occasionally, but the argument that this is statistically relevant is still the subject of some controversy. There is at least one credible study that shows that armed citizens reduce the rate of street crime (see John Lott, 2000). The argument has to work to some degree – being practically certain that a homeowner would not have a gun wouldn’t make a home invader less likely to break in. Statistics comparing the US with gun-free England do support this. You can play this argument off against the rate of gun accidents and other considerations, but, with regard to violent crime, being armed must give a person at least some advantage over being unarmed.
The final common argument against gun control – and against a ban on militarily useful firearms in particular – rests on the belief that the public itself should have the capacity to throw off tyranny, foreign or domestic, by force if necessary. This is an entirely different kind of argument – an argument for a specific kind of individual liberty, not an argument for more effective crime prevention. It is a romantic notion for some, and a terrifying one for others. A look at popular uprisings and insurgencies around the world, including those we have recently faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, shows that this is not a wholly unworkable idea. Still, professional military forces are formidable things, and only an extremely lucky private militia would survive a single battle against one. Whether one finds the idea of a violent revolution heroic or unspeakable, any honest look at history reveals all wars to be brutal, ugly, and indiscriminant. Revolutions are sometimes inevitable, but what follows them is usually worse than what preceded them. Ginning up a civil war is not something that should be taken lightly by anyone, but utterly stripping the people of the capacity to resist oppression should not be taken lightly either.
It is plain that the present furor over gun control has little to do with guns and even less to do with the unfortunate children who died in Sandy Hook. Neither side wants a repetition of that, but neither side has a viable solution. Politically, the Sandy Hook massacre is just the latest flash point in the conflict between liberal and conservative cultures. The liberal culture believes it is the role of government to protect us not only from imminent harm, but from the very possibility of harm – not only from each other, but from ourselves. Conservatives wish chiefly to be left alone, and chafe under the progressive erosion of individual freedoms. This division is at times quite explicit. During a speech announcing his state’s recent passage of particularly stringent gun laws, Governor Andrew Cuomo harangued his audience -- “This is New York, the Progressive Capitol! – You show them how we lead!” Statements like this have nothing to do with the merits of a particular public policy. Public policies do not have Capitols – separate peoples do.
It must be said, too, that one particular argument for gun control is particularly alarming. That argument was stated very succinctly by Nancy Pelosi years ago, and has continued to reverberate through the confrontation ever since. “No one needs a gun.” In one sense, this is a simple fact. No one, even a soldier or a police officer, will immediately drop dead without a gun. The problem with this argument, however, is that it sets the threshold for government intervention not at the limits set by the US Constitution, nor even by a standard of public safety, but at the bare threshold of need. It is equally true, for example, that no one needs a motorcycle. They are noisy, they are prone to accidents in which innocent people are sometimes killed, and they have social associations with lawlessness and antisocial behavior. Would we not be better, as a society, if we got rid of them? If we go very far with a standard of bare need, we can start throwing books into the fire as well. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in Rye has topped the reading list of an alarming number of killers – why not ban it as a precaution? No one needs to read it.
To return to my original scenario, it does seem likely that a total ban on firearms would reduce the frequency of mass killings like Sandy Hook in the short run. Typically, the people who shoot up schools and theaters are disturbed, isolated, middle class young men. They are not hardened criminals who would have access to guns smuggled over the border. They get them from gun stores or family members. Mass shootings per se could be expected to decline.
In the long run, I suspect that even this benefit would be fleeting. The killer who shot up the theater in Colorado last year also built a substantial collection of bombs, but didn’t use them. The Oklahoma City bomber did spectacular damage with a bomb, and the largest criminal massacre of American school children in history was the product of a bomb. It isn’t reasonable to think that whatever motivates mass murders would disappear with the elimination of firearms. Firearms are merely one means to an end. Bombs, too, are effectively immune to any sort of ban. The formulas for bomb making are widely disseminated. The component materials are so common and varied that they cannot be effectively regulated or monitored. Further, I have little doubt that in the wake of another serious bombing some enterprising filmmaker would make bombing “cool,” and some equally enterprising software company would make a video game on that theme. Grandpa’s favorite shotgun would be chopped up, but unless that is an end in itself very little would be accomplished.
Lesser measures, like limiting magazine capacity or banning guns that look especially scary to certain people, will, of course, be even less effective in reducing both types of crime than a total ban on firearms would. But then – stopping crime is really not the point. Welcome to the culture war.
January 2, 2013
Race and Culture
Race and culture are two ideas often tightly if unconsciously intertwined in contemporary political discourse. My purpose here is to untangle them.
Race, if it exists at all, is probably not a relevant determinant of anything important in and of itself. In other words, being white, black, Asian – or Jewish or Indian, if you care to parse those particular gradations – probably does not bequeath to an individual anything of much importance genetically. Blacks are prone to sickle-cell anemia, Jews to Tay-Sachs disease, and so forth – but I am aware of no one who has ever made a serious case for the superiority of one race over another based on disease resistance. Cases have been made for the intellectual superiority of one group or another on the basis of various tests (Herrnstein and Murray being only the most recent of many). None of these surveys, not surprisingly, have ever eliminated environmental considerations as a major factor in their results, or probably will ever do so. If you give two individuals intelligence tests and one of them is a university grad student while the other was until recently being raised by dogs, you will get entirely predictable results. Such comparisons, frankly, aren’t even very interesting.
Based on the accomplishments of a few gifted individuals of all races, it is evident that no human group is genetically incapable of high achievement in the mental realm. My intuition is that looking for decisive differences between the races is likely to be not only an offensive pursuit, but also a fruitless one. I believe people should be free to pursue offensive and fruitless questions, but I don’t expect anything interesting to come of that one. My further intuition is that if you could devise a perfect test for intelligence that excluded all environmental factors (first assuming you could decide what “intelligence” even is) you would indeed find that the average intelligence scores of the various human genetic groups would not be identical. Biology doesn’t have equality as a goal, so no doubt if there were some absolute standard of intelligence we would not discover perfect symmetry empirically. However, I believe the variance between groups would be insignificant compared to the variance between individuals within groups. Every group has geniuses; every group has imbeciles. We know that with reasonable certainty.
What I have said above about intelligence I believe to be true of other “mental” attributes – creativity, memory, intuition, etc. – as well. No doubt you could tease out the occasional subtle difference due to long term environmental effects on genetics, but I believe these would be minor. In short, I have no reason to believe that the phenotypical characteristics of race are anything more than superficial. It is important to understand this before we continue.
Culture, obviously, is a different kind of entity. I use the term “culture” in a broad sense, to mean the set of values and beliefs one gets from identification with a particular group. I make no distinction between the terms “culture” and “subculture.” Religions, in my view, are also chiefly cultural entities. While they entail certain kinds of beliefs about the nature of reality, possession of such beliefs help to define an individual culturally. By “culture” I mean that part of us which was shaped by environment rather than by genes, but which is not the product or our uniquely individual experience. If you hate cats because a cat scratched you as a child, that is not a feature of your culture. If you hate cats because everyone you know hates cats, that’s a feature of your culture.
Apart from the gene-environment distinction (or nature-nurture, if you prefer) it should also be obvious that race and culture differ in another important way. To say that one race is superior to another in some non-superficial sense is doubtful, suspect, and probably impossible to prove. To say that one culture is superior to another by some particular specified criteria is, on the other hand, a reasonable claim. There may be no absolute standard of cultural superiority, but it is accurate to say that given any single criteria for achievement, some cultures meet that standard better than others. If this sounds bigoted, consider that Nazism meets my definition of a culture. Any flaccid notion that everyone’s beliefs are good, equal, and compatible has to either embrace Nazism, or artificially exclude it from the cultural sphere.
The question of whether one culture is perceived as superior to another is, in most cases, a question of values. Since the values one has are largely a question of the culture one is a part of, the matter of cultural superiority is also largely circular. If what is most important to you is some belief that only members of your culture hold, then your culture is superior to all others by definition. Cultures are self-perpetuating, self-protecting sets of ideas – memes, if you like Richard Dawkins’ word.1
Very few people look at cultures as abstract entities with particular strengths and weakness. Rather, most of us view other cultures through the lens of our own. If we could achieve an entirely detached perspective, we could see that certain patterns of beliefs and behaviors produce certain outcomes, and that cultures, stripped of our prejudices for or against them, participate like any other entity in the causal universe. Nazism, for example, was an evolutionary dead end – not because it was nasty (many cultures are nasty) but because it brought about its own rapid demise. Conversely, the culture of the Kalahari Bushmen, as appealing or as unappealing as it might be to us, must be given credit for its longevity. Still, if what some Nazis wanted was a Wagnerian opera with a dramatic ending, then their culture was a complete success while the culture of the Bushmen remains a boring failure. Causation is neutral; it offers neither awards nor censures – only outcomes.
The interplay between cultures is a complex thing, but some insight may be had by an analogy. Imagine a culture as an individual, and the interplay of different cultures around the globe as a kind of community. It is easy to understand that individuals have different abilities and different ways of living, that they have various attachments to one another as well as various grievances. It is understandable that individuals compete over the same resources; that they sometimes cooperate and sometimes settle their differences less amiably through force or coercion. Some individuals are relatively productive and independent. Others, for any number of reasons, are wholly or largely dependent on the productivity of others. This far, at least, the analogy between individuals and cultures holds good. To use a relatively non-controversial example, if one considers the American entertainment industry as a kind of subculture it can be seen to exhibit characteristics as outline above.2 It makes a living amusing others – there are no farms or manufacturing plants in Hollywood. It sometimes cooperates with other subcultures by championing their causes. It sometimes attacks other subcultures by demonizing them. During the Second World War, it championed American values we would now consider conservative and it demonized the Japanese. Currently, it champions the left and demonizes conservatives. It gets along very happily with commerce. It buckled under pressure to McCarthyism in the 1950s. Like Congress, the banking industry, and the Catholic Church, is has its own internal customs and traditions, its own brand of self identity, but it could not exist without some other more pedestrian culture to feed and clothe it. A country populated solely by actors, directors, publicists and producers would obviously be unsustainable.
In the contest of cultures currently underway in the United States, and perhaps in Western Europe as well, accusations of racism are frequent. While genuine racism still exists, both among conservatives and liberals, most such accusations are misplaced. True racism entails what we were discussing earlier – a belief that the genetics that make you look a certain way also make you behave a certain way. The Nazis were true racists, as were the many Americans who believed, during the Second World War, that every last Japanese on the planet should be killed, regardless of their upbringing or their citizenship. The Klu Klux Klan is a truly racist organization, as is Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. Most of what is called racism now, however, is something rather different – a conflict between cultures.
The United States of America is, frankly, an oxymoron. While we are bound together by a thin web of pseudo-communication technologies (like Facebook) and a massive media-driven outpouring of clichés that have taken the place of tradition, we are divided by politics, religion, outlook, values and many other distinctions – most of them more important than race. Race, which used to be a major delineator in and of itself, has, I think, become chiefly relevant as an indicator of a person’s probable membership in a certain culture. Not many people judge a person’s race per se, but rather they judge the culture that most members of the person’s race bear allegiance too. Race, then, has become like any other visible characteristic.
If one sees a large white man in black leather with tattoos and a beard, it is not bigoted to assume he probably rides a motorcycle. He may not, and some motorcycle riders do not fit such a description, but the correlation is close enough that a reasonable person will make the connection. And so it is with race. I have, for example, met uneducated, unsuccessful Jews – but they are few and far between. I tend to assume, on meeting someone Jewish, that I’m meeting a fairly successful, fairly educated person and I treat them accordingly until proven wrong. I don’t assume they came out of the womb with a diploma and well-paying job; I assume they are a member of a culture which values education and material success. Everyone is prejudiced in at least this sense. When we see another human being, we do not see a gray, genderless, raceless object in nondescript clothing. Rather, we see a collection of clues about who and what they are. It is a virtue to be open-minded enough to overrule our initial impressions in light of new information, but it is neither virtuous nor possible not to have initial impressions. It is good to learn not to discriminate in the face of contrary evidence – but it would be absurd never to discriminate on any basis at all.
