In an earlier post I stated that Occupy Wall Street was straightforwardly a youth movement. I still think that is basically true, but its character has begun to change in certain ways that merit a note. The original gathering in New York appeared to consist mainly of middle class college students, not only from New York, but from other parts of the country. They seemed to be a pretty typical body of college students, full of enthusiasm and naïveté, out to save the world from itself. Some of the subsequent protests, notably the ones in Oakland, appear to be of a wholly different character. The movement has begun to attract the underclass.
I suppose this was inevitable, but I cannot be blindly enthusiastic about the underclass either. There is, to be sure, a huge population of Americans that we sometimes refer to as the working poor. I have some sympathy for this group, having once been one of their number. These people often have some real right to complain, but they are unfortunately not the sort of people who tend to show up at protest events, or at least not those who make the most noise. Rather, that role often falls to what Marxists would call the lumpen proletariat -- those people who would not want productive work if they could get it, that are predisposed (for one reason or another) to have their way by violence or larceny, who come with a brick rather than with a sign, and delight in cracking the heads and breaking the windows of strangers while decrying how unfair life has been to them. These are the people who will burn their own neighborhoods to the ground given only the opportunity, then blame the rest of us for making them do it. These are the people who will turn a peaceful protest into a bloody riot. Put them up against a militaristic police force like that of Los Angeles, and you are bound to get exciting TV. The 2012 TV season appears to be shaping up nicely.
To continue in that vein, but on a different note, it is fascinating how the protests get covered by the right wing press. They appear to have dusted off their rhetoric from the 1960's and found every word of it still serviceable. Thus, they portray the protesters as drug-addicted, unclean, sexually promiscuous, lazy bums whose sole purpose in life is to defecate on a police cruiser. This is eerily familiar. No doubt some of the protestors do check one or more of those boxes. The problem is, no crowd of ten thousand people or so is going to be composed purely of angels. People get beaten, sometimes to death, at professional baseball games -- but no one suggests that baseball fans as a group are murdering thugs. When we don't look at the crowd as a whole, we can paint them almost any way that suits us.
It may seem contradictory to say that the Occupy Wall Street movement is accumulating a bad element, and then go on to say that they are being unfairly characterized. This is not so. In Oakland, and other places, a non-constructively militant element has begun to assert itself. This does not mean that the college students, the recently unemployed, and other constituents of the movement are inclined toward violence. It means, rather, that protests are organic entities that attract different sorts of people at different stages of their development. One cannot blame the entire crowd for the actions of one segment, but it is also true that one brick, or gun, or Molotov cocktail is bound to ruin everybody's day. Everybody, that is, except the right and left wing media outlets -- each of which can find at least one brute in the riot on the other side that will hammer home their ongoing narrative.
November 21, 2011
November 18, 2011
Social Freedom
In an earlier essay (http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2010/03/case-against-existence-of-free-will.html), I examined the idea of free will, which I take to be chiefly concerned with freedom in an absolute sense – whether or not we can be original sources of causation. By “social freedom,” I mean something rather different. In this essay, I intend to focus on the way our actions are constrained by others within a broadly social context. Political freedom, economic freedom, and religious freedom can all be subsumed under the broader topic of social freedom. The fact that these topics have usually been treated independently has been the source of much confusion, and it is this that I hope to rectify.
Social freedom in its most general sense concerns itself with what we may or may not do because of the assent or constraint of other people. It excludes questions that concern abilities or constraints we have because of the impersonal and unconscious laws of nature or due to our own intrinsic qualities. No one constrains our freedom to fly by flapping our arms rapidly. One will neither be arrested, nor fined, nor excommunicated for attempting to fly in this manner. It simply will not work. On the other hand, presuming one is minimally able-bodied, nature does not constrain us from the act of shoplifting. We are constrained from shoplifting because it is antisocial, criminal, or sinful. This is the realm of social freedom.
Other people can constrain our freedom in a variety of ways. Most obviously, if one is physically imprisoned, one is constrained by barriers put in place by others. Constraints need not be physical, however. The threat of violence, or constraint, is itself a constraint. An awareness that one is under surveillance is a consraint. Likewise, the threat of ostracism is a functional constraint. Humans are social animals. To be part of a society is to avoid creating too many social barriers between oneself and others on whom one is dependent. Limitations in available resources are also constraints. The ownership of land is a simple example. One may be free, in a legal sense, to purchase a certain parcel of land, but this freedom is effectively nullified if the land is owned by someone else who adamantly refuses to sell. In all cases, social freedom is more-or-less narrowly defined by the customs, laws, perceptions and prejudices of the particular society in which one lives.
To make the unqualified statement “I am free” or “I live in a free country” is to assert nothing. It is essentially like saying “I am big”. Without some context to refer to, the word “free” means no more than the word “big”. You are free, probably, to read the next sentence in this essay and to draw your next breath. Beyond that, your freedom is wholly contingent on the vagaries of circumstance. Social freedom has no natural guarantor that stands above the social context that defines it.
It is usually more meaningful to talk of specific rights than to discuss freedom in some extra-contextual sense. Again, we must avoid the vague connotations usually carried by the term "right," and reduce it to some workable definition. A right is behavior or state of being that is acceptable within a certain social context. To exercise a right is either to do something acceptable or to be something acceptable. Rights are entirely social in nature. Copper does not have a right to conduct electricity nor does it need one. The electrical conductivity of copper is inherent rather than volitional. There is no copper that can elect to be non-conductive. Similarly, the brute fact of one’s existence cannot be socially constrained. One can be ostracized, or even executed, but no one can be utterly removed from the physically causal world. Even if someone kills you, you still were, and your existence in one region of space-time will continue to yield consequences indefinitely.
Rights sort all behaviors into acceptable and unacceptable realms. They define both individuals and the societies they inhabit. Societies, in an important sense, are no more than the application of a certain set of interpersonal constraints to a certain body of people – and rights are merely the field of action left unconstrained. If one had the universe entirely to one’s self, the idea of rights would have no meaning.
Being the product of the vicissitudes of human beings, all rights are both temporary and provisional. There is no such thing as a right which cannot be taken away. Beyond one’s brute existence, however fleeting, there are no actions or future states of being (other than death) which cannot be constrained by some human agency. We have rights only at the sufferance of others.
I will not go so far as to say the term “rights” is synonymous with the term “privileges”. The term “privilege” carries connotations which imply something even more fleeting than a “right”. Privileges are always granted by specific authorities, whereas rights may be basic assumptions of a certain culture, not granted by anyone in particular. Indeed, many rights are no more than a reflection of such cultural norms. If someone cuts us off in traffic most of us feel we have a “right” to honk our horns. This is an actual right, as it is certainly possible to imagine a society in which such horn honking would be unacceptable. It is not, however, a delineated “privilege” that anyone in particular has bestowed on us. It is merely an acceptable display of frustration in our culture.
Politics and Economics
A great error has occurred in assuming that political and economic rights are somehow neatly separable. John Stuart Mill and other like-minded people put forward a notion of freedom that was almost wholly political. In other words, all excessive social constraints worth our concern originate with political authorities. The government, whether oligarchic or democratic, present the only important danger to individual freedom in Mill’s view. Karl Marx and others of his school took essentially the opposite view. They believed that the most important impediment to individual freedom is economic. In other words, that it is not the government that enslaves a person but the employer or the landlord. In truth, the entire distinction between political and economic authority is illusory. Let me illustrate with two examples.
