Posts Tagged ‘libertarianism’
more gobbledegook on free will?: C D Broad
The Cambridge philosopher C D Broad (1887-1971) was, from what I’ve read, a genial self-effacing fellow, who according to his bio, got into philosophy because he didn’t think he could make it as a scientist. His contribution to the Berofsky volume is, so far, the most incomprehensible piece I’ve read. So, in the French tradition of explication de texte, I’ll have a go at pulling apart the penultimate paragraph of his essay. The whole essay is entitled ‘Determinism, indeterminism and libertarianism’ (published in 1952). The final two paragraphs of the essay come under the sub-title ‘Libertarianism’:
We are now in a position to define what I will call ‘Libertarianism’. This doctrine will be summed up in two propositions. (1) Some (and it may be all) voluntary actions have a causal ancestor which contains as a cause-factor the putting-forth of an effort which is not completely determined in direction and intensity by occurrent causation. (2) In such cases the direction and the intensity of the effort are completely determined by non-occurrent causation, in which the self or agent, taken as a substance or continuant, is the non-occurrent total cause. Thus, Libertarianism, as defined by me, entails Indeterminism, as defined by me; but the converse does not hold.
This sort of language-torturing borders on criminality, it seems to me. But it might be fixed. My simplification:
Here’s my summary of Libertarianism. First, our deliberate acts often (and perhaps always) proceed from a causal chain which, followed back in the past, involve efforts which have little to do with these current actions [if that’s what Broad means by ‘occurrent causation’]. Second, this means that these current acts can be traced causally to those past actions/decisions which…. oh, forget it.
What Broad is engaging in here, presumably without fully realising it, is just word-play. He fails to define ‘occurrent causation’ and ‘non-occurrent causation’, which are key to understanding the paragraph. On the face of it you’d think they mean ’causes that exist’ and ’causes that don’t exist’, but that just sounds dumb, so better to stick with the obscurantism. More important, Broad fails completely, like most of the contributors to this volume, to deal with real situations and the lives of real people. It’s all abstraction, which is often the biggest failing of philosophy. I recall many years ago reading comments, I think by Max Black – another philosopher heavily influenced by Wittgenstein – to the effect that most philosophical problems eventually get taken over and clarified by science (‘theory of mind’ comes immediately to mind – I mean, brain). Meaning, I reckon, that they move from abstract constructions and general formulae to formalised research and the hard data thereby produced.
In any case, Broad relies a lot on the concept of entailment, as mentioned in the last sentence of the above quote, which is essentially a concept in logic. The determinism that Sapolsky is focussing on is about more slippery phenomena, like the combined effects of genes, hormones, neural connections, early childhood experiences, thousands of years of culture, physical development, recent trauma, and much else besides, in our daily decision-making. Strict entailment isn’t what this is about at all, but that hardly rules out or mitigates against a determinism which is multifactorial and inescapable. It turns out, apparently, on the basis of other, more patient (and no doubt smarter) analysts than myself, that Broad is likely, on the basis of this essay, as much a determinist as Sapolsky:
The position Broad reaches is a version of what is sometimes called free will pessimism: free will is incompatible with determinism, but there is no viable form of indeterminism which leaves room for free will, either; therefore, free will does not exist—indeed could not exist.
from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: Charlie Dunbar Broad
And just a note on libertarianism – it has always seemed to me an ideology of the more-than-haves rather than the have-nots – and I note with some bemusement, and amusement, that it doesn’t rate a mention in Sapolsky’s book. It also seems to run in families – if your Dad’s a libertarian, you’ll rarely feel free to be anything else! In any case, libertarianism is usually defined in terms of individual freedom, which is funny coming from the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet.
To be continued, perhaps.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and determinism, 1966
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/broad/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-Wittgenstein
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
free will (or not) stuff, past and present
‘The idea that free will can be reconciled with the strictest determinism is now very widely accepted’.
This is the opening sentence of the philosopher Philippa Foot’s 1957 essay ‘Free will as involving determinism’. Whether Foot is arguing that free will requires determinism, as many philosophers have argued, or ‘involves’ it in some other way, will be explored later. Or not.