Very very few of the conservatives that I know are racists. Rather, they are partisans of a particular culture – a culture that most of them are delighted to see minorities participate in. They are not racists – they are just not multiculturalists. While this was obviously not the case in the 1950s, it is the case now. Many in the Tea Party loved Herman Cain, not because they wished to conceal some dark inner racism by pretending to embrace a black man, but because he was one of them – a genuine embodiment of their values. They do not feel compelled, however, to pretend to love the hip-hop culture, which has nothing constructive to offer. They do not hate Mexicans – they hate illegals. Many liberals, on the other hand, are so afraid of seeming racist that they will attempt to throw their arms around any cultural views at all, no matter how restrictive or bigoted, so long as they were not originated by conservative white people. At some point during my lifetime, the tables turned.
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1 Cultures are also quite amorphous things. One’s association with a certain culture is not always cleanly definable. I, for example, find myself roughly on the conservative side of most issues. However, I wasn’t born into a conservative family, and I hold a number of positions most conservatives would disagree with. I do not believe in God, I am not blindly pro-military, etc. Even people born into cultures can have certain non-conforming beliefs, and any discussion of cultures in the abstract tends to ignore this. In some sense, cultures are only discussible as stereotypes – and I don’t claim any special exemption from this difficulty.
2 I want to make it clear that I am not asserting that every occupation or every industry is a culture. There is a certain critical mass of common rituals, beliefs, and institutions that are required to make a group of human beings cohesive. I doubt there is a culture of optometrists. While one finds a certain commonality among police officers, there is no police culture at a national level because they lack any organizational institution at that level. The American entertainment industry, on the other hand, is bound together by a limited number of studios, networks, and common unions. Individual police departments can have cultures in a small but relevant sense, but lacking national institutions their cultures end at the city limits. The cultures of corporations are similar in the sense that they tend to dissolve at the end of the work day.
Race, if it exists at all, is probably not a relevant determinant of anything important in and of itself. In other words, being white, black, Asian – or Jewish or Indian, if you care to parse those particular gradations – probably does not bequeath to an individual anything of much importance genetically. Blacks are prone to sickle-cell anemia, Jews to Tay-Sachs disease, and so forth – but I am aware of no one who has ever made a serious case for the superiority of one race over another based on disease resistance. Cases have been made for the intellectual superiority of one group or another on the basis of various tests (Herrnstein and Murray being only the most recent of many). None of these surveys, not surprisingly, have ever eliminated environmental considerations as a major factor in their results, or probably will ever do so. If you give two individuals intelligence tests and one of them is a university grad student while the other was until recently being raised by dogs, you will get entirely predictable results. Such comparisons, frankly, aren’t even very interesting.
Based on the accomplishments of a few gifted individuals of all races, it is evident that no human group is genetically incapable of high achievement in the mental realm. My intuition is that looking for decisive differences between the races is likely to be not only an offensive pursuit, but also a fruitless one. I believe people should be free to pursue offensive and fruitless questions, but I don’t expect anything interesting to come of that one. My further intuition is that if you could devise a perfect test for intelligence that excluded all environmental factors (first assuming you could decide what “intelligence” even is) you would indeed find that the average intelligence scores of the various human genetic groups would not be identical. Biology doesn’t have equality as a goal, so no doubt if there were some absolute standard of intelligence we would not discover perfect symmetry empirically. However, I believe the variance between groups would be insignificant compared to the variance between individuals within groups. Every group has geniuses; every group has imbeciles. We know that with reasonable certainty.
What I have said above about intelligence I believe to be true of other “mental” attributes – creativity, memory, intuition, etc. – as well. No doubt you could tease out the occasional subtle difference due to long term environmental effects on genetics, but I believe these would be minor. In short, I have no reason to believe that the phenotypical characteristics of race are anything more than superficial. It is important to understand this before we continue.
Culture, obviously, is a different kind of entity. I use the term “culture” in a broad sense, to mean the set of values and beliefs one gets from identification with a particular group. I make no distinction between the terms “culture” and “subculture.” Religions, in my view, are also chiefly cultural entities. While they entail certain kinds of beliefs about the nature of reality, possession of such beliefs help to define an individual culturally. By “culture” I mean that part of us which was shaped by environment rather than by genes, but which is not the product or our uniquely individual experience. If you hate cats because a cat scratched you as a child, that is not a feature of your culture. If you hate cats because everyone you know hates cats, that’s a feature of your culture.
Apart from the gene-environment distinction (or nature-nurture, if you prefer) it should also be obvious that race and culture differ in another important way. To say that one race is superior to another in some non-superficial sense is doubtful, suspect, and probably impossible to prove. To say that one culture is superior to another by some particular specified criteria is, on the other hand, a reasonable claim. There may be no absolute standard of cultural superiority, but it is accurate to say that given any single criteria for achievement, some cultures meet that standard better than others. If this sounds bigoted, consider that Nazism meets my definition of a culture. Any flaccid notion that everyone’s beliefs are good, equal, and compatible has to either embrace Nazism, or artificially exclude it from the cultural sphere.
The question of whether one culture is perceived as superior to another is, in most cases, a question of values. Since the values one has are largely a question of the culture one is a part of, the matter of cultural superiority is also largely circular. If what is most important to you is some belief that only members of your culture hold, then your culture is superior to all others by definition. Cultures are self-perpetuating, self-protecting sets of ideas – memes, if you like Richard Dawkins’ word.1
Very few people look at cultures as abstract entities with particular strengths and weakness. Rather, most of us view other cultures through the lens of our own. If we could achieve an entirely detached perspective, we could see that certain patterns of beliefs and behaviors produce certain outcomes, and that cultures, stripped of our prejudices for or against them, participate like any other entity in the causal universe. Nazism, for example, was an evolutionary dead end – not because it was nasty (many cultures are nasty) but because it brought about its own rapid demise. Conversely, the culture of the Kalahari Bushmen, as appealing or as unappealing as it might be to us, must be given credit for its longevity. Still, if what some Nazis wanted was a Wagnerian opera with a dramatic ending, then their culture was a complete success while the culture of the Bushmen remains a boring failure. Causation is neutral; it offers neither awards nor censures – only outcomes.
The interplay between cultures is a complex thing, but some insight may be had by an analogy. Imagine a culture as an individual, and the interplay of different cultures around the globe as a kind of community. It is easy to understand that individuals have different abilities and different ways of living, that they have various attachments to one another as well as various grievances. It is understandable that individuals compete over the same resources; that they sometimes cooperate and sometimes settle their differences less amiably through force or coercion. Some individuals are relatively productive and independent. Others, for any number of reasons, are wholly or largely dependent on the productivity of others. This far, at least, the analogy between individuals and cultures holds good. To use a relatively non-controversial example, if one considers the American entertainment industry as a kind of subculture it can be seen to exhibit characteristics as outline above.2 It makes a living amusing others – there are no farms or manufacturing plants in Hollywood. It sometimes cooperates with other subcultures by championing their causes. It sometimes attacks other subcultures by demonizing them. During the Second World War, it championed American values we would now consider conservative and it demonized the Japanese. Currently, it champions the left and demonizes conservatives. It gets along very happily with commerce. It buckled under pressure to McCarthyism in the 1950s. Like Congress, the banking industry, and the Catholic Church, is has its own internal customs and traditions, its own brand of self identity, but it could not exist without some other more pedestrian culture to feed and clothe it. A country populated solely by actors, directors, publicists and producers would obviously be unsustainable.
In the contest of cultures currently underway in the United States, and perhaps in Western Europe as well, accusations of racism are frequent. While genuine racism still exists, both among conservatives and liberals, most such accusations are misplaced. True racism entails what we were discussing earlier – a belief that the genetics that make you look a certain way also make you behave a certain way. The Nazis were true racists, as were the many Americans who believed, during the Second World War, that every last Japanese on the planet should be killed, regardless of their upbringing or their citizenship. The Klu Klux Klan is a truly racist organization, as is Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. Most of what is called racism now, however, is something rather different – a conflict between cultures.
The United States of America is, frankly, an oxymoron. While we are bound together by a thin web of pseudo-communication technologies (like Facebook) and a massive media-driven outpouring of clichés that have taken the place of tradition, we are divided by politics, religion, outlook, values and many other distinctions – most of them more important than race. Race, which used to be a major delineator in and of itself, has, I think, become chiefly relevant as an indicator of a person’s probable membership in a certain culture. Not many people judge a person’s race per se, but rather they judge the culture that most members of the person’s race bear allegiance too. Race, then, has become like any other visible characteristic.
If one sees a large white man in black leather with tattoos and a beard, it is not bigoted to assume he probably rides a motorcycle. He may not, and some motorcycle riders do not fit such a description, but the correlation is close enough that a reasonable person will make the connection. And so it is with race. I have, for example, met uneducated, unsuccessful Jews – but they are few and far between. I tend to assume, on meeting someone Jewish, that I’m meeting a fairly successful, fairly educated person and I treat them accordingly until proven wrong. I don’t assume they came out of the womb with a diploma and well-paying job; I assume they are a member of a culture which values education and material success. Everyone is prejudiced in at least this sense. When we see another human being, we do not see a gray, genderless, raceless object in nondescript clothing. Rather, we see a collection of clues about who and what they are. It is a virtue to be open-minded enough to overrule our initial impressions in light of new information, but it is neither virtuous nor possible not to have initial impressions. It is good to learn not to discriminate in the face of contrary evidence – but it would be absurd never to discriminate on any basis at all.
Very very few of the conservatives that I know are racists. Rather, they are partisans of a particular culture – a culture that most of them are delighted to see minorities participate in. They are not racists – they are just not multiculturalists. While this was obviously not the case in the 1950s, it is the case now. Many in the Tea Party loved Herman Cain, not because they wished to conceal some dark inner racism by pretending to embrace a black man, but because he was one of them – a genuine embodiment of their values. They do not feel compelled, however, to pretend to love the hip-hop culture, which has nothing constructive to offer. They do not hate Mexicans – they hate illegals. Many liberals, on the other hand, are so afraid of seeming racist that they will attempt to throw their arms around any cultural views at all, no matter how restrictive or bigoted, so long as they were not originated by conservative white people. At some point during my lifetime, the tables turned.
-------------------------------------------------------
1 Cultures are also quite amorphous things. One’s association with a certain culture is not always cleanly definable. I, for example, find myself roughly on the conservative side of most issues. However, I wasn’t born into a conservative family, and I hold a number of positions most conservatives would disagree with. I do not believe in God, I am not blindly pro-military, etc. Even people born into cultures can have certain non-conforming beliefs, and any discussion of cultures in the abstract tends to ignore this. In some sense, cultures are only discussible as stereotypes – and I don’t claim any special exemption from this difficulty.
2 I want to make it clear that I am not asserting that every occupation or every industry is a culture. There is a certain critical mass of common rituals, beliefs, and institutions that are required to make a group of human beings cohesive. I doubt there is a culture of optometrists. While one finds a certain commonality among police officers, there is no police culture at a national level because they lack any organizational institution at that level. The American entertainment industry, on the other hand, is bound together by a limited number of studios, networks, and common unions. Individual police departments can have cultures in a small but relevant sense, but lacking national institutions their cultures end at the city limits. The cultures of corporations are similar in the sense that they tend to dissolve at the end of the work day.