Imagine a society with a high degree of individual political liberty – universal suffrage, equal rights before the law, all the usual trappings of a liberal society – but no constraints whatsoever regarding the exercise of property rights. Now, imagine a family living in a house they own, but which is wholly surrounded by someone else’s property. The only access to their house is across this second party’s land. One morning the family wakes up to discover that their neighbor has posted a “NO TRESPASSING” sign on their access route. The family’s dilemma is simple. They may break society’s rules by violating their neighbor’s property rights, or they may starve. In such a case, the government has not curtailed the family’s freedom, but simply upholds the property rights of their neighbor.1 One could argue that, as the guarantor of property rights, the government is still responsible for the family’s fate, but it is clearly not the active agent in the curtailment of the family’s freedom. Anything the government might do to resolve the matter, perhaps allowing the family to cross their neighbor’s land in order to vote for example, would necessarily constrain the neighbor’s right to choose who may or may not cross his land. Is it less of an assault on freedom for the government to actively constrain the neighbor’s right than to passively constrain the family’s? Political freedom alone simply will not save us from this kind of situation.
The case using opposite conditions is even more straightforward. Imagine a society with all sorts of economic guarantees – the right to work, free healthcare, public pensions, etc. – but which excludes the general public from all meaningful political processes. It is easy to see that under such circumstances any rights exist only at the whim of those who govern. The government is, after all, that body which is sustained neither by its wisdom nor by its benevolence, but ultimately by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. When governments are unconstrained by the annoyance of democratic institutions and find it desirable to curtain individual rights there is seldom any mechanism in place to stop them.2
In actual practice, both economic and politic spheres preside over exactly the same question: who is to exercise material control over a society’s material assets, and thereby exercise control over other peoples’ lives. To be politically powerful is to be able to set people and things into motion to carry out one’s will. To be economically powerful is the same. Power is fungible. Typically, political and economic rights are played off against one another by people who benefit from increasing the centralization of power in one realm or another. An understanding of what freedom means within the context of any particular society involves more than the veneration of whatever rights it happens to bestow – it involves a critical examination of the constraints its citizens take for granted.
At this point, we also need to acknowledge that freedom is a somewhat self-contradictory notion. To grant everyone the right to vote, for example, is also to deny everyone the right to be an unelected despot. We are accustomed to thinking of universal suffrage as a freedom, and a laudable thing, but it is a curtailment of freedom in some absolute sense. It deprives one of the freedom to rule arbitrarily. That this is probably a good thing is beside the point. Many constraints on individual freedom are certainly in the public’s best interest. Few if any of us would prosper long under conditions of absolute anarchy. Too often, though, people confuse freedom with equality, when the two are actually contrary notions. To be guaranteed equality in any area of life is to have someone else denied the freedom to excel in that area. To have freedom in any area is by necessity to have the potential to excel beyond someone else’s talent or means.3
Religion
Religious freedom is nothing short of an oxymoron. All religions are, or at least contain, elaborate systems of constraints on individual behavior. Even a religion like Zen Buddhism, which at first blush seems unburdened by arbitrary rules, constrains its followers to certain patterns of thought. Even such self-serving belief systems as Satanism demand that their followers be obediently anti-altruistic. Thoroughgoing nastiness requires a certain dedication, after all.
What is usually meant by “freedom of religion,” then, is the freedom to practice whatever system of religious constraints your upbringing and inclinations happen to mark out for you. It means that the government promises not to go out of its way to oppress you for oppressing yourself. Of course, when governments do persecute certain religions (or the denial of them) it is, straightforwardly, a curtailment of individual freedom too. Again, our interest here is to describe the nature of social freedom, not to argue about what is or isn’t beneficial. Arguably, a government which criminalized a belief in ghosts would do the public a service by advancing the cause of truth, but this must be balanced against social costs of employing such draconian interventions against the minutia of peoples’ beliefs. Those societies perceived as un-free are not necessarily those that have the most constraints, but are often those who impose constraints the most gratuitously.
Within religions themselves, I am aware of no rights that are offered in the usual sense of the term – that is, in the sense we would use in saying one has the right to vote or the right to free speech.4 Gods are capricious, and do not grant to mortals any concessions that they cannot overturn if the whim suits them. Rights within a religious context would constrain omnipotence. Rather than enumerating freedoms, religions generally promise rewards for obedience and conformity. I have heard such constraints described as freedom, just as I have heard the world we live in, complete with disease, natural disasters and all the other sources of human suffering, described as evidence of “God’s love”. While constraints may be a good thing, and may even be conducive to individual happiness, it is incoherent to say that freedom is constraint, just as it is incoherent to say that causing or allowing untold suffering is an expression of love. This is simply to hijack the positive connotations of a certain term and apply them to its opposite.
Like political and economic systems, religious beliefs prune away the myriad ways in which an individual might behave and think and leave behind a relatively uniform, predictable personality. We are defined not by our freedoms, but by our boundaries. If you know a person has a certain job, lives a well-adjusted life in a certain culture, and ascribes to certain religious beliefs – you can infer a great deal about them. A truly free individual, unconstrained by any social conventions or beliefs, might behave and think in any number of different ways, being bound only by the ineliminable forces of nature. The socially adapted individual must conform to a great many behavioral expectations if society is to function at all, and what remains to be recognized as freedom is merely the residual latitude a society is prepared to tolerate.
Conclusions
It would be a mistake to think that we constrain ourselves by conscious choice or that human societies are unique in having constraints. Any pack of wolves or troop of baboons will show plenty of examples of social constraints and even ritualized behavior. Obviously the wolves and baboons do not sit down and discuss a sort of social contract under which they will live. They do not delineate their rights in documents. They know instinctively that they live safer, easier lives when they cooperate, and between this instinct and subsequent learning they become functional members of their own small societies. Human beings are not different in kind from wolves or baboons in this respect, but differ from them only in their capacity for abstraction and complexity. Each of us trades freedom for security to a high degree, and does so unconsciously and uncomplainingly. Our genes compel us to do so. Those who are indifferent to society’s scorn are aberrations, and suffer predictably.
If one has a desire to understand one’s place within a social context, rather than merely react to one’s perceptions, it is well to remember no one is ever really free. Questions of freedom are really only questions about what rules we will have – not about whether we will have rules. The consistent feature of episodes of social anarchy is that they are hastily replaced with some degree of order. Power abhors a vacuum. Sooner rather than later, people coalesce around a leader who, for better or worse, will offer them the promise of security. The equal, free, and ungoverned society that 19th century anarchists proposed was never more than a dream. They believed that human societies could get along perfectly well with neither leaders nor laws. The objective evidence of history, however, shows that social stratification is not an artificial condition created by a few avaricious miscreants at the top, but a normal state of affairs in which almost everyone gravitates toward their own particular social position. Constraints on individual freedom thus arise spontaneously. Any society which provides tolerable conditions for enough of its members will be stable as long as it can do so. I myself may chafe under constraints on information access or constraints on speech, but I know well that many of my fellow citizens would live quite happily without these things, and would be quite content with food, shelter, a little alcohol, and a football game on television. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can, for most, be adequately replaced with life, stability, and the pursuit of entertainment.
___________________________________________________
1 For those who imagine this sort of exercise of power by the private sector is farfetched, consider the various historical applications of the truck system in which employees were paid in either goods or company scrip instead of standard money. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system ) Here we have a system that was the functional equivalent of slavery, but which, in most cases, operated in a political context that gave its victims the right to vote, legal equality, and exactly the same property rights as their exploiters.
2 Soviet Russia is the trite but apt example. Initially, a great deal of effort was invested in giving soviet citizen various positive economic rights, but in time, as power became more centralized, these rights withered. Stalin continued to give lip service to the Marx’s ideal of a state organized for the common man while in fact presiding over the most centralized authority imaginable.