So, having read Foot’s essay and wanting to be generous as she’s the only female contributor to the mid-twentieth century collection of essays I’m pushing my way through without much enthusiasm (linked below), I find little that’s truly relevant to the issue, to my mind. There are two reasons, I think, that these essays generally seem to miss the mark. One is that, largely under the perhaps baleful influence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Anglo-American philosophers of the period were overly concerned with ‘clarifying’ language terms such as ‘responsibility’, ‘agency’ ‘freedom’ and the like. The assumption was that, under the right circumstances, the person ‘could have done otherwise’, as long as you understood the term ‘could’ or ‘can’ correctly. To be fair, the importance of genetics was only just being felt at the time, to say nothing of epigenetics, endocrinology and neural development. Having said that, the lack of any thought to the massive effects of social disadvantage – having the ‘wrong parents’ and belonging to the ‘wrong’ class or sub-culture – is typical of these academicians, who clearly had little idea of what a childhood of extreme poverty or ill-treatment does to a soul, or of just how many people out there, myself included, could never dream of the academic life these philosophers enjoyed. That was a second assumption – that they were there by the grace of their own smarts – hence the exasperated arrogance I’ve often detected in their writings.
I did get to university though, in my thirtieth year, via the mature age entry scheme, after passing some sort of essay-writing, IQ testing amalgam. I did some philosophy as part of my BA, and read Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room at that time, because my philosophy tutor, whom I was rather attracted to, informed me that Dennett had recently been a visiting lecturer.
I found Elbow Room to be persuasive enough, even though, as a bottom-of-the pile, anti-authoritarian nobody, I had a niggling suspicion that, smart though I thought myself to be, there were reasons, or rather, forces, beyond my ken, for my occupying the lowly societal position I found myself – occupying. Some time later, after more or less dropping out of uni (it was something of an on-again, off-again romance), I read a few books by Steven Pinker, in one of which he briefly dealt with ‘free will’ in the same rather off-hand, elitist, compatibilist way. That, and some conversations I had with members of a humanist group I joined quite a bit later, made me reconsider the whole topic more thoughtfully, so that by the time I read Sam Harris’ little book on free will I was convinced. I should also add that Thalma Lobel’s Sensation: the new science of physical intelligence – full of bonafide research data on the unconscious effects of holding a warm cup of coffee (we feel friendlier), wearing sunglasses (we feel like cheating), mild hunger (makes us more snarky), and of our view of others (tall people are better leadership material, good-looking people have better morals) – also put me on the right track. Even so, Sapolsky’s summary dismissal of the free will myth towards the end of his book Behave came as something of a revelation – a lot of detail packed into a dozen pages or so (from memory). The degree to which we, like all living beings, are the plaything of shaping forces beyond our control became more apparent than ever.
All of this makes me wonder whether it’s worth continuing with the Berofsky book. Sadly, I learned nothing useful from Philippa Foot’s contribution. What I did find rather interesting was that her grandfather was Grover Cleveland, twice President of the USA. Not that this would have had any career influence on this Oxford-educated co-founder of ‘virtue ethics’ hahahahahahaha.
And just on the topic of heritage, I happened to listen recently to a podcast commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Anglo-Australian Telescope. It included a broadcast made in the early 70s about the telescope’s launch. A couple of British astronomers were interviewed, and I was struck by their plummy accents – ‘one is raally struck by the quality of viewing here in the southern hemisphaar, it rahther takes one’s breath away’ (okay, not verbatim). Clearly, success in such exalted fields was more due to one’s connections with the royal family than with mere talent. An American astronomer was also interviewed, with a basic New York accent as far as I could tell. Of course, academic success in the US is more due more to New Money than to Old.