December 5, 2012
Fairness and the nature of government
An ongoing debate between M.Planck and myself:
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MCP:
I think fairness is a human concern; it does not occur naturally (and thus government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness). One of the problems I have with the libertarian perspective is that it assumes that fairness does occur naturally, that the natural outcome is the definition of fair. I don't believe this position can withstand scrutiny (although it can pass a casual examination, which accounts for why there are so many proto-libertarians about).
At a similar level, I define justice as fairness; to me, the two concepts are largely indistinguishable. A fair act is a just one, and vice versa.
Is there anything here you disagree with?
EMC:
Indeed there is, but let’s begin with what is not so much a disagreement as a problem. What is fairness? We cannot really debate the applicability, characteristics, or even the coherence of a concept without at least a rough-and-ready definition. It is interesting but not really sufficient to just say that justice and fairness are synonymous.
If one resorts to the relevant Oxford definition, one sees:
Fair 1.
treating people equally without favouritism or discrimination:
the group has achieved fair and equal representation for all its members
a fairer distribution of wealth
Just or appropriate in the circumstances:
to be fair, this subject poses special problems
it’s not fair to take it out on her
Is this a sufficient definition for our discussion or would you like to propose a different one that better captures your intent?
MCP:
This definition is close, if one understands that favoritism includes favoring one's self.
I use fairness in the Rawlsian sense. John Rawls describes the Original Position: you have to decide on the outcome of a dispute before you know which party of the dispute you belong to. Imagine being asked to allocate starting resources to team Red and team Blue before you know which team you will be playing on.
This imaginary exercise is how humans determine fairness. While it can be difficult to pretend to be blind to one's own identity, it is not impossible; indeed, the ability to do so is what defines us as social beings. "Theory of Mind" is the ability to imagine being someone else, and everyone but autistics has it (sociopaths have it too; they can imagine acting or thinking like someone else, they just can't feel like someone else).
So all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement (of rules, resources, etc.) is fair, in the sense that they would be equally happy accepting any portion of that arrangement. A formal definition is useful, but only while keeping in mind that determining fairness is a semantic process, like language, rather than a syntactical operation, like math. As is sometimes claimed of art, you know it when you see it.
Of course, people have to look out for their own best interests; but that is a statement about actions, not about metaphysical determinations. It just so happens that fairness generally favors our best interests (but of course, this is not a surprise, since we evolved our ability to determine fairness precisely because such an ability favored our best interests!)
EMC:
Thank you for providing us with a working definition. While I don’t want to get mired down in a debate about the merits of the definition itself, I will observe that the definition on offer is essentially Kant’s categorical imperative with the word “moral” scratched out and the word “fair” penciled in. (It is apparently a valid philosophical project to find new and elaborate ways of restating the golden rule periodically -- but that is definitely a digression.) Let us now return to the original topic.
You stated in your first set of assertions:
“I think fairness is a human concern; it does not occur naturally (and thus government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness).”
Then, in the elaboration of your chosen definition, you stated:
“…So all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement (of rules, resources, etc.) is fair…”
This is contradictory on its face. If all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement is fair, then fairness occurs in nature. What else could “innately” mean? It may be that fairness is not applied uniformly or necessarily, but you cannot hold the second position without negating the first.
One possible difference between our views is that I believe that the very categories of a natural realm and a human realm cause a great deal of mischief. Humans are a part of nature and thus everything we do is natural. What one achieves by making the distinction is little more than a sort of vestigial Cartesian dualism, where the world is one thing, and our mental activity quite another. My position, to apply this idea to the present topic, is that government itself is just another process that arises spontaneously from a certain kind of organism under certain circumstances. We perceive governmental organization and policies as the products of conscious planning, but it is self evident that much of what happens as the result of such organization and policies is unintended and surprising.
Your view that “government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness” is wholeheartedly normative rather than descriptive. It is what you want government to be, rather than what government actually is. Even the most cursory look at history will show that governments are not fair by necessity. Indeed, by almost any definition of fairness most governments are unfair. From a purely descriptive perspective, government is best viewed as that institution within a society which maintains its internal and external stability through a relative monopoly on the application of force. While governments can do many other things as well, they must all preserve themselves and a substantial fraction of the population over which they are sovereign. Those that fail at this task cease to exist. While fairness may be a very laudable thing, plenty of states have prospered without making it a central theme.
MCP:
Doh.
“This is contradictory on its face. If all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement is fair, then fairness occurs in nature. What else could “innately” mean? It may be that fairness is not applied uniformly or necessarily, but you cannot hold the second position without negating the first.”
I don't understand this objection. It's like warmth; humans innately understand what warmth means, they require it at some level for survival and at another level for comfortable survival; occasionally the natural world provides the right amount of warmth; but it is not much of an exaggeration to say that human technology exists to provide warmth when nature fails to do so. In exactly the same way, fairness is a state of being that humans generally have to provide for themselves.
The ability to comprehend warmth (i.e. the difference between too much heat and too little) does not guarantee the existence of warmth; imagining ideal states of existence, and then working to create them, is what human beings do. The pursuit of warmth and the pursuit of fairness look very much alike; as we get better at the technology, we succeed at producing it more reliably.
“One possible difference between our views is that I believe that the very categories of a natural realm and a human realm cause a great deal of mischief. Humans are a part of nature and thus everything we do is natural.”
This cannot be a source of difference, as I reject the notion of non-naturalism even more resolutely than most philosophers (even to the point of asserting that ideas do not exist unless they are instantiated by physical matter, such as neuronal arrangements).
“My position, to apply this idea to the present topic, is that government itself is just another process that arises spontaneously from a certain kind of organism under certain circumstances. We perceive governmental organization and policies as the products of conscious planning, but it is self evident that much of what happens as the result of such organization and policies is unintended and surprising.”
Yes; in fact, the same is true of human activity at every level, right down to making dinner. You've just described how the brain works to create personality.
“Your view that ‘government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness’ is wholeheartedly normative rather than descriptive. It is what you want government to be, rather than what government actually is.”
It's like saying "fire-making is best viewed as a human institution designed to create warmth." It's what we want from fire-making; it's why we invented it; the fact that it occasionally fails, falls short, or does something else does not really detract from the essential definition.
When something is an artificial construct - that is, a part of the self-feedback loop between observed reality and the model of reality humans create in their head - I think a normative description is appropriate. Government does not exist "in nature;" that is to say, like fire-making, it is an activity that relies on uniquely human mental constructs. (Even this is a simplification; it could be argued that some animals form limited governments, just as some animals make and use simple tools. But for general discourse the distinction between artificial and natural basically means people vs. everything else). (This also differentiates between government and eusocial arrangements; chimps might have a form of government; ants do not.)
"Even the most cursory look at history will show that governments are not fair by necessity. Indeed, by almost any definition of fairness most governments are unfair."
Now we come to a legitimate difference: you assert that governments are not fair by necessity, and I completely disagree. They are fair by necessity; they exist solely to create that fairness. So, how can I square this assertion with the plainly observable facts of history?To deal with the lesser point first: by an exacting definition of warmth, most people are not. The vast bulk of the planet is either too cold or too hot much of the time. But no one would deny that warmth is necessary and that fire-making serves a crucial function in the production of warmth; nor would anyone deny that we are markedly better at making warmth than we used to be. In the same way, governments have become generally more fair. The fact that none of them are ideally fair is no more significant than the fact that few households are ideally warm.
As for necessity: the entire point of government is to produce fairness between parties. When every agent operates off of pure, immediate strength, you have anarchy, which is an inherently unstable state. Eventually the most powerful agents reach some kind of agreement, which includes allocating resources, adjudicating disputes, and punishing transgressors of the agreement. Viola - government! And a government of fairness, insomuch as the various parties to the agreement have entered into it voluntarily, viewing it as the best possible arrangement for a future in which they are not certain which role they will play. Of course, they fully expect to still possess the powers of an agent; but they may not be of the same strength they are now, or allied with the same factions, etc. So they want an arrangement that preserves their position even in the face of minor changes.
When mobsters get together to settle a turf war, they talk about strength; but they also talk about fairness. Merely being the strongest mobster is not enough to convince the others to allow you open license; after all, if they combined, they would form a stronger force. However, they prefer not to combine as it would diminish each of them. So the discussion is not purely about numbers of gunmen; it is about an arrangement that allows for some flexibility but not too much. And if you watch these discussions as a fly on the wall, you will see fairness repeatedly introduced as a deciding principal in disputes between equals.
The reason you perceive government as so wildly unfair is because you are measuring government as a tool for creating fairness for people. This is not what it does; it creates fairness for agents, i.e. the active participants of the government.
However, the story of democracy has been the story of the ever-expanding franchise, including more and more groups as agents in the political process. And this form of government has repeatedly won in real-world struggles against smaller franchises (though not necessarily smaller societies).
So, given the history of broad-based franchises defeating narrow-based ones (Lincoln freeing the slaves to raise manpower for defeating the South, for example), it is not unreasonable to conclude that governments have all the fairness necessary to their survival; and that this creates a feedback loop that leads to expanding quantities of fairness. Plenty of states prospered with limited fairness, but only until they were faced with competition from more fair states.
And biologically speaking, humans are basically equal. Thus the broadest possible franchise is political equality for everyone. This is why we are not doomed to a future of tyranny; all forms of government are not equal, high levels of fairness make stronger societies which defeat weaker societies, thus raising the average level of fairness. It's like a technological arms race, because it is.
EMC:
Fairness is not like warmth. Warmth is ultimately reducible to neat, reasonably precise, physical terms. We can say a human being will be comfortable within a certain range of temperatures and can survive within a somewhat greater range, making allowances for individual differences on the margins. Fairness is a moral rather than a physical entity. It is physical in the important sense that it requires the existence of a relationship between at least two physical beings to exist, but it is non-physical in the sense that you cannot build a fairness meter out of hardware or build a machine to fission fairness into smaller parts. (I believe that this is also the difference between ideas and technologies, but I don’t want to digress into a side debate over that issue.)
By your definition, fairness quite subjective. Having helped yourself to the “you know it when you see it” caveat, you can hardly deny this. I will not disagree. Consider the example of affirmative action. If one believes that affirmative action is fair, then one believes that one’s membership in a certain historically disadvantaged group merits a countervailing dispensation on, for example, civil service exams. If one believes that affirmative action is unfair, then one believes that civil service exams should be blind to the matter of group affiliation. Both of these positions are fair in the Rawlsian sense you outlined earlier – a hypothetical individual might hold either as an acceptable universal law – but the two positions are quite incompatible. If we argue about whether 72 or 68°F is the ideal temperature, we are at least arguing about the same ontological stuff, whereas in the affirmative action example we are not.
Even putting this objection aside, following your analogy back to your original statements would imply you meant the following:
Although human beings are innately capable of assessing whether or not a situation is fair, they are incapable of acting fairly as individuals.
If they could act fairly as individuals, then, again, fairness would exist in nature. The only way I can see out of this trap is to make the definitional claim that fairness can only exist at some social level above the individual. You might want to go there, but it was not a part of your proposed definition. But let’s move on.
Your position that government is fair by necessity rests on an assumption that the resolution of a conflict by any means other than the direct application of force is an instance of fairness. This is a false assumption. Among human beings, as among most animals, the actual application of force among near equals is relatively rare. An even fight is a dangerous thing for both players. Rather, barring desperate conditions or psychotic participants, conflicts are usually settled with accommodations taking relative power onto consideration, but not relying on overt force. The stronger prevail, generally, but not at an intolerable cost to the weaker. Nothing in this process requires fairness.