3 Equality, too, is self-contradictory. It must be granted that no real body of human beings is equal by nature. We all have differing abilities as well as differing starting circumstances. Thus, equality must always be artificially enforced by some governing authority. Members of such a governing authority, however, must necessarily be unequal to those governed. Were they not so, they would have no authority.
4 Thomas Jefferson’s poetic formulation in the American Declaration of Independence is an interesting, and generally misunderstood, example of the juxtaposition of rights with religion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The legal meaning of “unalienable” is non-transferrable. It is certainly true that neither one’s life, nor one’s liberty, nor one’s pursuit of happiness can be transferred to another person who is either dead, enslaved, or unhappy. I am convinced, too, that this is precisely what Jefferson meant. While there may have been additional reasons for amending Locke’s formulation of “life, liberty, and property,” it is plain that property is readily alienable. Jefferson was making an observation about the uniqueness of these entities; he could not have been suggesting that they were entities that it was beyond the capacity of human beings to curtail. He was certainly aware of gallows, prisons, and the many ways that the pursuit of happiness might be impeded. To say that these entities are endowed by a creator was, for a deist like Jefferson, not much more than saying that they exist. If he had believed that the creator was prepared to protect such “rights” against human interference he could not have been aware of the realities of 18th century life. His intention, then, had to have been to establish these rather general notions as rights within the new republic, not to assert that a creator was the guarantor of these freedoms. In his reference to equality too, it appears that Jefferson may have only been referring to the equivalence of one individual’s state of being alive with another’s state being alive -- or free, or happy, as the case might be. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unquantifiable and in some sense equal in potential. If that is all he meant, Jefferson was not asserting much about equality in any practical sense.
Note: I made minor revisions to this essay on 9/26/14. I have noted a steady internet traffic to this work from the time that I posted it, often from quite interesting places. If you have read the work and have an opinion, I would love to hear it. Frankly, I would also just like to know who you are and why you are interested in the topic. If you enjoyed this essay, you might also be interested in Why is Slavery Wrong? (http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-is-slavery-wrong_22.html) -emc
Social freedom in its most general sense concerns itself with what we may or may not do because of the assent or constraint of other people. It excludes questions that concern abilities or constraints we have because of the impersonal and unconscious laws of nature or due to our own intrinsic qualities. No one constrains our freedom to fly by flapping our arms rapidly. One will neither be arrested, nor fined, nor excommunicated for attempting to fly in this manner. It simply will not work. On the other hand, presuming one is minimally able-bodied, nature does not constrain us from the act of shoplifting. We are constrained from shoplifting because it is antisocial, criminal, or sinful. This is the realm of social freedom.
Other people can constrain our freedom in a variety of ways. Most obviously, if one is physically imprisoned, one is constrained by barriers put in place by others. Constraints need not be physical, however. The threat of violence, or constraint, is itself a constraint. An awareness that one is under surveillance is a consraint. Likewise, the threat of ostracism is a functional constraint. Humans are social animals. To be part of a society is to avoid creating too many social barriers between oneself and others on whom one is dependent. Limitations in available resources are also constraints. The ownership of land is a simple example. One may be free, in a legal sense, to purchase a certain parcel of land, but this freedom is effectively nullified if the land is owned by someone else who adamantly refuses to sell. In all cases, social freedom is more-or-less narrowly defined by the customs, laws, perceptions and prejudices of the particular society in which one lives.
To make the unqualified statement “I am free” or “I live in a free country” is to assert nothing. It is essentially like saying “I am big”. Without some context to refer to, the word “free” means no more than the word “big”. You are free, probably, to read the next sentence in this essay and to draw your next breath. Beyond that, your freedom is wholly contingent on the vagaries of circumstance. Social freedom has no natural guarantor that stands above the social context that defines it.
It is usually more meaningful to talk of specific rights than to discuss freedom in some extra-contextual sense. Again, we must avoid the vague connotations usually carried by the term "right," and reduce it to some workable definition. A right is behavior or state of being that is acceptable within a certain social context. To exercise a right is either to do something acceptable or to be something acceptable. Rights are entirely social in nature. Copper does not have a right to conduct electricity nor does it need one. The electrical conductivity of copper is inherent rather than volitional. There is no copper that can elect to be non-conductive. Similarly, the brute fact of one’s existence cannot be socially constrained. One can be ostracized, or even executed, but no one can be utterly removed from the physically causal world. Even if someone kills you, you still were, and your existence in one region of space-time will continue to yield consequences indefinitely.
Rights sort all behaviors into acceptable and unacceptable realms. They define both individuals and the societies they inhabit. Societies, in an important sense, are no more than the application of a certain set of interpersonal constraints to a certain body of people – and rights are merely the field of action left unconstrained. If one had the universe entirely to one’s self, the idea of rights would have no meaning.
Being the product of the vicissitudes of human beings, all rights are both temporary and provisional. There is no such thing as a right which cannot be taken away. Beyond one’s brute existence, however fleeting, there are no actions or future states of being (other than death) which cannot be constrained by some human agency. We have rights only at the sufferance of others.
I will not go so far as to say the term “rights” is synonymous with the term “privileges”. The term “privilege” carries connotations which imply something even more fleeting than a “right”. Privileges are always granted by specific authorities, whereas rights may be basic assumptions of a certain culture, not granted by anyone in particular. Indeed, many rights are no more than a reflection of such cultural norms. If someone cuts us off in traffic most of us feel we have a “right” to honk our horns. This is an actual right, as it is certainly possible to imagine a society in which such horn honking would be unacceptable. It is not, however, a delineated “privilege” that anyone in particular has bestowed on us. It is merely an acceptable display of frustration in our culture.
Politics and Economics
A great error has occurred in assuming that political and economic rights are somehow neatly separable. John Stuart Mill and other like-minded people put forward a notion of freedom that was almost wholly political. In other words, all excessive social constraints worth our concern originate with political authorities. The government, whether oligarchic or democratic, present the only important danger to individual freedom in Mill’s view. Karl Marx and others of his school took essentially the opposite view. They believed that the most important impediment to individual freedom is economic. In other words, that it is not the government that enslaves a person but the employer or the landlord. In truth, the entire distinction between political and economic authority is illusory. Let me illustrate with two examples.
Imagine a society with a high degree of individual political liberty – universal suffrage, equal rights before the law, all the usual trappings of a liberal society – but no constraints whatsoever regarding the exercise of property rights. Now, imagine a family living in a house they own, but which is wholly surrounded by someone else’s property. The only access to their house is across this second party’s land. One morning the family wakes up to discover that their neighbor has posted a “NO TRESPASSING” sign on their access route. The family’s dilemma is simple. They may break society’s rules by violating their neighbor’s property rights, or they may starve. In such a case, the government has not curtailed the family’s freedom, but simply upholds the property rights of their neighbor.1 One could argue that, as the guarantor of property rights, the government is still responsible for the family’s fate, but it is clearly not the active agent in the curtailment of the family’s freedom. Anything the government might do to resolve the matter, perhaps allowing the family to cross their neighbor’s land in order to vote for example, would necessarily constrain the neighbor’s right to choose who may or may not cross his land. Is it less of an assault on freedom for the government to actively constrain the neighbor’s right than to passively constrain the family’s? Political freedom alone simply will not save us from this kind of situation.