So anyway, I’m continuing with the Berofsky volume, for now, and I want to analyse a passage from a 1951 essay, ‘Is “freewill” a pseudo-problem?’, by C A Campbell (a Scots philosopher educated at Glasgow University – where Adam Smith, James Watt, Frances Hutcheson and Lord Kelvin all got their start – and at Oxford. Sigh). I want to analyse this passage because I found it so discombobulating. Hopefully it’ll turn out more combobulous by the end of the process:
Let us put the argument implicit in the common view [that we have free will, incompatible with determinism] a little more sharply. The moral ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. If we say that A morally ought to have done X, we imply that in our opinion, he could have done X. But we assign moral blame to a man only for failing to do what we think he morally ought to have done. Hence if we morally blame A for not having done X, we imply that he could have done X even though in fact he did not. In other words, we imply that A could have acted otherwise than he did. And that means that we imply, as a necessary condition of a man’s being morally blameworthy, that he enjoyed a freedom of a kind not compatible with unbroken causal continuity.
First, there’s so much that’s mid-20th century about this passage, and all the essays in the Berofsky volume. They all, including the one female contributor, use, at all times, the male pronoun to identify an abstract or ‘universal’ human and her decisions. They also describe abstract situations – ‘A could/should have done X but he chose to do Y’. By contrast there are no abstract humans in Sapolsky’s determinist analyses and descriptions. In fact, the lack of abstractness or universality of every human (not to mention other animals) is a major theme of his argument. Campbell (who turns out to self-identify as a libertarian), like most philosophers of the time, utilises clunky phrases such as ‘necessary condition’ and ‘unbroken causal continuity’. Even ‘moral blame’ sounds clunky to me. If we blame someone for something, the morality (or rather, immorality) element is already implied. In short, this passage could’ve been much shorter, and so clearer. Here’s my update:
Here, in short, is the common or garden incompatibilism argument. Saying ‘she should have’ implies that she could have. We blame people for failing to do what they really should’ve done, in our view. They could’ve acted otherwise but chose not to, thus exercising their own personal freedom, unconstrained by determinism.
I don’t think I’ve missed anything out here, but I think it reveals the weakness of Campbell’s reasoning, which is easy to miss among all the philosophic dross. And that is that, ‘exercising our own personal freedom’ isn’t proof that our decision is not determined. It’s just a phrase, after all. Campbell’s extended argument, presented later in his essay, is of the ‘self is its own undetermined (or self-determined) determinator’, variety which is just silly – though rather popular. He bases this largely on the swirling complexity we find within our own minds, which leads to determinism-beating impulsivity, unpredictability and the like. So our determining factors are complex – what else is new?
Anyway, I’ve decided to continue grinding through the Berofsky volume, in tandem with Sapolsky’s much more enlightening Determined. I’m also planning to write a few posts of the ‘dummies’ guide to particle physics/quantum mechanics’ type, which might be good for a laugh. Never too late to learn.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and Determinism, 1965
Thalma Lobel, Sensation: the new science of physical intelligence, 2014
Sam Harris, Free will, 2012
Robert Sapolsky, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, 2017
On free will and libertarianism 3: freedom and politics
Canto: So I’ve tried to establish my claim that free will just doesn’t exist, which will of course be rejected by those who are obsessed with the notion, who go on at length about freedom from government, the ‘system’, conformism, gender norms, religion, taxation, and so on. Of course, it would be highly unusual to hear any humans asserting their freedom from being human. We all seem to recognise that we’re stuck with that constraint. So, what is it, to be human?
Jacinta: Well I’m not sure if you’ve succeeded in convincing me about a complete lack of free will. It may be a product of complexity – that’s to say, we just don’t know what all the determining factors are, they’re so mind-bogglingly complex that the sense that we’ve made a particular positive or negative decision through the processes of unconstrained thought is probably the best explanation we can make in many circumstances. Isn’t that more or less the compatibilist argument?
Canto: Well, maybe, but I don’t think we’re the best judges of our own decision-making processes, just as, evidence shows, we’re not the best judges of our own abilities, our sex appeal, and so forth. For obvious evolutionary reasons, we’re inclined to think better of ourselves than others think of us. It helps us to keep afloat. But let’s turn now, for a while, to political libertarianism. First, it’s based, it seems to me, on the concept of rights, which is rather recent, though undoubtedly useful in trying to outline for individuals the needed conditions for a fruitful life.
Jacinta: Inauspicious beginnings, as we’ve discussed before, but perhaps coming of age as a useful guide with the Universal Declaration. But there’s an obvious problem with basing our ethical and political values on individual liberty when we’re clearly the most hypersocial species on the planet.