Consider your negotiating mobsters. If their accommodations were based on fairness as you originally defined it, any subsequent fluctuations in one’s ability to apply force would be irrelevant. Motivated by fairness, a newly dominant mobster would not exploit a temporarily weaker one. They would behave as good Kantian moral agents, at least toward one another. If, on the other hand, their accommodations were based merely on immediate relative capacities, they would renegotiate in response to changing conditions, or possibly even resort to force if they could do so without risk. In the real word, the latter is the norm rather than the exception. Treaties are broken, small states abused, weaker parties exploited, etc. – not always and necessarily, but with unsurprising regularity. That which looks like fairness is, as often as not, nothing more than a temporary balance of opposing strengths. It is not only possible, but common, to construct elaborate institutions, including governments, on exactly such a basis.
You go on:
“The reason you perceive government as so wildly unfair is because you are measuring government as a tool for creating fairness for people. This is not what it does; it creates fairness for agents, i.e. the active participants of the government.”
This makes hash of your already weak definition. If you can be fair -- just not to politically inconsequential people – then the Nazis were fair and slavery was fair. I understand the distinction you are making sociologically (and have pointed it out myself in other contexts) but linking this sense of fairness with your earlier definition is incoherent. What sense does it make to say: “…you have to decide on the outcome of a dispute before you know which party of the dispute you belong to” – except that you know you won’t be among the weakest parties? Stripped of the concept of a universal law, the categorical imperative is not worth uttering.
Finally, we have your hypotheses of the self-expanding franchise and the primacy of democratic states. For the latter proposition I could offer numerous counter examples, as well as arguments showing why the picture is not that simple, but suffice to say for now that I interpret history differently. We can return to this latter if you wish. On the matter of the self-expanding franchise I also disagree in several ways, but will limit myself, for now, to the most obvious.
Meaningful democratic participation is not simple matter of having the right to vote. It is not a matter of flipping a switch, like the democracy technology in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. Rather, meaningful democratic participation requires a polity which is both educated enough to understand what they are voting for and engaged enough to take the process seriously. Voting for candidate X because he is the coolest or because you feel in your heart that he loves you more than candidate Y is not meaningful participation in government -- it’s a testimony to the power of advertising. Read a few pages of the Lincoln-Douglas debate or de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America then watch a few minutes of campaign commercials or a modern presidential “debate” and you will see just how stark the contrast is. While we (speaking here specifically of the US) have expanded the franchise considerably in the last 150 years, the political consciousness of the electorate has degenerated along with the rest of the culture. Whether one approves of democracy as a system of government or not, one must surely concede that it is only meaningful if the electorate is politically conscious, not only of their own interests but also of the basic requirements of the system itself. When people begin to feel that their own interests are best served by signing their liberties away to smarter people they neither know nor influence, the breadth of the franchise becomes a rather pathetic joke.
MCP:
Hmm. I did not expect so much difficulty in establishing such a basic premise; that is, that fairness exists, is obtainable, desirable, and the basis for good government.
Perhaps language is a better metaphor than warmth: Fairness exists in nature in exactly the same sense that language does; that is, it is a biologically driven behavior that assists human survival. Like language, it is innate, universal, and something we've gotten better at over time. Language is experienced subjectively, but it also has an objective component: not any collection of sounds constitutes a language.
Of course the mobsters are unfair to the rubes and marks; their Rawlsian decisions are made by deciding disputes between mobsters; i.e. essentially equal parties. Farmers can construct fair agreements without concerning themselves about the rights of the cows. Fairness was a huge concern for slave owners - as evidenced by the lawsuits they brought against each other. They just didn't extend political franchise (and hence fairness) to the slaves. They did not consider them worthy of political franchise.
The freedom we enjoy today is a direct result of extending the political franchise to wider circles. Our democracy is better educated and more responsive than any that has gone before it; the Athenian farmers were no wiser than our country bumpkins, and the Athenian polity was as addicted to cheap theater as ours. But literacy, mathematics, basic science, are all more widely disseminated today than ever before. And most important, the idea that all humans are essentially equal - that women are as deserving of fairness as men, for instance - is more widespread than ever in history. This leads to governments that consider all of their subjects to be citizens, not just some of them. (Hence my claim that freedom is impossible without equality.)
It is true that there is no perfect fairness, and that the amount of fairness in the world ebbs and flows. Nonetheless, it is a simple matter to determine that more people are treated more fairly now than the century before (the mere matter of women's emancipation settles the issue instantly, as it concerns 50% of the human population), and that this statement is true almost no matter what century of recorded history you live in.
To view every human interaction as merely a contest of strength is to fundamentally misread human nature. Humans voluntarily limit the exercise of their power out of a consideration for unknown futures, the value of reputation, and an innate sense of moral duty. This is what makes us social animals, and not solitary predators. Nietzsche wrote morality for tigers, not humans; he was a fantasist more than a philosopher. The mere act of making the kind of calculations of strength you describe is itself sub-optimal, insomuch as it is a vast expenditure of energy for the chance to make a fatal miscalculation. People don't do that; instead, they operate off of heuristic principles that make broad assumptions and cover a wide variety of general cases. I.e., fairness.
EMC:
I can see that some clarifications are in order. To begin with, I am not disputing the existence of a Rawlsian sense of fairness, nor am I disputing that real human beings can, and sometimes do, act in conscious accordance with that principle. What I am disputing is the assertion that government is Rawlsian by necessity – or, frankly, that it is even Rawlsian typically. I am also disputing that fairness itself is a sufficiently stable and robust concept to survive serious scrutiny.
Let me address the latter first. My position is that there really is no workable objective standard of fairness, and that the Rawlsian formulation, like the golden rule and categorical imperative before it, ultimately yields little more than a projection of the cultural values of the individual implementing the rule.
Consider a 17th century witch burning. If we accept that the beliefs and intentions of the officials who conducted such executions were as they themselves stated, they were being entirely fair by Rawlsian standards. They believed that the witch’s soul might saved in the course of this horrible process, and would not have granted themselves any special exemption from it. There were, in fact, several cases in which judges who had condemned witches to the flames were themselves burned for witchcraft. Are we prepared to say that deliberately burning a person alive might be fair under certain circumstances? More, it would be incorrect to assume witch burning is merely an odd exception to our rule – a special case of ignorant religious fanaticism. The Soviets of the late 20th century and, I believe, the Chinese of today have both been prepared to treat political dissent as a form of mental illness in some instances, treatable with heavy medication and behavioral therapy. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was also treated with drugs and behavioral therapy – not in a totalitarian state, but in the U.S. I have no reason to believe that the majority of the people who were carried out such treatments were not being Rawlsian fair – which is to say, that they believed that they were subjecting others to treatments that they themselves would have been reasonably liable to under the same circumstances. One always assumes one’s own values are correct, thus, in a Rawlsian sense, it is always fair to compel another to adhere to them for his or her own good.
My other claim – that governments are not fair by necessity – would hardly seem to need proof. Still, since you have specified that by fair in the context of government you only mean fair within the sphere of government’s own agents, not fairness toward the governed, perhaps we do need a few additional comments to cover this very attenuated sense of fairness.
I believe it self-evident to any American, whichever side of the political divide he or she happens to be on, that the present Congress is not driven chiefly by considerations of mutual fairness. Fairness may be expressed in the actions of individual members in individuals instances, but the dominant theme in Congress is now, and historically usually has been, one of struggle between opposing forces. A power struggle, mediated by law and custom but not by moral sentiment. To call this ongoing wrangling over power an instance of fairness is like calling a hurricane an expression of God’s love. If you actually see it that way, we do indeed have a difference.
It is also evident that we draw very different lessons from history, and that dispute would probably be endless. I am not disagreeing that universal suffrage is a fine achievement, but I am disputing that it trumps all other considerations. The Soviets had as broad a suffrage as we do. Virtually every adult in the Soviet Union had the right to vote -- for or against the party’s proposed head of state. Perhaps for regional leaders to, though I am less sure of this. However, I would not call what actually happened in the Soviet Union meaningful participation in government. There is a difference between involvement in government in a real sense and in a ritual sense, and there is a continuum of possibilities between the two extremes.
You said:
“…the Athenian farmers were no wiser than our country bumpkins…”
Having lived and worked in a rural area for many years I find this particular offhand prejudice noxious and unjustified. You could hardly have invented a better instance of the cultural subjectivity of fairness. Fairness, in practice, rarely extends much further than the edges of one’s own culture – in this case, an urban culture that takes its own superiority as a given.
MCP:
Ironically, your position seems to be the classic Leftist position - that human nature is merely a product of culture, infinitely malleable, a tabula rasa. This has been scientifically demonstrated to be false. There is a sense of fairness - and many other facets of human nature - that transcend culture, arising as they do from a biological substrate.
Your examples do not detract from Rawlsian fairness. They simply point out that superior understanding of the real world allows a better approximation of fairness; thus, the knowledge that there are no witches improves Salem society. But this is the heart of my thesis - that increased knowledge leads to more fairness!
I also take issue with your Marxist (again, the irony!) reading of Congress. It has not been merely a dialectical power struggle for most of history. Both of us are actually old enough to remember when the major complaint about American politics was that there was only one party; that the Ds and Rs were essentially identical in their policies. Both of us have lived through the increasing polarization of politics, and a realistic assessment shows that the partisanship is much more on one side than the other. There was a time when Ds & Rs routinely came together for the perceived good of the nation; an event as recent as the Iraq war was a largely bi-partisan affair. The gentleman's agreements that held vis-à-vis cabinet appointments (up until the Reagan era), the fact that the now dysfunctional Senate was once functional with the same rules, and so on, all point to a time when the idea of a united struggle - dare I call it patriotism - was the norm.
And I don't understand your final comment. I was merely pointing out that the hoi polloi of humanity has not biologically changed (nor, it should be taken as given, the aristocracy). Interpreting some kind of prejudice in my statement strikes me as not only unnecessary, but wholly bizarre.
I do not understand how you square your position with the biological facts of human nature or my assertion that government is designed to produce fairness - as understood by its members - between its members. Nor do I understand why you keep returning to fairness as an ideal for all parties when I keep specifically limiting it to an arrangement between powers. If the Salem judges would have submitted to the same treatment, then yes, they were being fair. The only sin they committed was being wrong about the state of the world. Our liberty is a product of both innate fairness and earned wisdom.
EMC:
Again, I am not asserting that fairness, in some Rawlsian sense, does not exist – nor that human beings are infinitely malleable. I completely agree that human beings have certain genetic underpinnings that hold their malleability within certain limits. Neither am I asserting that fairness, as we have defined it, does not play a significant role in human behavior. I am asserting, quite specifically, that your claim that government is essentially and necessarily fair is false. My point about Congress was that, if you believe it is necessarily fair – then you must believe it is operating fairly now. Clearly, you don’t. I grant that Congress has fluctuations of cooperation and opposition (though I disagree that the Iraq war resolution is an exemplar of fairness) – but that is not the point. If it is substantially unfair now, it cannot be fair by necessity.
I agree, with equal amusement, that my support of what are generally conservative principles proceeds from a species of Marxist analysis. It is perhaps just as amusing, though, that your leftist position is grounded on Kantian idealism! Ironic though this all might be, philosophical jokes do not get many laughs. Such distinctions leave most people cold.
More telling than my witch trial example are, I think, the Soviet and Chinese dissident examples. There we have Rawlsian cases which we would clearly see as abusive, but which we cannot explain away by any straightforward lack of simple concrete facts. Rather, in the Soviet-Chinese cases, we are dealing with actions based on ideological presumptions. While I don’t think it’s possible to save a witch’s soul (since I don’t believe that souls exist) I do think it is possible to change person’s ideology with drugs and behavioral therapy. In some cases, I’m sure the Communists “cured” their “patients.” The point here is that it is possible to force others to conform to one’s own particular cultural standards – whatever they might be – by law and other coercive means, and be completely Rawlsian fair. The problem is, at that point, practically anything short of direct exploitation is admitted into the realm of fairness. So long as you consider a person as a person this definition gives you license to remake him, or her, in your own image.