The case using opposite conditions is even more straightforward. Imagine a society with all sorts of economic guarantees – the right to work, free healthcare, public pensions, etc. – but which excludes the general public from all meaningful political processes. It is easy to see that under such circumstances any rights exist only at the whim of those who govern. The government is, after all, that body which is sustained neither by its wisdom nor by its benevolence, but ultimately by its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. When governments are unconstrained by the annoyance of democratic institutions and find it desirable to curtain individual rights there is seldom any mechanism in place to stop them.2
In actual practice, both economic and politic spheres preside over exactly the same question: who is to exercise material control over a society’s material assets, and thereby exercise control over other peoples’ lives. To be politically powerful is to be able to set people and things into motion to carry out one’s will. To be economically powerful is the same. Power is fungible. Typically, political and economic rights are played off against one another by people who benefit from increasing the centralization of power in one realm or another. An understanding of what freedom means within the context of any particular society involves more than the veneration of whatever rights it happens to bestow – it involves a critical examination of the constraints its citizens take for granted.
At this point, we also need to acknowledge that freedom is a somewhat self-contradictory notion. To grant everyone the right to vote, for example, is also to deny everyone the right to be an unelected despot. We are accustomed to thinking of universal suffrage as a freedom, and a laudable thing, but it is a curtailment of freedom in some absolute sense. It deprives one of the freedom to rule arbitrarily. That this is probably a good thing is beside the point. Many constraints on individual freedom are certainly in the public’s best interest. Few if any of us would prosper long under conditions of absolute anarchy. Too often, though, people confuse freedom with equality, when the two are actually contrary notions. To be guaranteed equality in any area of life is to have someone else denied the freedom to excel in that area. To have freedom in any area is by necessity to have the potential to excel beyond someone else’s talent or means.3
Religion
Religious freedom is nothing short of an oxymoron. All religions are, or at least contain, elaborate systems of constraints on individual behavior. Even a religion like Zen Buddhism, which at first blush seems unburdened by arbitrary rules, constrains its followers to certain patterns of thought. Even such self-serving belief systems as Satanism demand that their followers be obediently anti-altruistic. Thoroughgoing nastiness requires a certain dedication, after all.
What is usually meant by “freedom of religion,” then, is the freedom to practice whatever system of religious constraints your upbringing and inclinations happen to mark out for you. It means that the government promises not to go out of its way to oppress you for oppressing yourself. Of course, when governments do persecute certain religions (or the denial of them) it is, straightforwardly, a curtailment of individual freedom too. Again, our interest here is to describe the nature of social freedom, not to argue about what is or isn’t beneficial. Arguably, a government which criminalized a belief in ghosts would do the public a service by advancing the cause of truth, but this must be balanced against social costs of employing such draconian interventions against the minutia of peoples’ beliefs. Those societies perceived as un-free are not necessarily those that have the most constraints, but are often those who impose constraints the most gratuitously.
Within religions themselves, I am aware of no rights that are offered in the usual sense of the term – that is, in the sense we would use in saying one has the right to vote or the right to free speech.4 Gods are capricious, and do not grant to mortals any concessions that they cannot overturn if the whim suits them. Rights within a religious context would constrain omnipotence. Rather than enumerating freedoms, religions generally promise rewards for obedience and conformity. I have heard such constraints described as freedom, just as I have heard the world we live in, complete with disease, natural disasters and all the other sources of human suffering, described as evidence of “God’s love”. While constraints may be a good thing, and may even be conducive to individual happiness, it is incoherent to say that freedom is constraint, just as it is incoherent to say that causing or allowing untold suffering is an expression of love. This is simply to hijack the positive connotations of a certain term and apply them to its opposite.
Like political and economic systems, religious beliefs prune away the myriad ways in which an individual might behave and think and leave behind a relatively uniform, predictable personality. We are defined not by our freedoms, but by our boundaries. If you know a person has a certain job, lives a well-adjusted life in a certain culture, and ascribes to certain religious beliefs – you can infer a great deal about them. A truly free individual, unconstrained by any social conventions or beliefs, might behave and think in any number of different ways, being bound only by the ineliminable forces of nature. The socially adapted individual must conform to a great many behavioral expectations if society is to function at all, and what remains to be recognized as freedom is merely the residual latitude a society is prepared to tolerate.
Conclusions
It would be a mistake to think that we constrain ourselves by conscious choice or that human societies are unique in having constraints. Any pack of wolves or troop of baboons will show plenty of examples of social constraints and even ritualized behavior. Obviously the wolves and baboons do not sit down and discuss a sort of social contract under which they will live. They do not delineate their rights in documents. They know instinctively that they live safer, easier lives when they cooperate, and between this instinct and subsequent learning they become functional members of their own small societies. Human beings are not different in kind from wolves or baboons in this respect, but differ from them only in their capacity for abstraction and complexity. Each of us trades freedom for security to a high degree, and does so unconsciously and uncomplainingly. Our genes compel us to do so. Those who are indifferent to society’s scorn are aberrations, and suffer predictably.
If one has a desire to understand one’s place within a social context, rather than merely react to one’s perceptions, it is well to remember no one is ever really free. Questions of freedom are really only questions about what rules we will have – not about whether we will have rules. The consistent feature of episodes of social anarchy is that they are hastily replaced with some degree of order. Power abhors a vacuum. Sooner rather than later, people coalesce around a leader who, for better or worse, will offer them the promise of security. The equal, free, and ungoverned society that 19th century anarchists proposed was never more than a dream. They believed that human societies could get along perfectly well with neither leaders nor laws. The objective evidence of history, however, shows that social stratification is not an artificial condition created by a few avaricious miscreants at the top, but a normal state of affairs in which almost everyone gravitates toward their own particular social position. Constraints on individual freedom thus arise spontaneously. Any society which provides tolerable conditions for enough of its members will be stable as long as it can do so. I myself may chafe under constraints on information access or constraints on speech, but I know well that many of my fellow citizens would live quite happily without these things, and would be quite content with food, shelter, a little alcohol, and a football game on television. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can, for most, be adequately replaced with life, stability, and the pursuit of entertainment.
___________________________________________________
1 For those who imagine this sort of exercise of power by the private sector is farfetched, consider the various historical applications of the truck system in which employees were paid in either goods or company scrip instead of standard money. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_system ) Here we have a system that was the functional equivalent of slavery, but which, in most cases, operated in a political context that gave its victims the right to vote, legal equality, and exactly the same property rights as their exploiters.
2 Soviet Russia is the trite but apt example. Initially, a great deal of effort was invested in giving soviet citizen various positive economic rights, but in time, as power became more centralized, these rights withered. Stalin continued to give lip service to the Marx’s ideal of a state organized for the common man while in fact presiding over the most centralized authority imaginable.
3 Equality, too, is self-contradictory. It must be granted that no real body of human beings is equal by nature. We all have differing abilities as well as differing starting circumstances. Thus, equality must always be artificially enforced by some governing authority. Members of such a governing authority, however, must necessarily be unequal to those governed. Were they not so, they would have no authority.