Canto: Yes, and that hypersociality has involved the development of somewhat coercive hierarchical state systems such as the feudal system in its various forms throughout Eurasia. These dominance systems, however, have been phenomenally successful for the spread of our species and for our own overall dominance of the biosphere.
Jacinta: And a domination based on control of land has since morphed into a dominance based on markets. But it’s much more complicated than that. State control has integrated people in terms of language, customs, religion and so forth. As we’ve already pointed out, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, our jobs, our education, we didn’t create any of these as individuals but acquired them as part of an organisational structure that existed long before we came into being and will continue long after we pass. Isn’t all this rather problematic for libertarians?
Canto: Yes, I’ve pointed out before that libertarianism is really a product of the success of the state system, of hypersocial civilisation. The individual, who is in many respects the product of all this social construction, has been so benefitted by it that she feels she owes it all to her own striving, somewhat like the ungrateful offspring of an all-giving mother.
Jacinta: Who’s she, the cat’s mother? But it’s interesting that a lot of disadvantaged people, really quite poor people, are stridently anti-government. Look at so many Trumpet types. His buffoonish incompetence predictably led to dysfunction in every sector of government, to the total delight of his supporters. Would you call these people libertarians?
Canto: Well I doubt if they would call themselves libertarians or have much idea of what the term meant, but I’m sure many of them would be in the category of those who rarely or ever vote, who would see, and suffer from, the inequities of society, which are of such a complex nature that one of the easiest targets for their ire would be government. After all, those in government aren’t poor by their standards.
Jacinta: “Don’t vote, it just encourages them”. Yes, these are people without easy connections to big business, higher education, or political clout. Constraints on free will, you might say?
Canto: The politics of resentment, as you realise that particular avenues don’t seem to be open to you, and you might not have even known those avenues existed until it was too late. So these people shouldn’t be labelled as libertarians – their plight is too complex to be pigeon-holed in such a way. The ‘real’ libertarians base their position on the evolution, over the past few centuries, of the concept of rights. They’ve taken the Universal Declaration, based squarely on the individual…
Jacinta: Having at last, in the 20th century, expanded on the ‘man’ part.
Canto: Yes, and they’ve run with it, especially with regard to restraints on individual freedom which affect others, from freedom from taxation to freedom to drive dangerously crappy cars, own hand-guns or go about unmasked and unvaccinated during a pandemic.
Jacinta: Not to mention freedom to exploit others in employment. Doesn’t the USA have about the lowest minimum wage rates in the WEIRD world? Not to mention low rates of what they call ‘unemployment insurance’, which is taxable and of limited duration. “Stop scrounging off the government, get out there and get exploited like us…”
Canto: Yes, we love USA-bashing. But of course libertarianism is far from an exclusively US ideology, anyone can indulge in it. But it does seem to rely heavily on individual freedom as a right, and since free will is a myth, IMHO, that’s a bit of a non-starter. But here I want to talk about rights. I think the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a great advance, not because of its promotion of rights particularly, but because it was a first attempt to be fully global about the conditions for human flourishing. These conditions will always need to be tweaked, because humanity is evolving. Rights are a useful human construct but we need to be aware of their fundamental artificiality. This artificiality can hopefully be more easily uncovered when we note that they’re based on the individual, an entity that simply doesn’t exist outside of the society or culture that brought it into being. You can, of course, isolate a human being, just as you can isolate a chimp, a bonobo, an elephant, a dolphin or a crow, but you cannot understand or explain or define any of these creatures without understanding the species, sub-species, culture or community they belong to. If we were to talk about the ‘rights’ of a crow, for example, we would have to talk about the conditions required for a crow’s flourishing. And it’s those conditions that really matter, not the crow’s ‘rights’. So ‘rights’ talk is really a way of talking about something else, something much more important.
Jacinta: So… let me be clear about this. Have you just demolished rights as a fundamental concept?