“…Interpreting some kind of prejudice in my statement strikes me as not only unnecessary, but wholly bizarre.”
I am reasonably sure that you would not use the terms “fag,” “nigger,” or “kike” to describe human beings. That you are comfortable using the term “bumpkin” is an indicator that you are confident that “bumpkins” are not part of your culture, and that you can assume without reflection that no one in your culture will be offended by the slur. It is by no means a unique or an interesting prejudice, but it is an apt example of the kind of prejudice that devolves from cultural allegiance. Since I believe the problem with Rawlsian fairness is that it merely echoes one’s own cultural values, an instance of cultural prejudice is entirely relevant in demonstrating that weakness.
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MCP:
I think fairness is a human concern; it does not occur naturally (and thus government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness). One of the problems I have with the libertarian perspective is that it assumes that fairness does occur naturally, that the natural outcome is the definition of fair. I don't believe this position can withstand scrutiny (although it can pass a casual examination, which accounts for why there are so many proto-libertarians about).
At a similar level, I define justice as fairness; to me, the two concepts are largely indistinguishable. A fair act is a just one, and vice versa.
Is there anything here you disagree with?
EMC:
Indeed there is, but let’s begin with what is not so much a disagreement as a problem. What is fairness? We cannot really debate the applicability, characteristics, or even the coherence of a concept without at least a rough-and-ready definition. It is interesting but not really sufficient to just say that justice and fairness are synonymous.
If one resorts to the relevant Oxford definition, one sees:
Fair 1.
treating people equally without favouritism or discrimination:
the group has achieved fair and equal representation for all its members
a fairer distribution of wealth
Just or appropriate in the circumstances:
to be fair, this subject poses special problems
it’s not fair to take it out on her
Is this a sufficient definition for our discussion or would you like to propose a different one that better captures your intent?
MCP:
This definition is close, if one understands that favoritism includes favoring one's self.
I use fairness in the Rawlsian sense. John Rawls describes the Original Position: you have to decide on the outcome of a dispute before you know which party of the dispute you belong to. Imagine being asked to allocate starting resources to team Red and team Blue before you know which team you will be playing on.
This imaginary exercise is how humans determine fairness. While it can be difficult to pretend to be blind to one's own identity, it is not impossible; indeed, the ability to do so is what defines us as social beings. "Theory of Mind" is the ability to imagine being someone else, and everyone but autistics has it (sociopaths have it too; they can imagine acting or thinking like someone else, they just can't feel like someone else).
So all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement (of rules, resources, etc.) is fair, in the sense that they would be equally happy accepting any portion of that arrangement. A formal definition is useful, but only while keeping in mind that determining fairness is a semantic process, like language, rather than a syntactical operation, like math. As is sometimes claimed of art, you know it when you see it.
Of course, people have to look out for their own best interests; but that is a statement about actions, not about metaphysical determinations. It just so happens that fairness generally favors our best interests (but of course, this is not a surprise, since we evolved our ability to determine fairness precisely because such an ability favored our best interests!)
EMC:
Thank you for providing us with a working definition. While I don’t want to get mired down in a debate about the merits of the definition itself, I will observe that the definition on offer is essentially Kant’s categorical imperative with the word “moral” scratched out and the word “fair” penciled in. (It is apparently a valid philosophical project to find new and elaborate ways of restating the golden rule periodically -- but that is definitely a digression.) Let us now return to the original topic.
You stated in your first set of assertions:
“I think fairness is a human concern; it does not occur naturally (and thus government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness).”
Then, in the elaboration of your chosen definition, you stated:
“…So all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement (of rules, resources, etc.) is fair…”
This is contradictory on its face. If all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement is fair, then fairness occurs in nature. What else could “innately” mean? It may be that fairness is not applied uniformly or necessarily, but you cannot hold the second position without negating the first.
One possible difference between our views is that I believe that the very categories of a natural realm and a human realm cause a great deal of mischief. Humans are a part of nature and thus everything we do is natural. What one achieves by making the distinction is little more than a sort of vestigial Cartesian dualism, where the world is one thing, and our mental activity quite another. My position, to apply this idea to the present topic, is that government itself is just another process that arises spontaneously from a certain kind of organism under certain circumstances. We perceive governmental organization and policies as the products of conscious planning, but it is self evident that much of what happens as the result of such organization and policies is unintended and surprising.
Your view that “government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness” is wholeheartedly normative rather than descriptive. It is what you want government to be, rather than what government actually is. Even the most cursory look at history will show that governments are not fair by necessity. Indeed, by almost any definition of fairness most governments are unfair. From a purely descriptive perspective, government is best viewed as that institution within a society which maintains its internal and external stability through a relative monopoly on the application of force. While governments can do many other things as well, they must all preserve themselves and a substantial fraction of the population over which they are sovereign. Those that fail at this task cease to exist. While fairness may be a very laudable thing, plenty of states have prospered without making it a central theme.
MCP:
Doh.
“This is contradictory on its face. If all humans are innately equipped to determine whether a given arrangement is fair, then fairness occurs in nature. What else could “innately” mean? It may be that fairness is not applied uniformly or necessarily, but you cannot hold the second position without negating the first.”
I don't understand this objection. It's like warmth; humans innately understand what warmth means, they require it at some level for survival and at another level for comfortable survival; occasionally the natural world provides the right amount of warmth; but it is not much of an exaggeration to say that human technology exists to provide warmth when nature fails to do so. In exactly the same way, fairness is a state of being that humans generally have to provide for themselves.
The ability to comprehend warmth (i.e. the difference between too much heat and too little) does not guarantee the existence of warmth; imagining ideal states of existence, and then working to create them, is what human beings do. The pursuit of warmth and the pursuit of fairness look very much alike; as we get better at the technology, we succeed at producing it more reliably.
“One possible difference between our views is that I believe that the very categories of a natural realm and a human realm cause a great deal of mischief. Humans are a part of nature and thus everything we do is natural.”
This cannot be a source of difference, as I reject the notion of non-naturalism even more resolutely than most philosophers (even to the point of asserting that ideas do not exist unless they are instantiated by physical matter, such as neuronal arrangements).
“My position, to apply this idea to the present topic, is that government itself is just another process that arises spontaneously from a certain kind of organism under certain circumstances. We perceive governmental organization and policies as the products of conscious planning, but it is self evident that much of what happens as the result of such organization and policies is unintended and surprising.”
Yes; in fact, the same is true of human activity at every level, right down to making dinner. You've just described how the brain works to create personality.
“Your view that ‘government is best viewed as a human institution designed to create fairness’ is wholeheartedly normative rather than descriptive. It is what you want government to be, rather than what government actually is.”
It's like saying "fire-making is best viewed as a human institution designed to create warmth." It's what we want from fire-making; it's why we invented it; the fact that it occasionally fails, falls short, or does something else does not really detract from the essential definition.
When something is an artificial construct - that is, a part of the self-feedback loop between observed reality and the model of reality humans create in their head - I think a normative description is appropriate. Government does not exist "in nature;" that is to say, like fire-making, it is an activity that relies on uniquely human mental constructs. (Even this is a simplification; it could be argued that some animals form limited governments, just as some animals make and use simple tools. But for general discourse the distinction between artificial and natural basically means people vs. everything else). (This also differentiates between government and eusocial arrangements; chimps might have a form of government; ants do not.)
"Even the most cursory look at history will show that governments are not fair by necessity. Indeed, by almost any definition of fairness most governments are unfair."
Now we come to a legitimate difference: you assert that governments are not fair by necessity, and I completely disagree. They are fair by necessity; they exist solely to create that fairness. So, how can I square this assertion with the plainly observable facts of history?To deal with the lesser point first: by an exacting definition of warmth, most people are not. The vast bulk of the planet is either too cold or too hot much of the time. But no one would deny that warmth is necessary and that fire-making serves a crucial function in the production of warmth; nor would anyone deny that we are markedly better at making warmth than we used to be. In the same way, governments have become generally more fair. The fact that none of them are ideally fair is no more significant than the fact that few households are ideally warm.
As for necessity: the entire point of government is to produce fairness between parties. When every agent operates off of pure, immediate strength, you have anarchy, which is an inherently unstable state. Eventually the most powerful agents reach some kind of agreement, which includes allocating resources, adjudicating disputes, and punishing transgressors of the agreement. Viola - government! And a government of fairness, insomuch as the various parties to the agreement have entered into it voluntarily, viewing it as the best possible arrangement for a future in which they are not certain which role they will play. Of course, they fully expect to still possess the powers of an agent; but they may not be of the same strength they are now, or allied with the same factions, etc. So they want an arrangement that preserves their position even in the face of minor changes.
When mobsters get together to settle a turf war, they talk about strength; but they also talk about fairness. Merely being the strongest mobster is not enough to convince the others to allow you open license; after all, if they combined, they would form a stronger force. However, they prefer not to combine as it would diminish each of them. So the discussion is not purely about numbers of gunmen; it is about an arrangement that allows for some flexibility but not too much. And if you watch these discussions as a fly on the wall, you will see fairness repeatedly introduced as a deciding principal in disputes between equals.
The reason you perceive government as so wildly unfair is because you are measuring government as a tool for creating fairness for people. This is not what it does; it creates fairness for agents, i.e. the active participants of the government.
However, the story of democracy has been the story of the ever-expanding franchise, including more and more groups as agents in the political process. And this form of government has repeatedly won in real-world struggles against smaller franchises (though not necessarily smaller societies).
So, given the history of broad-based franchises defeating narrow-based ones (Lincoln freeing the slaves to raise manpower for defeating the South, for example), it is not unreasonable to conclude that governments have all the fairness necessary to their survival; and that this creates a feedback loop that leads to expanding quantities of fairness. Plenty of states prospered with limited fairness, but only until they were faced with competition from more fair states.
And biologically speaking, humans are basically equal. Thus the broadest possible franchise is political equality for everyone. This is why we are not doomed to a future of tyranny; all forms of government are not equal, high levels of fairness make stronger societies which defeat weaker societies, thus raising the average level of fairness. It's like a technological arms race, because it is.
EMC:
Fairness is not like warmth. Warmth is ultimately reducible to neat, reasonably precise, physical terms. We can say a human being will be comfortable within a certain range of temperatures and can survive within a somewhat greater range, making allowances for individual differences on the margins. Fairness is a moral rather than a physical entity. It is physical in the important sense that it requires the existence of a relationship between at least two physical beings to exist, but it is non-physical in the sense that you cannot build a fairness meter out of hardware or build a machine to fission fairness into smaller parts. (I believe that this is also the difference between ideas and technologies, but I don’t want to digress into a side debate over that issue.)
By your definition, fairness quite subjective. Having helped yourself to the “you know it when you see it” caveat, you can hardly deny this. I will not disagree. Consider the example of affirmative action. If one believes that affirmative action is fair, then one believes that one’s membership in a certain historically disadvantaged group merits a countervailing dispensation on, for example, civil service exams. If one believes that affirmative action is unfair, then one believes that civil service exams should be blind to the matter of group affiliation. Both of these positions are fair in the Rawlsian sense you outlined earlier – a hypothetical individual might hold either as an acceptable universal law – but the two positions are quite incompatible. If we argue about whether 72 or 68°F is the ideal temperature, we are at least arguing about the same ontological stuff, whereas in the affirmative action example we are not.