4 Thomas Jefferson’s poetic formulation in the American Declaration of Independence is an interesting, and generally misunderstood, example of the juxtaposition of rights with religion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The legal meaning of “unalienable” is non-transferrable. It is certainly true that neither one’s life, nor one’s liberty, nor one’s pursuit of happiness can be transferred to another person who is either dead, enslaved, or unhappy. I am convinced, too, that this is precisely what Jefferson meant. While there may have been additional reasons for amending Locke’s formulation of “life, liberty, and property,” it is plain that property is readily alienable. Jefferson was making an observation about the uniqueness of these entities; he could not have been suggesting that they were entities that it was beyond the capacity of human beings to curtail. He was certainly aware of gallows, prisons, and the many ways that the pursuit of happiness might be impeded. To say that these entities are endowed by a creator was, for a deist like Jefferson, not much more than saying that they exist. If he had believed that the creator was prepared to protect such “rights” against human interference he could not have been aware of the realities of 18th century life. His intention, then, had to have been to establish these rather general notions as rights within the new republic, not to assert that a creator was the guarantor of these freedoms. In his reference to equality too, it appears that Jefferson may have only been referring to the equivalence of one individual’s state of being alive with another’s state being alive -- or free, or happy, as the case might be. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are unquantifiable and in some sense equal in potential. If that is all he meant, Jefferson was not asserting much about equality in any practical sense.
Note: I made minor revisions to this essay on 9/26/14. I have noted a steady internet traffic to this work from the time that I posted it, often from quite interesting places. If you have read the work and have an opinion, I would love to hear it. Frankly, I would also just like to know who you are and why you are interested in the topic. If you enjoyed this essay, you might also be interested in Why is Slavery Wrong? (http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2014/04/why-is-slavery-wrong_22.html) -emc
October 26, 2011
What does the Occupy Wall Street movement want?
The goals of most American protest movements have been obvious. Consider those of the last sixty years. The Civil Rights movement wanted black people to have the constitutional rights that they had been promised. The anti-war movement of the 1960’s wanted an end to the Viet Nam war, or at least an end to the draft. The Equal Rights movement wanted equal rights for women. The Gay Rights movement wanted equal rights for gays and lesbians. The Tea Party movement wants a reduction in taxes and, more generally, a reduction in the size and power of government. But what exactly does the Occupy Wall Street movement want?
The initial demand around which the Occupy Wall Street movement coalesced, the only demand the movement has ever articulated more-or-less clearly, was that President Obama “ordain” a commission tasked with ending the influence of money in Washington D.C. On its face, this is unworkable to the point of being quixotic. The framers of this demand have apparently never read the President’s delineated constitutional powers. This is perhaps a minor objection, since neither Obama nor his immediate predecessor seem to have read them either. A worse oversight is that they don’t seem to have taken note of who the Presidents friends are. I doubt that either Tim Geitner or Larry Summers are big proponents of the removal of money from politics. One might as well demand the Federal Highway Administration “ordain” a subcommittee to abolish cars.
The protestors are not, it seems, a coherent, well-organized movement with a succinct objective. They are a vague mass of human beings whose interests cannot really subsumed under is single slogan. They rally around certain websites and internet entities (such as Adbusters and Anonymous) but do not appear to be under any organization’s actual direction. This is contrary to what both the liberal and conservative media establishments would have us believe. The Occupy Wall Street movement is not an energetic junior branch of the Democratic Party, no matter how many Democratic politicians and liberal academics rhapsodize about them, with a timidly raised fist and a twinkle of nostalgia in the eye. Neither the movement the tool of American communists and socialists that Fox would have you believe it is, notwithstanding that a handful of communists and socialist have pitched tents among the protestors and are carrying out their usual desultory recruitment efforts. As of now, at least, this is a youth movement plain and simple. If you watch the protests on TV, you will see plenty of interviews with older people in the crowd. If you watch the more random, less crafted clips on YouTube that were shot by the protestors themselves you will rarely see a person over thirty.
Unlike the anti-war youth movement of the 1960’s, in which at least the young men involved had an obvious goal – to avoid being thrown into the senseless meat grinder of Viet Nam – this protest’s connection to its object is far more abstract. While it is true that money has greatly, perhaps even irrevocably, distorted the American political process, the young are probably the group least equipped to detect and understand that influence. It isn’t as though they have seen their purchasing power steadily eroded over decades, or worry much over the potential collapse of Social Security. They grew up in a world where rapid change was the norm, and tend to believe that any person over thirty years old, any idea over ten years old, and any gadget older than last Thursday is not only worthless but contemptible. They have only just begun to notice that events outside of their circle of friends might be important. Fine comprehension of political and economic matters is simply not the hallmark of the young, in this generation or any other. Action and enthusiasm are. Accordingly, to stand with one’s friends and chant at a very old building down the street full of detached, wealthy, middle-aged men seems like a possible way to change the world – especially if the commercial media has told you every day of your short life that yours is the smartest, best, and coolest generation that ever existed. Youth has always been an uncomfortable mixture of naïve innocence, passion, and not-quite-insufferable narcissism. And courage too, if only born of blind belief. This has not changed. The protestors are there because they have been promised more than the real world can give them, or, to put it another way, because the difference between how cool they think they are and how indifferent the raw world of economics is to their aspirations is intolerable. Maybe shouting and making a nuisance of oneself will work. It sometimes does with adults.
I show my age, I know, but I will not give the young, en masse, more credit than they deserve. Some are more precocious than others. Most will become more circumspect and practical if they live long enough. Few if any are capable of sifting the details of such enormous questions as they are confronting with anything approaching wisdom. None of us would be willing to let a twenty-year-old perform surgery on us; it should be no less worrisome to imagine a large number of them dictating the future course of the nation – or the world. Not, I will admit, that their elders have been doing much better.
A restive population is an animal in search of a head. It may find one, or create one, but it is usually better off if it does neither. The jeering, absurd face of Anonymous is not a much more comforting entity than anything it claims to oppose. Only a teenager could want the world to be ruled by a cartoon, generated by nameless hackers from the depths of cyberspace. Adults generally prefer computer games they can turn off, and at least want leaders who will lie to them in honestly televised flesh. Anonymous and similar groups have basically brought phishing to politics, as if things were not already illusory enough.
Like the Iranian and Egyptian movements from which it derives some inspiration, Occupy Wall Street is bound to the culture of texting and tweeting that have become the modern norm. This is likely to give it both staying power (as any kid with a cell phone can be an organizer now that he or she knows how) and vulnerability (as anyone who wants to either monitor or infiltrate the movement’s activities can easily do so). It is likely to also keep the movement vague and unconcerned about specifics, as it is far easier to gather a thousand people for an event than to arrive at any consensus about what the event is supposed to accomplish when they get there.
Occupy Wall Street is not, at least at this point, in any position to accomplish anything other than minor disorder and misleading press coverage. It is not a cure for a disease, but rather a symptom. Like the Tea Party movement, it is an indicator that most people are angry at having been functionally disenfranchised by political and economic processes that favor a few elites to the exclusion of everyone else. Unlike the Tea Party, it is unlikely to spawn a new class of congressmen and senators. To be a congressman you have to be at least twenty-five, and that is already the twilight years of cool. The movement can only accomplish things by scaring people with an overdose of anarchy, and that will not be pretty, nor will the results be predictable. It will not go away, however. Expect all sorts of sound and fury.
The initial demand around which the Occupy Wall Street movement coalesced, the only demand the movement has ever articulated more-or-less clearly, was that President Obama “ordain” a commission tasked with ending the influence of money in Washington D.C. On its face, this is unworkable to the point of being quixotic. The framers of this demand have apparently never read the President’s delineated constitutional powers. This is perhaps a minor objection, since neither Obama nor his immediate predecessor seem to have read them either. A worse oversight is that they don’t seem to have taken note of who the Presidents friends are. I doubt that either Tim Geitner or Larry Summers are big proponents of the removal of money from politics. One might as well demand the Federal Highway Administration “ordain” a subcommittee to abolish cars.