Canto: Haha, well I’ve just tried to establish, or promote, a more fundamental concept, which goes back in history well before the concept of rights. Aristotle used the term eudaimonia, though whether it was his invention, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter really. Think of it as the conditions for flourishing – whether for a human, a guppy or a tardigrade. They all need their own species to keep on keeping on, as a species.
Jacinta: Ah, but group selection is a myth isn’t it?
Canto: No, not group selection. The individual, being part of a group, or species, seeks to mate with other members of that species, which is not a sacrifice for the group, far from it. The individual is in some very strong sense motivated to replicate itself through reproduction, which indirectly benefits the species.
Jacinta: So these conditions for flourishing take into account individuals as individual members of something larger, a culture, a species, etc?
Canto: Yes precisely, that membership of a larger whole, which for humanity has become a more global, hypersocial whole than ever, due to our capacity for destruction – nuclear arsenals, destruction of habitats, greenhouse gas emissions, the production of waste and so forth – makes a mockery of the individual’s claim to freedom of action, when they simply can’t and don’t exist outside of that hypersocial, productive and destructive community. We just need to understand what has made us human, and it’s not what libertarians seem to think it is. And that’s really fundamental.
Jacinta: Well that’s interesting. Libertarianism really seems to stand and fall on rights, unless there are some types of libertarianism that take a different tack.
Canto: Yes I’m not really sure if I want to explore the topic any further.
Jacinta: Haha well then that’s all for now.
References
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/
the anti-bonobo world 1: the BHT
on free will and libertarianism 2: character and punishment
I hope I have dispelled two fallacies that have allowed the sciences of human nature to sow unnecessary fear. The first fallacy is that biological explanations corrode responsibility in a way that environmental explanations do not. The second fallacy is that causal explanations (both biological and environmental) corrode responsibility in a way that a belief in an uncaused will or soul does not.
Steven Pinker, ‘the fear of determinism’, from The blank slate
Canto: I’m currently reading Jane Goodall’s book Through a window, about the chimp communities in Tanzania observed and monitored by herself and her team over twenty-odd years – the hierarchies, the friendships, the brutalities, the shifting allegiances and the tragedies. It’s all very recognisable to me, a fellow primate – enough to bring tears to my eyes on occasion.
Jacinta: So we were talking about free will and all that.
Canto: Precisely. We don’t get to choose our species, or our parents, or in the case of chimps, our mothers in particular. Nor do we choose to get crippled by polio, pushed from a high tree-branch, or killed in infancy, for no apparent reason, by an enraged or jealous, or perhaps insane, adult female. Are these environmental or biological events? Does it really matter?
Jacinta: And if we survive them, they shape our character, is that your point?
Canto: Well, I’ve just reread a section of Steven Pinker’s The blank slate, which deals with what he considers our ‘unreasonable fear of determinism’, and it reminds me of what I found so unpalatable about certain academics’ disdain for the idea that determinism diminishes personal responsibility. Pinker, in this essay, reminds me of those typical sons of privilege who mock the ‘his genes/environment made him do it’ legal defence that lawyers sometimes use to get their clients off. I should remind Pinker and his ilk that most individuals who find themselves in legal trouble due to the environment they didn’t choose to grow up in can’t afford lawyers, so they usually don’t get a chance to make those arguments let alone win them. They have to throw themselves on the mercilessness of the court, whose bewigged officers make it clear which class they belong to and and are there to uphold.
Jacinta: So I take it that the above Pinker quote isn’t entirely kosher to you.
Canto: Yes, it’s bullshit. Pinker gives himself away with the examples he chooses to use. He mocks the environmental determinist ‘defence’ without coming remotely close to examining environmental determinism itself (which cannot, by the way, be disentangled from biological determinism, and I don’t find the distinction a particularly valid one). Instead he smugly recites a list of lawyerly tropes – ‘the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics’, etc, without showing a moment’s insight into the kinds of lives I saw around me while growing up, and which have been recounted by those lucky enough to survive, or by those who stood witness to the misery of others.
Jacinta: So your point is that the fallacies Pinker ‘identifies’ in the quote at the top of this post are not fallacies at all?