Even putting this objection aside, following your analogy back to your original statements would imply you meant the following:
Although human beings are innately capable of assessing whether or not a situation is fair, they are incapable of acting fairly as individuals.
If they could act fairly as individuals, then, again, fairness would exist in nature. The only way I can see out of this trap is to make the definitional claim that fairness can only exist at some social level above the individual. You might want to go there, but it was not a part of your proposed definition. But let’s move on.
Your position that government is fair by necessity rests on an assumption that the resolution of a conflict by any means other than the direct application of force is an instance of fairness. This is a false assumption. Among human beings, as among most animals, the actual application of force among near equals is relatively rare. An even fight is a dangerous thing for both players. Rather, barring desperate conditions or psychotic participants, conflicts are usually settled with accommodations taking relative power onto consideration, but not relying on overt force. The stronger prevail, generally, but not at an intolerable cost to the weaker. Nothing in this process requires fairness.
Consider your negotiating mobsters. If their accommodations were based on fairness as you originally defined it, any subsequent fluctuations in one’s ability to apply force would be irrelevant. Motivated by fairness, a newly dominant mobster would not exploit a temporarily weaker one. They would behave as good Kantian moral agents, at least toward one another. If, on the other hand, their accommodations were based merely on immediate relative capacities, they would renegotiate in response to changing conditions, or possibly even resort to force if they could do so without risk. In the real word, the latter is the norm rather than the exception. Treaties are broken, small states abused, weaker parties exploited, etc. – not always and necessarily, but with unsurprising regularity. That which looks like fairness is, as often as not, nothing more than a temporary balance of opposing strengths. It is not only possible, but common, to construct elaborate institutions, including governments, on exactly such a basis.
You go on:
“The reason you perceive government as so wildly unfair is because you are measuring government as a tool for creating fairness for people. This is not what it does; it creates fairness for agents, i.e. the active participants of the government.”
This makes hash of your already weak definition. If you can be fair -- just not to politically inconsequential people – then the Nazis were fair and slavery was fair. I understand the distinction you are making sociologically (and have pointed it out myself in other contexts) but linking this sense of fairness with your earlier definition is incoherent. What sense does it make to say: “…you have to decide on the outcome of a dispute before you know which party of the dispute you belong to” – except that you know you won’t be among the weakest parties? Stripped of the concept of a universal law, the categorical imperative is not worth uttering.
Finally, we have your hypotheses of the self-expanding franchise and the primacy of democratic states. For the latter proposition I could offer numerous counter examples, as well as arguments showing why the picture is not that simple, but suffice to say for now that I interpret history differently. We can return to this latter if you wish. On the matter of the self-expanding franchise I also disagree in several ways, but will limit myself, for now, to the most obvious.
Meaningful democratic participation is not simple matter of having the right to vote. It is not a matter of flipping a switch, like the democracy technology in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. Rather, meaningful democratic participation requires a polity which is both educated enough to understand what they are voting for and engaged enough to take the process seriously. Voting for candidate X because he is the coolest or because you feel in your heart that he loves you more than candidate Y is not meaningful participation in government -- it’s a testimony to the power of advertising. Read a few pages of the Lincoln-Douglas debate or de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America then watch a few minutes of campaign commercials or a modern presidential “debate” and you will see just how stark the contrast is. While we (speaking here specifically of the US) have expanded the franchise considerably in the last 150 years, the political consciousness of the electorate has degenerated along with the rest of the culture. Whether one approves of democracy as a system of government or not, one must surely concede that it is only meaningful if the electorate is politically conscious, not only of their own interests but also of the basic requirements of the system itself. When people begin to feel that their own interests are best served by signing their liberties away to smarter people they neither know nor influence, the breadth of the franchise becomes a rather pathetic joke.
MCP:
Hmm. I did not expect so much difficulty in establishing such a basic premise; that is, that fairness exists, is obtainable, desirable, and the basis for good government.
Perhaps language is a better metaphor than warmth: Fairness exists in nature in exactly the same sense that language does; that is, it is a biologically driven behavior that assists human survival. Like language, it is innate, universal, and something we've gotten better at over time. Language is experienced subjectively, but it also has an objective component: not any collection of sounds constitutes a language.
Of course the mobsters are unfair to the rubes and marks; their Rawlsian decisions are made by deciding disputes between mobsters; i.e. essentially equal parties. Farmers can construct fair agreements without concerning themselves about the rights of the cows. Fairness was a huge concern for slave owners - as evidenced by the lawsuits they brought against each other. They just didn't extend political franchise (and hence fairness) to the slaves. They did not consider them worthy of political franchise.
The freedom we enjoy today is a direct result of extending the political franchise to wider circles. Our democracy is better educated and more responsive than any that has gone before it; the Athenian farmers were no wiser than our country bumpkins, and the Athenian polity was as addicted to cheap theater as ours. But literacy, mathematics, basic science, are all more widely disseminated today than ever before. And most important, the idea that all humans are essentially equal - that women are as deserving of fairness as men, for instance - is more widespread than ever in history. This leads to governments that consider all of their subjects to be citizens, not just some of them. (Hence my claim that freedom is impossible without equality.)
It is true that there is no perfect fairness, and that the amount of fairness in the world ebbs and flows. Nonetheless, it is a simple matter to determine that more people are treated more fairly now than the century before (the mere matter of women's emancipation settles the issue instantly, as it concerns 50% of the human population), and that this statement is true almost no matter what century of recorded history you live in.
To view every human interaction as merely a contest of strength is to fundamentally misread human nature. Humans voluntarily limit the exercise of their power out of a consideration for unknown futures, the value of reputation, and an innate sense of moral duty. This is what makes us social animals, and not solitary predators. Nietzsche wrote morality for tigers, not humans; he was a fantasist more than a philosopher. The mere act of making the kind of calculations of strength you describe is itself sub-optimal, insomuch as it is a vast expenditure of energy for the chance to make a fatal miscalculation. People don't do that; instead, they operate off of heuristic principles that make broad assumptions and cover a wide variety of general cases. I.e., fairness.
EMC:
I can see that some clarifications are in order. To begin with, I am not disputing the existence of a Rawlsian sense of fairness, nor am I disputing that real human beings can, and sometimes do, act in conscious accordance with that principle. What I am disputing is the assertion that government is Rawlsian by necessity – or, frankly, that it is even Rawlsian typically. I am also disputing that fairness itself is a sufficiently stable and robust concept to survive serious scrutiny.
Let me address the latter first. My position is that there really is no workable objective standard of fairness, and that the Rawlsian formulation, like the golden rule and categorical imperative before it, ultimately yields little more than a projection of the cultural values of the individual implementing the rule.
Consider a 17th century witch burning. If we accept that the beliefs and intentions of the officials who conducted such executions were as they themselves stated, they were being entirely fair by Rawlsian standards. They believed that the witch’s soul might saved in the course of this horrible process, and would not have granted themselves any special exemption from it. There were, in fact, several cases in which judges who had condemned witches to the flames were themselves burned for witchcraft. Are we prepared to say that deliberately burning a person alive might be fair under certain circumstances? More, it would be incorrect to assume witch burning is merely an odd exception to our rule – a special case of ignorant religious fanaticism. The Soviets of the late 20th century and, I believe, the Chinese of today have both been prepared to treat political dissent as a form of mental illness in some instances, treatable with heavy medication and behavioral therapy. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was also treated with drugs and behavioral therapy – not in a totalitarian state, but in the U.S. I have no reason to believe that the majority of the people who were carried out such treatments were not being Rawlsian fair – which is to say, that they believed that they were subjecting others to treatments that they themselves would have been reasonably liable to under the same circumstances. One always assumes one’s own values are correct, thus, in a Rawlsian sense, it is always fair to compel another to adhere to them for his or her own good.
My other claim – that governments are not fair by necessity – would hardly seem to need proof. Still, since you have specified that by fair in the context of government you only mean fair within the sphere of government’s own agents, not fairness toward the governed, perhaps we do need a few additional comments to cover this very attenuated sense of fairness.
I believe it self-evident to any American, whichever side of the political divide he or she happens to be on, that the present Congress is not driven chiefly by considerations of mutual fairness. Fairness may be expressed in the actions of individual members in individuals instances, but the dominant theme in Congress is now, and historically usually has been, one of struggle between opposing forces. A power struggle, mediated by law and custom but not by moral sentiment. To call this ongoing wrangling over power an instance of fairness is like calling a hurricane an expression of God’s love. If you actually see it that way, we do indeed have a difference.
It is also evident that we draw very different lessons from history, and that dispute would probably be endless. I am not disagreeing that universal suffrage is a fine achievement, but I am disputing that it trumps all other considerations. The Soviets had as broad a suffrage as we do. Virtually every adult in the Soviet Union had the right to vote -- for or against the party’s proposed head of state. Perhaps for regional leaders to, though I am less sure of this. However, I would not call what actually happened in the Soviet Union meaningful participation in government. There is a difference between involvement in government in a real sense and in a ritual sense, and there is a continuum of possibilities between the two extremes.
You said:
“…the Athenian farmers were no wiser than our country bumpkins…”
Having lived and worked in a rural area for many years I find this particular offhand prejudice noxious and unjustified. You could hardly have invented a better instance of the cultural subjectivity of fairness. Fairness, in practice, rarely extends much further than the edges of one’s own culture – in this case, an urban culture that takes its own superiority as a given.
MCP:
Ironically, your position seems to be the classic Leftist position - that human nature is merely a product of culture, infinitely malleable, a tabula rasa. This has been scientifically demonstrated to be false. There is a sense of fairness - and many other facets of human nature - that transcend culture, arising as they do from a biological substrate.
Your examples do not detract from Rawlsian fairness. They simply point out that superior understanding of the real world allows a better approximation of fairness; thus, the knowledge that there are no witches improves Salem society. But this is the heart of my thesis - that increased knowledge leads to more fairness!
I also take issue with your Marxist (again, the irony!) reading of Congress. It has not been merely a dialectical power struggle for most of history. Both of us are actually old enough to remember when the major complaint about American politics was that there was only one party; that the Ds and Rs were essentially identical in their policies. Both of us have lived through the increasing polarization of politics, and a realistic assessment shows that the partisanship is much more on one side than the other. There was a time when Ds & Rs routinely came together for the perceived good of the nation; an event as recent as the Iraq war was a largely bi-partisan affair. The gentleman's agreements that held vis-à-vis cabinet appointments (up until the Reagan era), the fact that the now dysfunctional Senate was once functional with the same rules, and so on, all point to a time when the idea of a united struggle - dare I call it patriotism - was the norm.
And I don't understand your final comment. I was merely pointing out that the hoi polloi of humanity has not biologically changed (nor, it should be taken as given, the aristocracy). Interpreting some kind of prejudice in my statement strikes me as not only unnecessary, but wholly bizarre.
I do not understand how you square your position with the biological facts of human nature or my assertion that government is designed to produce fairness - as understood by its members - between its members. Nor do I understand why you keep returning to fairness as an ideal for all parties when I keep specifically limiting it to an arrangement between powers. If the Salem judges would have submitted to the same treatment, then yes, they were being fair. The only sin they committed was being wrong about the state of the world. Our liberty is a product of both innate fairness and earned wisdom.
EMC:
Again, I am not asserting that fairness, in some Rawlsian sense, does not exist – nor that human beings are infinitely malleable. I completely agree that human beings have certain genetic underpinnings that hold their malleability within certain limits. Neither am I asserting that fairness, as we have defined it, does not play a significant role in human behavior. I am asserting, quite specifically, that your claim that government is essentially and necessarily fair is false. My point about Congress was that, if you believe it is necessarily fair – then you must believe it is operating fairly now. Clearly, you don’t. I grant that Congress has fluctuations of cooperation and opposition (though I disagree that the Iraq war resolution is an exemplar of fairness) – but that is not the point. If it is substantially unfair now, it cannot be fair by necessity.