The protestors are not, it seems, a coherent, well-organized movement with a succinct objective. They are a vague mass of human beings whose interests cannot really subsumed under is single slogan. They rally around certain websites and internet entities (such as Adbusters and Anonymous) but do not appear to be under any organization’s actual direction. This is contrary to what both the liberal and conservative media establishments would have us believe. The Occupy Wall Street movement is not an energetic junior branch of the Democratic Party, no matter how many Democratic politicians and liberal academics rhapsodize about them, with a timidly raised fist and a twinkle of nostalgia in the eye. Neither the movement the tool of American communists and socialists that Fox would have you believe it is, notwithstanding that a handful of communists and socialist have pitched tents among the protestors and are carrying out their usual desultory recruitment efforts. As of now, at least, this is a youth movement plain and simple. If you watch the protests on TV, you will see plenty of interviews with older people in the crowd. If you watch the more random, less crafted clips on YouTube that were shot by the protestors themselves you will rarely see a person over thirty.
Unlike the anti-war youth movement of the 1960’s, in which at least the young men involved had an obvious goal – to avoid being thrown into the senseless meat grinder of Viet Nam – this protest’s connection to its object is far more abstract. While it is true that money has greatly, perhaps even irrevocably, distorted the American political process, the young are probably the group least equipped to detect and understand that influence. It isn’t as though they have seen their purchasing power steadily eroded over decades, or worry much over the potential collapse of Social Security. They grew up in a world where rapid change was the norm, and tend to believe that any person over thirty years old, any idea over ten years old, and any gadget older than last Thursday is not only worthless but contemptible. They have only just begun to notice that events outside of their circle of friends might be important. Fine comprehension of political and economic matters is simply not the hallmark of the young, in this generation or any other. Action and enthusiasm are. Accordingly, to stand with one’s friends and chant at a very old building down the street full of detached, wealthy, middle-aged men seems like a possible way to change the world – especially if the commercial media has told you every day of your short life that yours is the smartest, best, and coolest generation that ever existed. Youth has always been an uncomfortable mixture of naïve innocence, passion, and not-quite-insufferable narcissism. And courage too, if only born of blind belief. This has not changed. The protestors are there because they have been promised more than the real world can give them, or, to put it another way, because the difference between how cool they think they are and how indifferent the raw world of economics is to their aspirations is intolerable. Maybe shouting and making a nuisance of oneself will work. It sometimes does with adults.
I show my age, I know, but I will not give the young, en masse, more credit than they deserve. Some are more precocious than others. Most will become more circumspect and practical if they live long enough. Few if any are capable of sifting the details of such enormous questions as they are confronting with anything approaching wisdom. None of us would be willing to let a twenty-year-old perform surgery on us; it should be no less worrisome to imagine a large number of them dictating the future course of the nation – or the world. Not, I will admit, that their elders have been doing much better.
A restive population is an animal in search of a head. It may find one, or create one, but it is usually better off if it does neither. The jeering, absurd face of Anonymous is not a much more comforting entity than anything it claims to oppose. Only a teenager could want the world to be ruled by a cartoon, generated by nameless hackers from the depths of cyberspace. Adults generally prefer computer games they can turn off, and at least want leaders who will lie to them in honestly televised flesh. Anonymous and similar groups have basically brought phishing to politics, as if things were not already illusory enough.
Like the Iranian and Egyptian movements from which it derives some inspiration, Occupy Wall Street is bound to the culture of texting and tweeting that have become the modern norm. This is likely to give it both staying power (as any kid with a cell phone can be an organizer now that he or she knows how) and vulnerability (as anyone who wants to either monitor or infiltrate the movement’s activities can easily do so). It is likely to also keep the movement vague and unconcerned about specifics, as it is far easier to gather a thousand people for an event than to arrive at any consensus about what the event is supposed to accomplish when they get there.
Occupy Wall Street is not, at least at this point, in any position to accomplish anything other than minor disorder and misleading press coverage. It is not a cure for a disease, but rather a symptom. Like the Tea Party movement, it is an indicator that most people are angry at having been functionally disenfranchised by political and economic processes that favor a few elites to the exclusion of everyone else. Unlike the Tea Party, it is unlikely to spawn a new class of congressmen and senators. To be a congressman you have to be at least twenty-five, and that is already the twilight years of cool. The movement can only accomplish things by scaring people with an overdose of anarchy, and that will not be pretty, nor will the results be predictable. It will not go away, however. Expect all sorts of sound and fury.
September 9, 2011
The Unexamined Game
Considered in the abstract, there are striking similarities between the near collapse of the global financial sector in 2008 and the series of events that precipitated the First World War. The kind of reasoning we use in connection with human institutions often transcends the specific purposes of the institutions themselves, applying as well to major banks as to national governments. Let us first consider, briefly, the events that lead to war in 1914.
In the minor nation of Serbia there was much bad feeling toward the neighboring Austrian empire. Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian patriot, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Austria demanded that Serbia redress the matter in a way that would effectively nullify Serbia’s sovereignty. Serbia only partially complied. Austria used this less than complete submission as a pretext to declare war. Russia, bound by treaty to protect Serbia, mobilized its army. Germany, allied with Austria, declared war on Russia. France, allied with Russia, declared war on German and Austria. Germany invaded Belgium as a militarily favorable route to France. Britain, bound by treaty to defend Belgium, declared war on Germany. Four years of carnage and bloodshed were required to break the ensuing military deadlock.
What is notable here is the nature of the alliance game. Every government that was pulled into the war had sought to manipulate the political system of Europe to enhance its own influence and security. None had formed alliances with the immediate intention of going to war. They had all either hedged their political adventures by allying with a major power, or, in the case of the Russo-Serbian and Anglo-Belgian agreements, had attempted to protect weak friends from the ambitions of powerful enemies. The general conflagration that followed was the result of no one’s explicit intention. Rather, it was the collective result of each participant’s pursuit of advantage and risk mitigation.
Consider the events that led up to the crash of 2008. Prior to the crash, there was a huge proliferation of risk mitigation through the use of hedge funds. In essence, the large banks formed a network of interlocking alliances and agreements that gave them sense of security that was not really merited. While each individual risky derivative investment was mitigated by some carefully crafted bet, few people were paying any attention to the dynamics of the system as a whole. As in the First World War, when the first domino fell the rest followed inevitably.
It is a weakness of human beings that they tend to take the stability of the environment their institutions operate in for granted. While they recognize that their institutions themselves can have ups and downs (advancing one’s country or one’s business is the whole point of any political or economic game) there seems to be an innate assumption that game itself is more-or-less immutable. Thus, in Europe before the First World War statesmen jockeyed for position within the European balance of power, but never fully grasp that their own actions would collapse the European political system as a whole. Likewise, banks finding ways to leverage thin air into unprecedented levels of nominal wealth never really grasped that they were undermining the very basis of real wealth – the forces of industrial production.
Clearly, neither Serbia’s nor Austria’s national pride were worth the sixteen million deaths attributed to the First World War. Similarly, it is difficult to image the extraordinary expansion of paper wealth for a few in any way compensates for either the loss of real wealth for the many, or the wholesale damage to global economic stability which is still playing itself out. Neither event, however, appear to be the result of malice in any pure sense. In truth, humanity is simply ill-equipped, at least at this point in our evolution, to cope with nations and business institutions of the current gargantuan scale. To paraphrase the popular aphorism – we act globally, but think locally.