Canto: Well, my point is that Pinker oversimplifies the issue to a risible degree. Or rather, he doesn’t even address it. For example, he mocks ‘the abuse excuse’, as if abuse is an ‘excuse’ for something rather than a trauma with lifelong effects, depending on its intensity, its type, its duration and other variables including the enormously complex background against which it occurs. These events shape the very being of that person, pig, rat or butterfly. And yet Pinker has the chutzpah to claim that he and his white horse have ridden into view to dispel for us the ‘fallacy’ that such abuse corrodes any responsibility we have for our actions. Yeah, but… nah.
Jacinta: So what about this concept of responsibility? And how we relate it to crime and punishment. Can we really say that we’re not, or never, responsible for our actions?
Canto: I think we’re tricked into thinking we’re responsible by the felt complexity of our own thoughts. When we look at less complex animals – dogs, for example, or birds, we’re much less liable to attribute responsibility to their actions. So what’s the difference between those creatures and ourselves? Surely it’s only complexity.
Jacinta: And the fact that we can speak for ourselves – which is part of our complexity – and other creatures can’t. We can voice the claim that we were free to do otherwise, as no other creature can, as far as we know. But what does all this mean for apportioning blame and punishment? Is our court and justice system obsolete?
Canto: Well the justice system is, I suppose, designed to keep us safe from each other. You see this, again in a less complex way, with wild animals. I recall watching a video of pack animals, I can’t recall, maybe hyenas or wolves, in which the pack leader for some reason started behaving dysfunctionally – that’s to say, to the detriment of the pack. He was biting and wounding other pack members for no apparent reason. Eventually, it got too much, and the pack rose up against him, hurting him badly, and sending him to the back of the pack. From then on he behaved more like the runt of the litter, living off the scraps of the others. You see this sort of thing too, in gorilla and chimp groups. The group deals with the alpha male turned miscreant But if we can only agree on the evidence that free will is a myth, then we should be able to develop a far better justice system than the one we have.
Jacinta: How so?
Canto: Well, take one very toxic issue. Paedophilia. There’s at least one person I know well who has a kind of zero tolerance, ‘worst of the worst’ attitude to serial paedophiles, and simply doesn’t want to hear any kind of free will argument that might ‘exonerate’ them. It’s easy to understand this attitude being held by a victim whose life has been seriously damaged by a paedophile, and as we know, they’re a favourite tabloid newspaper villain. But, as has been pointed out by Sam Harris among others, arguments that paedophiles are the worst of the worst and are incorrigible, ‘never to be released’, are essentially arguments for a lack of free will. If they can never be ‘corrected’, how can they be held responsible for their ‘incorrectness’ in the first place? It follows that ‘punishment’ for such people not only doesn’t work, but is unfair. A justice system should of course be about protecting people from the malpractices of the minority, but surely it needs to be accompanied or tied up with an understanding of how these malpractices arise, and how to fix them.
Jacinta: Do you think serial paedophilia is fixable?
Canto: I have no idea, but I’m saying that should be the aim. To take a simpler example, I don’t know if a broken diff in a car is fixable (I don’t even know what that is), but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be, and if it can be fixed obviously it should be. As Robert Sapolsky points out, we’ve fixed schizophrenia largely with medications, and knowing more than one schizophrenic as I do, that has improved their lives massively.
Jacinta: Okay, so maybe that’s enough about free will for now. There’s another kind of freedom that’s been in the air for decades, and that’s political freedom – freedom from the tyranny of Big Government. It has generally gone by the name ‘libertarianism’. I suppose that if there’s no free will, that kind of freedom doesn’t even get out of the starting gate?
Canto: Well political libertarianism brings up a whole different set of issues, though clearly it’s dependent on and assumes free will. But we’ll leave all that for next time.
a bonobo world 38: bonobos aren’t monogamous
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Exodus 20:17 New International Version
As to humans and monogamy, it would be absurd to try to cover the subject in one book, let alone an essay, but absurdism has its appeal. Ferdinand Mount has many interesting things to say on the topic in his 1982 book The subversive family, which is not so much a defence of the nuclear family as an account of its endurance against attacks from religious organisations, communists and free-love advocates, among others. More recently, the same-sex marriage push throughout the developed world has been met with surprise rather than serious pushback from those of us not particularly committed to the institution, heterosexual or otherwise.