I agree, with equal amusement, that my support of what are generally conservative principles proceeds from a species of Marxist analysis. It is perhaps just as amusing, though, that your leftist position is grounded on Kantian idealism! Ironic though this all might be, philosophical jokes do not get many laughs. Such distinctions leave most people cold.
More telling than my witch trial example are, I think, the Soviet and Chinese dissident examples. There we have Rawlsian cases which we would clearly see as abusive, but which we cannot explain away by any straightforward lack of simple concrete facts. Rather, in the Soviet-Chinese cases, we are dealing with actions based on ideological presumptions. While I don’t think it’s possible to save a witch’s soul (since I don’t believe that souls exist) I do think it is possible to change person’s ideology with drugs and behavioral therapy. In some cases, I’m sure the Communists “cured” their “patients.” The point here is that it is possible to force others to conform to one’s own particular cultural standards – whatever they might be – by law and other coercive means, and be completely Rawlsian fair. The problem is, at that point, practically anything short of direct exploitation is admitted into the realm of fairness. So long as you consider a person as a person this definition gives you license to remake him, or her, in your own image.
“…Interpreting some kind of prejudice in my statement strikes me as not only unnecessary, but wholly bizarre.”
I am reasonably sure that you would not use the terms “fag,” “nigger,” or “kike” to describe human beings. That you are comfortable using the term “bumpkin” is an indicator that you are confident that “bumpkins” are not part of your culture, and that you can assume without reflection that no one in your culture will be offended by the slur. It is by no means a unique or an interesting prejudice, but it is an apt example of the kind of prejudice that devolves from cultural allegiance. Since I believe the problem with Rawlsian fairness is that it merely echoes one’s own cultural values, an instance of cultural prejudice is entirely relevant in demonstrating that weakness.
November 11, 2012
The Inevitability of Progress
There are many ways the human mind can stray from objectivity. One of the most pervasive, and all the more dangerous for being so common as to go unrecognized, is a habitual belief in the inevitability of progress.
A belief in progress is a form of optimism, although not all forms of optimism require a belief in progress. For example, people who believe that the universe is the product of a benevolent deity are optimists – they believe that everything that happens is according to plan and ultimately for the best, but they do not necessarily believe in progress – the idea that conditions naturally improve over time. Since a belief in progress is a form of optimism we may, however, critique it on that more general basis.
Believing that things will generally turn out well, or, conversely, believing that things will generally turn out badly, is nothing more than an excise in magical thinking. Both optimism and pessimism ascribe directions to nature that nature is not obligated to adhere to. We may, for reasons of culture or individual psychology, view the world through one or the other magical lens, but we do not change nature by doing so. Rather, we create a kind of prejudice regarding what sort of empirical facts we tend to emphasize and take an interest in.
If I think it’s a rotten world I will carefully catalog rotten events as they occur. I may even actively seek them out. If, on the other hand, something good happens I will tend to view it as an aberration, a momentary up-tick on a graph that is predestined to go down. If I am an optimist, on the other hand, I will wait expectantly for the next rosy sunrise to bloom, expecting the graph to go up sooner or later simply because I am predisposed to believe it must. Either view not only ascribes a direction to nature, but strongly implies that nature is a kind or narrative in which either our individual fates or the fate of humanity as a whole is a central theme. To be either an optimist or a pessimist in a universe that is acknowledged to be indifferent to our desires would be incoherent.
Naturally, we would like the universe to care about us. We would like to think that the universe has purpose and that our well being or salvation, all modesty aside, is precisely what that purpose is. This is obviously so of the religious. Even when we hypothesize deities of infinite power and capacity, we never fail to imagine their attentions fixed steadily on us. Although they may be greater than us in every respect, our worship is, inexplicably, of pivotal value to them. Only H.P. Lovecraft invented gods that didn’t give us any more thought than we would give an insect – and though his writing has a certain literary following, it is hard to imagine anyone who would bother to pray to a deity like Cthulhu. Even the most capricious of Greek deities could be placated, offering advantages to the worshipper, but prayers to indifferent deities – or indifferent nature – must of necessity go unanswered.
Modern secular thought may have given up religious thinking in detail, but the core belief that we have a central role and purpose in nature, and that we have special dispensations with regard to natural law, remain pervasive. You can be an atheist and still believe in magic, if, perhaps, subconsciously.
To understand this mystical belief in progress better, one need look no further than a common misunderstanding about the nature of Darwinian evolution. I think it is fair to say that most secular-minded people believe that biological evolution represents a general movement upward.1 They believe that evolution makes species better over time. Better both in the sense that animals become more adaptable through an increase in their physical complexity, and better in some vague and general sense. This is progress in biology in the popular conception. In fact, natural selection does not make organisms better or even necessarily more complex. Rather, it eliminates from the gene pool those organisms that are the least well adapted to current conditions. There is no reason to believe, for example, that a contemporary apex predator like a grizzly bear would have prospered in the late Cretaceous period, out-competing the dinosaurs of that time. To begin with, bears are not well adapted to hot climates. Physically, a modern grizzly would not have been more than a nuisance to a Tyrannosaur. Bears are not better than Tyrannosaurs in some general or absolute sense – they are merely better adapted to current conditions. For sheer adaptability to a variety of harsh conditions, few organisms have ever done much better than some very primitive bacteria.
What is true of biology is also true of many other things. The concept of natural selection is applicable to any field in which the concepts of survival and competition are applicable. It is applicable to human cultures and political states, notwithstanding the errors of (and the revulsion to) the 19th century social Darwinists who first put forward the connection. One is justified in a neutral belief that social and political charges occur because certain ideas and groups achieve a temporary condition of dominance. One is not justified in the belief that history is an inevitable march from the worse to the better, or better to worse.
Many people, at various times and for various reasons, have made arguments for the inevitability of progress. These take a predictable form. To make a case for the inevitably of progress, one simply points out unpleasant and unhappy conditions in the past that the march of history has overcome. No reasonable person can argue that such changes have never occurred. The elimination of slavery as a legal and acceptable public institution is an obvious example of social progress. We will set aside the problem that slavery may still exist, and even be on the rise, in other forms – it is still the case that the legally recognized, public institution has been largely, if not completely, eradicated. We could continue with a litany of all sorts of other wonderful and positive things that have happened, and, as it’s a big world in which many things do happen, we could fill many pages or even volumes with this sort of evidence for the inevitable march of progress. This, of course, would prove very little. It is cherry-picking the data. If I were a bigot and wanted to persuade people that a particular minority was evil and dangerous, I would proceed in essentially the same way. I would list the crimes and atrocities committed by members of that group, and, over the course of several hundred pages of such evidence, I would probably persuade most readers to accept my case. This is simply an exploitation of the human tendency to generalize. It isn’t difficult to persuade people of anything by this means, and it is all the easier if the case being made is a happy and comforting one like the inevitability of progress.
To understand history in the sense required, however, could only mean to understand it in its totality. Cherry-picking the data for examples that support our case is obviously not a good route to the truth. Unfortunately, creating any sort of comprehensive balance sheet for all of history is an impossibility. Even setting aside the fact that historians are human beings with their own peculiar biases, we are faced with an insurmountable problem of quantifying the unquantifiable. Assuming the worst case scenario of global warming, for example, how much is that offset by the elimination of slavery? Were people worse off treating illnesses with prayers and herbs than they are being bankrupted to pay for the treatment of cancers that rarely occurred in pre-industrial times? Are people, on average, happier now than they were in 12th century? How would we know? Even an historian arrogant enough to bluff the case forward on the sheer weight of academic authority would be hard pressed to justify the dark ages or the hundred years war as minor aberrations in an inexorable trend. If viewed on normal evolutionary timescales, all of human civilization has been a single, almost instantaneous population event. It is far from obvious that it is going to produce any sort of truly permanent improvement. Can we say with any confidence that human beings will be better off a million years from now? A thousand? Even ten? One momentous decision on the part of any of the world’s major nuclear nations might end the whole enterprise in an afternoon, or at least render the idea of inevitable progress tragically laughable.
In the absence of a method of quantifying the problem, and the suffering from the lack of an unbiased perspective, we can only turn to a causal explanation to save the idea of inevitable progress. This is to say, if we cannot prove that progress is the statistical norm, we have to prove the existence of a mechanism that makes it inevitable. Of course, if we knew of such a mechanism adherents of the belief wouldn’t be leaning on statistical proof in the first place – but let’s entertain the notion nevertheless. What we would need to prove the inevitably of progress mechanically would be something like the process of evolution through natural selection. Again, I am not saying that biological evolution is an instance of progress, but that evolution through natural selection is the kind of process we would need. Evolution is mechanical. You can test it in a laboratory with microbes. It really happens, and it is fully understandable. To the best of my knowledge, no such mechanism has even been proposed regarding progress.
There is nothing innate in either human beings or the environment that makes progress inevitable, not if by “progress” we mean a general advancement of the public good.2 It is plainly not true that we are all wise, compassionate, forward-looking or even alert enough to always replace flawed behaviors, policies, and institutions with more agreeable ones. It happens, of course, but it does not happen mechanically or inevitably. Rather, like any other animal, we respond the environment with such capacities as our genetic legacies and personal experiences have given us. Genetics and experience both tend to bend our behaviors to our own immediate advantage, not toward some nebulous long term benefit for the species. While our actions may include an element of social accommodation, even that accommodation itself is predicated on some perceived individual gain, no matter how subtle. Even the philanthropist who gives anonymously is buying something – either an imaginary reward in heaven or an equally imaginary advance in self esteem. People never act in any way that doesn’t maximize their perceived self interest, though their perceptions of what constitutes self interest may vary to some degree.3 While some expressions of self interest do benefit others, it is obviously not the case that all of them do, or even that most of them do. We produce behaviors, policies, and institutions according to our own predispositions – but the mechanisms of evolution will determine what persists, and what persists is in no way guaranteed to please us.
Setting all of my arguments above aside for the moment, it is understandable how a casual survey of the last two hundred years would leave one with the impression that humanity is moving forward. There has been a great advance in material comfort for most people in industrialized nations. Attributing this to an invisible hand that guides human destiny, be it God or something else, is simply incorrect however. Our present level of material comfort is directly attributable to our consumption of a finite supply of fossil fuels and other resources. Our social advances are also largely the result of our temporary frenzy of material consumption and abundance. In a society awash in powered machinery, the labor benefits of human slavery would be inconsequential. The total amount of wealth in a society sets an upper limit on its capacity to be generous. Let’s see how this sort of progress holds up as we become more numerous and the pool of resources we must compete over continues to shrink.
Quite apart from the question of whether or not a belief in the march of progress is valid or not is the question of whether or not the belief is harmful. Optimism, no doubt, makes the optimist feel better about the world. The irony is that a belief in the inevitability of progress is an impediment to making rational efforts toward progress.
When a person believes that good things are predestined, he or she will either sit idly by and wait for time and more industrious people to produce nirvana, or seize uncritically on whatever movement seems to be headed in the right direction. A classic example of how this mentality can lead to disaster is the rise of Stalin. Communist theory held that communism was not a deliberate undertaking – an experimental new form of social and economic organization worth trying – but rather it was an inevitable consequence of history. The belief of the communist intelligentsia was that their movement was just bound by nature to succeed. There was, therefore, no need to take measures to avoid the rise of a dictator who might subvert the process. Unjust authority would disappear and that was that. The theory said so. Other forms of optimism produce similar adaptive failures. A belief in God’s love may well be very comforting, but it you are starving it is usually more productive to hunt or forage than to pray and trust.
