[From Mike Acree (990309.1230 PST)]
I'm not necessarily sorry to see that the anarchy thread has been laid
to rest in my absence. Tracy's parting message (990226.0800), however,
raises a different, and interesting, issue.
My relative silence in this debate is due to my sense of contrast
between
the nature of this forum and the nature of the topic. As Rick's
recent
post emphasized, this is a *scientific* forum. We gather here to
discuss,
study, model and otherwise probe a feature as to how the world *is*.
Mike's concern, in contrast, is an *ethical* one. The topic of
anarchism
is a discussion around how the world ought to be. It is focused on
choosing appropriate values. Although I share Mike's general ethical
biases, I refrain from attempting to advance them by reliance on PCT
because I agree with a particular philosophical insight which is
usually
phrased so: You cannot derive an 'is' from an 'ought'. With this in
mind
it is clear to me that PCT cannot imply a particular social vision.
It
certainly is more compatible with some visions than others, and in
that
manner it may be directly applied in the advancement of social theory.
But
it cannot "establish" an ethical position.
I have seen the argument of Chapter 17 as pragmatic more than (or rather
than) moral. This approach seemed to me to offer the advantage of
making the issue (of appropriate social organization) more empirical,
thus easier to discuss and perhaps to reach agreement on. I had aspired
to maintain the same approach myself, though Tracy's perception of my
thrust as moral indicates that I haven't succeeded very well.
But what is really interesting is having been drawn to the (tentative)
conclusion that the reason why dialogue on this topic has been so
difficult, and has accomplished so little, is that people really are
coming from a moral place, and that aspect must thus be addressed. In
this respect I am also seeking to address a post of Bill's some weeks
ago, I believe, where he expressed some interest in the real issues
dividing people of different political persuasions. He has suggested,
if I recall correctly, that the reason such disputes are so intractable
may be that system concepts are not a high enough level to resolve them.
My thinking thus far is leading me to a different conclusion, namely
that people are controlling for something at a _lower_ level, and that
the system concepts, as Rick has suggested for anarchy, are more of a
side consequence. That still doesn't make resolution of the conflict
easy, but it does point to some possible paths.
Liberals and conservatives in American culture today can be seen as
differing merely in having picked up different aspects of Christian
asceticism--as it were, the material and the spiritual. The sin of the
left is greed; the sin of the right is lust. Both sins have in common
that money and sex are things of which humans control for a rather high
level. People aspiring to either ascetic standard of morality commonly
feel that they need extra help, in the form of external
controls--rewards and punishments. But if you are to suffer such
deprivation, it is intolerable to see others unconstrained; hence the
press for universalizing such proscriptions, through the institution of
the Church or the State, or preferably both. Hence the idea of
legislation making crimes of one or the other of these sins makes sense
to almost everybody, and as a result we have criminalized both. This
analysis would account for the curious indifference of both liberals and
conservatives to the hardships their laws cause others. The typical
response is one we have heard several times on the Net: "_I_'m happy
with taxation (or heterosexual monogamy); if I'm willing to suffer the
deprivation, you should be, too." But I have also heard liberals, in
unguarded moments, complain about taxes, and boast about creatively
arranging their dinner parties or their honeymoon in Bali as a tax
deduction; and for conservatives who have strayed we need look no
farther than Congress. Ascetic codes lead people to feel frustrated and
deprived, therefore commonly entitled and inclined to override others,
and therefore probably more inclined to expect that others will do the
same.
This typology is obviously not exhaustive; there is plenty of room for
people who want to punish both sins. Al and Tipper Gore come famously
to mind, but so do many conservatives. There are also those who,
largely under the influence of Rand, reject both standards of morality.
For them, it might be said, with the same crudeness as the previous
characterizations, the fundamental sin is power. Like Rand, these
libertarians remain fiercely, often obnoxiously, moralistic. (In each
case, of course, it is the exercise of the respective capacity that is
the sin, rather than the feeling itself--making money, making love,
making war.) It is fair to ask whether this view constitutes a third
ascetic standard (one also with some Christian roots), and the answer
seems to me pretty clearly affirmative. The ideal of minimal-government
(as opposed to anarchist) libertarians is a government that would punish
only their sin--coercion (understood in a more specific sense than
Rick's, which seems to equate it with force or violence per se). And it
is not unknown for libertarians to give the impression of being
frustrated dictators. The fondness for military metaphors may be one
indication: years ago Rand had a feature in her newsletter called the
"Intellectual Ammunition Department," and the continuing popularity of
the phrase suggests that few of her followers felt any discomfort with
it.
There is also, especially among the young, a kind of punk nihilism which
cynically rejects all standards. I have some sympathy with their
conclusions, tending myself toward Nietzsche's cynical characterization
of ethics as the invention of the weak for the control of the strong.
But this position is missing for me, even more conspicuously, the same
element as the others: an orientation to the positive connections
between people. Even as things stand, the reason why most people do not
rob or murder each other is not the fear of being caught and punished
(and, conversely, that fear is often ineffective against those who are
so inclined). A sense of respect for others as autonomous beings
survives to some degree--the quality I'm struggling to articulate may be
contained in what Bill has referred to as "grace"--but our systems of
legal and ethical rules go far toward undermining it. Bill has written
in various places of the phenomenon of extrinsic motivation, a kind of
Gresham's law of motivation. An interesting example of how we relax our
own efforts at control as it is taken over for us is the ethics of
research. We responded a few decades ago to some egregious abuses by
creating the ubiquitous bureaucracy of Institutional Review Boards; now,
as a result, people have come to treat research ethics as a matter of
complying with the paperwork. Practices not explicitly covered by the
rules, such as talking about research participants in restaurants, go on
as before, but with perhaps even less sense of awareness and
responsibility. In the general case I'm concerned with, surely the
greatest obstacle to a felt sense of respect for others is simply
childhood. The best most children can hope for is to be treated like
pets--to be owned, controlled, trained, protected, perhaps to be cuddled
when young--but to be consistently regarded with respect, as autonomous
human beings, is rare.
I don't think the political ideas I've advocated depend on the universal
achievement of any such attitude; such an achievement would surely never
be more than partial, anyway (as it already is). But neither is the
vision utopian in the sense of being unworkable in principle; there is
much that could actually be done, at least over the long run, and
different political arrangements vary in the degree to which they
promote that outcome.
To my claim that the basis of political disputes may lie at a lower
level than system concepts--namely, people controlling for a perception
of themselves as moral, by a standard they feel incapable of meeting
unaided, while controlling simultaneously for a sense of justice, which
requires that everyone be subject to the same constraints--it might
reasonably be objected that moral concepts are system concepts, too. To
this I have no important objection; I have merely shifted the system
concept from political or economic to ethical. I'm not especially
pleased with this conclusion, but it does look to me as though focusing
on the political or economic concepts, to the exclusion of the moral,
will miss the fundamental source of the resistance. I intend these
comments, I hasten to add, as a possibly useful observation about
political conflicts, not as an invitation to an ethical debate.
Mike