In the minor nation of Serbia there was much bad feeling toward the neighboring Austrian empire. Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian patriot, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Austria demanded that Serbia redress the matter in a way that would effectively nullify Serbia’s sovereignty. Serbia only partially complied. Austria used this less than complete submission as a pretext to declare war. Russia, bound by treaty to protect Serbia, mobilized its army. Germany, allied with Austria, declared war on Russia. France, allied with Russia, declared war on German and Austria. Germany invaded Belgium as a militarily favorable route to France. Britain, bound by treaty to defend Belgium, declared war on Germany. Four years of carnage and bloodshed were required to break the ensuing military deadlock.
What is notable here is the nature of the alliance game. Every government that was pulled into the war had sought to manipulate the political system of Europe to enhance its own influence and security. None had formed alliances with the immediate intention of going to war. They had all either hedged their political adventures by allying with a major power, or, in the case of the Russo-Serbian and Anglo-Belgian agreements, had attempted to protect weak friends from the ambitions of powerful enemies. The general conflagration that followed was the result of no one’s explicit intention. Rather, it was the collective result of each participant’s pursuit of advantage and risk mitigation.
Consider the events that led up to the crash of 2008. Prior to the crash, there was a huge proliferation of risk mitigation through the use of hedge funds. In essence, the large banks formed a network of interlocking alliances and agreements that gave them sense of security that was not really merited. While each individual risky derivative investment was mitigated by some carefully crafted bet, few people were paying any attention to the dynamics of the system as a whole. As in the First World War, when the first domino fell the rest followed inevitably.
It is a weakness of human beings that they tend to take the stability of the environment their institutions operate in for granted. While they recognize that their institutions themselves can have ups and downs (advancing one’s country or one’s business is the whole point of any political or economic game) there seems to be an innate assumption that game itself is more-or-less immutable. Thus, in Europe before the First World War statesmen jockeyed for position within the European balance of power, but never fully grasp that their own actions would collapse the European political system as a whole. Likewise, banks finding ways to leverage thin air into unprecedented levels of nominal wealth never really grasped that they were undermining the very basis of real wealth – the forces of industrial production.
Clearly, neither Serbia’s nor Austria’s national pride were worth the sixteen million deaths attributed to the First World War. Similarly, it is difficult to image the extraordinary expansion of paper wealth for a few in any way compensates for either the loss of real wealth for the many, or the wholesale damage to global economic stability which is still playing itself out. Neither event, however, appear to be the result of malice in any pure sense. In truth, humanity is simply ill-equipped, at least at this point in our evolution, to cope with nations and business institutions of the current gargantuan scale. To paraphrase the popular aphorism – we act globally, but think locally.
September 1, 2011
Before the Crash
If you have ever been in a car crash, you have probably experienced a moment, just before the collision, in which you became aware that it was inevitable. In that instant, everything falls away. Your journey becomes irrelevant. Your plans evaporate in the face of a future both violent and unpredictable. Perhaps there is terror. Perhaps a certain feeling of detachment. Life holds its breath.
That feeling seldom leaves me now. The world has gotten away from us. It follows its own trajectory, beyond anyone’s actual control. Some confluence of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change awaits us. Governments unravel. The global financial system shudders and buckles. The idea of eternal progress – more and better every year, more and better every generation – reveals itself to be little more that a comforting fairy tale. A circus act. A gross, insulting lie. We will be waking up from our collective dream now. Brace yourself! Get ready!
But how does one get ready for the unknown? Especially when, to be sure, most people still cling tightly to that dream. “…Look at my new smartphone – see? I can tweet with people in Uganda if I want to. We will all have electric cars soon! There’s no problem! There are some very smart people out there who will take care of everything! I was guaranteed a future – you understand me – GUARANTEED!!!...” I shrug. I hold my breath. Time slows. The moment drags on, month by month, a car crash in extreme slow motion. Most of the other passengers still believe we will just be at the mall soon, and that once we get there everything will just get better and better. More and more…
I cling only to physics and to history. To facts. I am here. I look out the windshield in mute amazement. My existence, the momentary flicker of my consciousness, may be snuffed out by what’s to come. In hard times, people suffer. People die. There’s your guarantee, if you want one. A rough impact after a high speed run. Brace yourself! Get ready!
That feeling seldom leaves me now. The world has gotten away from us. It follows its own trajectory, beyond anyone’s actual control. Some confluence of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change awaits us. Governments unravel. The global financial system shudders and buckles. The idea of eternal progress – more and better every year, more and better every generation – reveals itself to be little more that a comforting fairy tale. A circus act. A gross, insulting lie. We will be waking up from our collective dream now. Brace yourself! Get ready!
But how does one get ready for the unknown? Especially when, to be sure, most people still cling tightly to that dream. “…Look at my new smartphone – see? I can tweet with people in Uganda if I want to. We will all have electric cars soon! There’s no problem! There are some very smart people out there who will take care of everything! I was guaranteed a future – you understand me – GUARANTEED!!!...” I shrug. I hold my breath. Time slows. The moment drags on, month by month, a car crash in extreme slow motion. Most of the other passengers still believe we will just be at the mall soon, and that once we get there everything will just get better and better. More and more…
I cling only to physics and to history. To facts. I am here. I look out the windshield in mute amazement. My existence, the momentary flicker of my consciousness, may be snuffed out by what’s to come. In hard times, people suffer. People die. There’s your guarantee, if you want one. A rough impact after a high speed run. Brace yourself! Get ready!
August 29, 2011
Power and Distance
In any relationship in which one person or group of persons holds some power over another, the likelihood of that power becoming oppressive increases as the likelihood of contact between two parties decreases. This law holds true regardless of the type or nature of human institution in question. It is as true of left wing governments as of right wing governments. It is true of corporations. It is true of religious hierarchies. While it is always possible for people to treat one another badly face-to-face, it is always easier to deal callously with people that one neither knows nor sees.
This principle sounds so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. We have all been on the receiving end of someone else’s thoughtless policy at one time or another. We have all asked ourselves “what idiot made that rule?” Nevertheless, whether we lean left or right, we tend to think that there is some ideal way to organize society. We believe that creating a decent society is just a matter of getting all the rules right. My contention here is that any manipulation of other peoples’ lives on a large, impersonal scale, no matter how well intentioned, will eventually degenerate into an attempt to make human beings conform to the needs of a system, rather than making a system conform to the needs of human beings.
One example of this is the rise of industrial regulation. Unquestionably, it is a good thing that industries be prevented from despoiling their environments in gross and obvious ways. It is a good thing that they should be prohibited from producing unduly dangerous products, or putting employees in serious danger. The guiding principle in all such regulations is one of safety. However, human institutions have a life of their own. Beyond creating rules to advance the cause of safety, the work of the regulator will eventually creep into other realms. They will produce regulations to benefit themselves, or to manipulate industries to suit someone’s theories, or, often, simply for the reason that they can – in other words, purely for the exercise of power. Many laws and policies produce paperwork without producing any tangible benefit to anyone. Of course, in the absence of industrial regulation one finds abuses of similar character rendered by the industries themselves. When it is profitable to despoil someone else’s land or extract money that does not correspond to any actual goods or services it is a rare corporation that will quibble about ethics. It is not a failing of this group or that group. It is simply in the nature of human perception that the problems of distant parties are always tenuous abstractions while producing benefits for oneself, one’s family, one’s institution, or one’s cronies is a far more pressing concern.
Neither should we think that we are discussing a tendency that is a unique disease of power. While this sort of moral myopia is most dramatically expressed by those who wield authority, it is the social distance, not the possession of authority, which is the root of this tendency. Consider the September 11th attacks. A great many Arabs around the world openly reveled in the attacks, not because they hated any of the victims personally, but because they hated America, the ally of Israel, in the abstract. Likewise, many quite peaceable Americans, the sort of people who would readily come to the aid of any real individual in distress, were calling for what amounted to blood vengeance on behalf of their country. Patriotism is nothing if not the reduction of individuals to abstractions. It is the mass dehumanization of both the enemy and oneself. Yet none of this, on either side, was whipped up by any real authority. Rather, it sprang spontaneously from ordinary people.