Optimism is an epistemic flaw. It is leads one to conclusions for which one has either no evidence, or has only insufficient evidence. It suppresses healthy skepticism for the sake of emotional comfort.
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1 Most religious people, in my experience, have a completely different misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. They believe than Darwin’s theory is that evolutionary changes occur by random chance.
2 I use the term “public good” tentatively, merely because I don’t want to get bogged down in a precise definition of what kind of developments would even constitute “progress”. The average person who believes in the idea bends it toward his or her particular values, but most still leave the concept fairly nebulous – an “I know it when I see it” sort of notion. I am content to argue with the muddy naïve concept of “things just getting better and better.” While such a belief is, in some ways, harder to refute than a more specific assertion like “people get happier” or “people’s lives become more materially secure,” the nebulous assertion really shows the essential character of the belief – that it is a faith rather than an empirical conclusion.
3 Even an act of compassion may be seen as a form of self interest. It simply requires that one collapses the distinction between one’s own identity and that of the object of one’s compassion. This is not merely a trick of redefining terms, but a serious point about the nature of compassion.
A belief in progress is a form of optimism, although not all forms of optimism require a belief in progress. For example, people who believe that the universe is the product of a benevolent deity are optimists – they believe that everything that happens is according to plan and ultimately for the best, but they do not necessarily believe in progress – the idea that conditions naturally improve over time. Since a belief in progress is a form of optimism we may, however, critique it on that more general basis.
Believing that things will generally turn out well, or, conversely, believing that things will generally turn out badly, is nothing more than an excise in magical thinking. Both optimism and pessimism ascribe directions to nature that nature is not obligated to adhere to. We may, for reasons of culture or individual psychology, view the world through one or the other magical lens, but we do not change nature by doing so. Rather, we create a kind of prejudice regarding what sort of empirical facts we tend to emphasize and take an interest in.
If I think it’s a rotten world I will carefully catalog rotten events as they occur. I may even actively seek them out. If, on the other hand, something good happens I will tend to view it as an aberration, a momentary up-tick on a graph that is predestined to go down. If I am an optimist, on the other hand, I will wait expectantly for the next rosy sunrise to bloom, expecting the graph to go up sooner or later simply because I am predisposed to believe it must. Either view not only ascribes a direction to nature, but strongly implies that nature is a kind or narrative in which either our individual fates or the fate of humanity as a whole is a central theme. To be either an optimist or a pessimist in a universe that is acknowledged to be indifferent to our desires would be incoherent.
Naturally, we would like the universe to care about us. We would like to think that the universe has purpose and that our well being or salvation, all modesty aside, is precisely what that purpose is. This is obviously so of the religious. Even when we hypothesize deities of infinite power and capacity, we never fail to imagine their attentions fixed steadily on us. Although they may be greater than us in every respect, our worship is, inexplicably, of pivotal value to them. Only H.P. Lovecraft invented gods that didn’t give us any more thought than we would give an insect – and though his writing has a certain literary following, it is hard to imagine anyone who would bother to pray to a deity like Cthulhu. Even the most capricious of Greek deities could be placated, offering advantages to the worshipper, but prayers to indifferent deities – or indifferent nature – must of necessity go unanswered.
Modern secular thought may have given up religious thinking in detail, but the core belief that we have a central role and purpose in nature, and that we have special dispensations with regard to natural law, remain pervasive. You can be an atheist and still believe in magic, if, perhaps, subconsciously.
To understand this mystical belief in progress better, one need look no further than a common misunderstanding about the nature of Darwinian evolution. I think it is fair to say that most secular-minded people believe that biological evolution represents a general movement upward.1 They believe that evolution makes species better over time. Better both in the sense that animals become more adaptable through an increase in their physical complexity, and better in some vague and general sense. This is progress in biology in the popular conception. In fact, natural selection does not make organisms better or even necessarily more complex. Rather, it eliminates from the gene pool those organisms that are the least well adapted to current conditions. There is no reason to believe, for example, that a contemporary apex predator like a grizzly bear would have prospered in the late Cretaceous period, out-competing the dinosaurs of that time. To begin with, bears are not well adapted to hot climates. Physically, a modern grizzly would not have been more than a nuisance to a Tyrannosaur. Bears are not better than Tyrannosaurs in some general or absolute sense – they are merely better adapted to current conditions. For sheer adaptability to a variety of harsh conditions, few organisms have ever done much better than some very primitive bacteria.
What is true of biology is also true of many other things. The concept of natural selection is applicable to any field in which the concepts of survival and competition are applicable. It is applicable to human cultures and political states, notwithstanding the errors of (and the revulsion to) the 19th century social Darwinists who first put forward the connection. One is justified in a neutral belief that social and political charges occur because certain ideas and groups achieve a temporary condition of dominance. One is not justified in the belief that history is an inevitable march from the worse to the better, or better to worse.
Many people, at various times and for various reasons, have made arguments for the inevitability of progress. These take a predictable form. To make a case for the inevitably of progress, one simply points out unpleasant and unhappy conditions in the past that the march of history has overcome. No reasonable person can argue that such changes have never occurred. The elimination of slavery as a legal and acceptable public institution is an obvious example of social progress. We will set aside the problem that slavery may still exist, and even be on the rise, in other forms – it is still the case that the legally recognized, public institution has been largely, if not completely, eradicated. We could continue with a litany of all sorts of other wonderful and positive things that have happened, and, as it’s a big world in which many things do happen, we could fill many pages or even volumes with this sort of evidence for the inevitable march of progress. This, of course, would prove very little. It is cherry-picking the data. If I were a bigot and wanted to persuade people that a particular minority was evil and dangerous, I would proceed in essentially the same way. I would list the crimes and atrocities committed by members of that group, and, over the course of several hundred pages of such evidence, I would probably persuade most readers to accept my case. This is simply an exploitation of the human tendency to generalize. It isn’t difficult to persuade people of anything by this means, and it is all the easier if the case being made is a happy and comforting one like the inevitability of progress.
To understand history in the sense required, however, could only mean to understand it in its totality. Cherry-picking the data for examples that support our case is obviously not a good route to the truth. Unfortunately, creating any sort of comprehensive balance sheet for all of history is an impossibility. Even setting aside the fact that historians are human beings with their own peculiar biases, we are faced with an insurmountable problem of quantifying the unquantifiable. Assuming the worst case scenario of global warming, for example, how much is that offset by the elimination of slavery? Were people worse off treating illnesses with prayers and herbs than they are being bankrupted to pay for the treatment of cancers that rarely occurred in pre-industrial times? Are people, on average, happier now than they were in 12th century? How would we know? Even an historian arrogant enough to bluff the case forward on the sheer weight of academic authority would be hard pressed to justify the dark ages or the hundred years war as minor aberrations in an inexorable trend. If viewed on normal evolutionary timescales, all of human civilization has been a single, almost instantaneous population event. It is far from obvious that it is going to produce any sort of truly permanent improvement. Can we say with any confidence that human beings will be better off a million years from now? A thousand? Even ten? One momentous decision on the part of any of the world’s major nuclear nations might end the whole enterprise in an afternoon, or at least render the idea of inevitable progress tragically laughable.
In the absence of a method of quantifying the problem, and the suffering from the lack of an unbiased perspective, we can only turn to a causal explanation to save the idea of inevitable progress. This is to say, if we cannot prove that progress is the statistical norm, we have to prove the existence of a mechanism that makes it inevitable. Of course, if we knew of such a mechanism adherents of the belief wouldn’t be leaning on statistical proof in the first place – but let’s entertain the notion nevertheless. What we would need to prove the inevitably of progress mechanically would be something like the process of evolution through natural selection. Again, I am not saying that biological evolution is an instance of progress, but that evolution through natural selection is the kind of process we would need. Evolution is mechanical. You can test it in a laboratory with microbes. It really happens, and it is fully understandable. To the best of my knowledge, no such mechanism has even been proposed regarding progress.
There is nothing innate in either human beings or the environment that makes progress inevitable, not if by “progress” we mean a general advancement of the public good.2 It is plainly not true that we are all wise, compassionate, forward-looking or even alert enough to always replace flawed behaviors, policies, and institutions with more agreeable ones. It happens, of course, but it does not happen mechanically or inevitably. Rather, like any other animal, we respond the environment with such capacities as our genetic legacies and personal experiences have given us. Genetics and experience both tend to bend our behaviors to our own immediate advantage, not toward some nebulous long term benefit for the species. While our actions may include an element of social accommodation, even that accommodation itself is predicated on some perceived individual gain, no matter how subtle. Even the philanthropist who gives anonymously is buying something – either an imaginary reward in heaven or an equally imaginary advance in self esteem. People never act in any way that doesn’t maximize their perceived self interest, though their perceptions of what constitutes self interest may vary to some degree.3 While some expressions of self interest do benefit others, it is obviously not the case that all of them do, or even that most of them do. We produce behaviors, policies, and institutions according to our own predispositions – but the mechanisms of evolution will determine what persists, and what persists is in no way guaranteed to please us.
Setting all of my arguments above aside for the moment, it is understandable how a casual survey of the last two hundred years would leave one with the impression that humanity is moving forward. There has been a great advance in material comfort for most people in industrialized nations. Attributing this to an invisible hand that guides human destiny, be it God or something else, is simply incorrect however. Our present level of material comfort is directly attributable to our consumption of a finite supply of fossil fuels and other resources. Our social advances are also largely the result of our temporary frenzy of material consumption and abundance. In a society awash in powered machinery, the labor benefits of human slavery would be inconsequential. The total amount of wealth in a society sets an upper limit on its capacity to be generous. Let’s see how this sort of progress holds up as we become more numerous and the pool of resources we must compete over continues to shrink.
Quite apart from the question of whether or not a belief in the march of progress is valid or not is the question of whether or not the belief is harmful. Optimism, no doubt, makes the optimist feel better about the world. The irony is that a belief in the inevitability of progress is an impediment to making rational efforts toward progress.
When a person believes that good things are predestined, he or she will either sit idly by and wait for time and more industrious people to produce nirvana, or seize uncritically on whatever movement seems to be headed in the right direction. A classic example of how this mentality can lead to disaster is the rise of Stalin. Communist theory held that communism was not a deliberate undertaking – an experimental new form of social and economic organization worth trying – but rather it was an inevitable consequence of history. The belief of the communist intelligentsia was that their movement was just bound by nature to succeed. There was, therefore, no need to take measures to avoid the rise of a dictator who might subvert the process. Unjust authority would disappear and that was that. The theory said so. Other forms of optimism produce similar adaptive failures. A belief in God’s love may well be very comforting, but it you are starving it is usually more productive to hunt or forage than to pray and trust.
Optimism is an epistemic flaw. It is leads one to conclusions for which one has either no evidence, or has only insufficient evidence. It suppresses healthy skepticism for the sake of emotional comfort.
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1 Most religious people, in my experience, have a completely different misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. They believe than Darwin’s theory is that evolutionary changes occur by random chance.
2 I use the term “public good” tentatively, merely because I don’t want to get bogged down in a precise definition of what kind of developments would even constitute “progress”. The average person who believes in the idea bends it toward his or her particular values, but most still leave the concept fairly nebulous – an “I know it when I see it” sort of notion. I am content to argue with the muddy naïve concept of “things just getting better and better.” While such a belief is, in some ways, harder to refute than a more specific assertion like “people get happier” or “people’s lives become more materially secure,” the nebulous assertion really shows the essential character of the belief – that it is a faith rather than an empirical conclusion.
3 Even an act of compassion may be seen as a form of self interest. It simply requires that one collapses the distinction between one’s own identity and that of the object of one’s compassion. This is not merely a trick of redefining terms, but a serious point about the nature of compassion.
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