If, as a species, we want to build a future with less suffering than our past then we had better put at least two unworkable ideas behind us. First, we need to give up on a magical belief in ideal systems. We cannot legislate and organize our way to utopia. To value any idea as more important than a life can only end in denigrating life. Second, we need to drop the recently revived idea that we can extract moral perfection from a careful study of nature. Everything is nature – including the Holocaust. It is only the plasticity of human beings that offers any real hope. The trick is to invent without falling in love with our inventions, not to maintain unwavering fidelity to the customs of banobos and baboons.
This principle sounds so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. We have all been on the receiving end of someone else’s thoughtless policy at one time or another. We have all asked ourselves “what idiot made that rule?” Nevertheless, whether we lean left or right, we tend to think that there is some ideal way to organize society. We believe that creating a decent society is just a matter of getting all the rules right. My contention here is that any manipulation of other peoples’ lives on a large, impersonal scale, no matter how well intentioned, will eventually degenerate into an attempt to make human beings conform to the needs of a system, rather than making a system conform to the needs of human beings.
One example of this is the rise of industrial regulation. Unquestionably, it is a good thing that industries be prevented from despoiling their environments in gross and obvious ways. It is a good thing that they should be prohibited from producing unduly dangerous products, or putting employees in serious danger. The guiding principle in all such regulations is one of safety. However, human institutions have a life of their own. Beyond creating rules to advance the cause of safety, the work of the regulator will eventually creep into other realms. They will produce regulations to benefit themselves, or to manipulate industries to suit someone’s theories, or, often, simply for the reason that they can – in other words, purely for the exercise of power. Many laws and policies produce paperwork without producing any tangible benefit to anyone. Of course, in the absence of industrial regulation one finds abuses of similar character rendered by the industries themselves. When it is profitable to despoil someone else’s land or extract money that does not correspond to any actual goods or services it is a rare corporation that will quibble about ethics. It is not a failing of this group or that group. It is simply in the nature of human perception that the problems of distant parties are always tenuous abstractions while producing benefits for oneself, one’s family, one’s institution, or one’s cronies is a far more pressing concern.
Neither should we think that we are discussing a tendency that is a unique disease of power. While this sort of moral myopia is most dramatically expressed by those who wield authority, it is the social distance, not the possession of authority, which is the root of this tendency. Consider the September 11th attacks. A great many Arabs around the world openly reveled in the attacks, not because they hated any of the victims personally, but because they hated America, the ally of Israel, in the abstract. Likewise, many quite peaceable Americans, the sort of people who would readily come to the aid of any real individual in distress, were calling for what amounted to blood vengeance on behalf of their country. Patriotism is nothing if not the reduction of individuals to abstractions. It is the mass dehumanization of both the enemy and oneself. Yet none of this, on either side, was whipped up by any real authority. Rather, it sprang spontaneously from ordinary people.
If, as a species, we want to build a future with less suffering than our past then we had better put at least two unworkable ideas behind us. First, we need to give up on a magical belief in ideal systems. We cannot legislate and organize our way to utopia. To value any idea as more important than a life can only end in denigrating life. Second, we need to drop the recently revived idea that we can extract moral perfection from a careful study of nature. Everything is nature – including the Holocaust. It is only the plasticity of human beings that offers any real hope. The trick is to invent without falling in love with our inventions, not to maintain unwavering fidelity to the customs of banobos and baboons.
August 19, 2011
Signs
Almost every day I see some person standing by an exit ramp. Usually the person is young. Nine times out of ten the person is male. Nine times out of ten he is white. He holds a sign made of corrugated cardboard. Almost invariably it reads, “I will work for food.”
Some open their hearts, or their wallets at any rate, and hand the man a dollar or two and the requisite allotment of pity. Some hurl insults and accusations. Most pretend he isn’t there, and wait impatiently for the green light to release them from his presence. He’s a polarizing figure, this man with the sign. He gets on our nerves.
When I am in a rational frame of mind, as I do endeavor to be, I ask myself what I can actually know about a stranger based on a scruffy appearance and a sign. I cannot know much. I cannot know his personal history at a glance. I cannot know whether or not he has made an honest effort to find work. I cannot know whether or not he is a habitual panhandler or simply someone who has fallen on hard times. I can reasonably infer, though, that the purpose of the sign is more to elicit plain charity than to advertise a willingness to work for food. No one picks up strange men by the highway, takes them home to mow the yard, and gives them a can of beans in payment. People buy off their consciences with cash from the safety of their cars. Even if work were offered, certainly it must be more profitable to stand by the road holding a sign than to do some menial task for actual food. The sign, at least, is merely a cliché – and almost certainly a lie.
There are, of course, few jobs to be had. Our country is not organized to assure that there are either jobs or dignity. There is much talk of these things, in high circles and in front of the camera, but people have been shed from the economy year after year, decade after decade. What remains is only a thin, fragile shell of professionals, nervously clinging to their jobs, and various detached elites who only shuffle paper and juggle numbers. For most of the rest, there has been the indignity of either public charity or Wal-Mart jobs. We have outsourced the making of things to others. A great nation has been traded for a credit bubble.
The panhandler is what America has produced. We will see more of him. He is the product of our collective ambition and complacency -- the delinquent offspring of our contempt and our self-satisfied generosity. We shrink from his image because he wakes us from our cultural conceit. We fear we might become him. A nameless artifact, standing by an exit ramp. Invisible. Despised. Unnecessary.
Some open their hearts, or their wallets at any rate, and hand the man a dollar or two and the requisite allotment of pity. Some hurl insults and accusations. Most pretend he isn’t there, and wait impatiently for the green light to release them from his presence. He’s a polarizing figure, this man with the sign. He gets on our nerves.
When I am in a rational frame of mind, as I do endeavor to be, I ask myself what I can actually know about a stranger based on a scruffy appearance and a sign. I cannot know much. I cannot know his personal history at a glance. I cannot know whether or not he has made an honest effort to find work. I cannot know whether or not he is a habitual panhandler or simply someone who has fallen on hard times. I can reasonably infer, though, that the purpose of the sign is more to elicit plain charity than to advertise a willingness to work for food. No one picks up strange men by the highway, takes them home to mow the yard, and gives them a can of beans in payment. People buy off their consciences with cash from the safety of their cars. Even if work were offered, certainly it must be more profitable to stand by the road holding a sign than to do some menial task for actual food. The sign, at least, is merely a cliché – and almost certainly a lie.
There are, of course, few jobs to be had. Our country is not organized to assure that there are either jobs or dignity. There is much talk of these things, in high circles and in front of the camera, but people have been shed from the economy year after year, decade after decade. What remains is only a thin, fragile shell of professionals, nervously clinging to their jobs, and various detached elites who only shuffle paper and juggle numbers. For most of the rest, there has been the indignity of either public charity or Wal-Mart jobs. We have outsourced the making of things to others. A great nation has been traded for a credit bubble.
The panhandler is what America has produced. We will see more of him. He is the product of our collective ambition and complacency -- the delinquent offspring of our contempt and our self-satisfied generosity. We shrink from his image because he wakes us from our cultural conceit. We fear we might become him. A nameless artifact, standing by an exit ramp. Invisible. Despised. Unnecessary.
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