Advocates of monogamy generally focus on one positive attribute as central: loyalty. Of course it has variants – commitment, constancy, dedication and devotion -terms which are also used to promote nationalism.
It follows that those not committed to monogamy are described as fickle, selfish, shallow, or worse – decadent and degenerate. Top-down, ultra-controlling governments such as those of present-day Russia and China seek to prescribe the traditional values of their people in contrast to the decadence of the US and Western Europe, citing, with due exaggeration, the breakdown of families and the rise of homosexuality and other decadent practices, but they’re fighting a losing battle in an increasingly interactive human world. In fact, as Mount points out, until recently all states felt they had a right to control the rates and terms of divorce:
… it is remarkable how long even Western governments have clung on to their power over marriage. The most striking example is the state control of divorce – which in England was only transferred to the State from the Church courts in the mid-nineteenth century against severe opposition from Gladstone and other high churchmen. The real relaxation in the laws of divorce did not reach England – and many other countries – until well after the Second World War.
But the fact is that, if monogamy is on the decline, it’s a very slow one. We appear to be a jealous lot, ever on the lookout for betrayal and boundary-crossing. This doesn’t seem to be the bonobo way, and few would think to describe bonobos (or dolphins or elephants) as degenerate.
Monogamy is defended, promoted and celebrated in other ways too – in the form of true love. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Héloïse and Abelard, Bogart and Bacall, these couplings with their happy or sad endings have been presented, imitated and played upon in infinite varieties in novels, films and other media, while another view of this estate, more pragmatic or ‘realistic’, has an almost businesslike feel to it. You meet, you partner up, it’s all hormonal and feel-good for the first months or years, during which offspring come along, then come the disagreements and irritants, followed by a resolution of sorts, an appreciation of the good, a minimising of the rest, and another kind of love supposedly supervenes, a co-dependence which you’re never quite sure is unadventurous laziness or something like maturity. It helps that being part of a couple is highly approved of in a taken-for-granted way, and you don’t have to buy an interactive toy to keep you company in your twilight years.
However, defended or not, monogamy is certainly under some pressure, with the religious culture, which has emphasised the eternal nature of pair-bonding – ‘as long as ye both shall live’ – being very much in decline in Australia and similar nations. The developments of globalism and multiculturalism have encouraged us to look more broadly at human mating patterns, both culturally and historically. We generally find that, even in purportedly polygynous societies, monogamy is the norm – though serial monogamy is increasingly common. Think of the experimental teens – having any more than one boyfriend/girlfriend at a time is full of headaches, and because this is always about more than mating, rivalries, personality clashes and power struggles are bound to abound.
And yet, bonobos and other intelligent social animals are not classified as monogamous, serial or otherwise. Is this classification correct, and if so, how do they do it?
One obvious difference between them and us, is that they hang around together in large groups more or less all the time, whereas we spend much of our time in largely sealed off nuclear family units. We have homes, millions and millions of them. This separateness is built upon as we distinguish our homes from our neighbours’, and develop a private sphere within them. Private ownership extends to all the objects within the home’s perimeter, living or non-living. In some unmentionable countries, we even have private arsenals to protect our own from the potential incursions of ‘fellow’ humans. Compare, say, dolphins, who live in pods, for the protection, resource provision and welfare of all members. And yet, we know that we’re the most socially constructed mammals on the planet, and we owe our domination precisely to this fact. And we don’t, many of us, find anything odd about this paradoxical scenario.
So it seems that bonobos have evolved a mentality of sharing, of food, of space, and of each others’ bodies. This isn’t likely total, they surely experience greed, jealousy, spite and other such primal emotions, but it’s more like a spectrum and we’re tending, with affluence, to drift to one end of it, to what’s mine is mine, and what a depressing failure you are.
I recall, as autonomous (and electric) vehicles looked like they might be ‘five years away’, as the cliche had it, claims that they would not only solve the problem of petrol emissions, but also of traffic congestion, since we could not only dispense with drivers, but also with owners. Vehicles could be owned communally, and so be put to regular use as technological slaves, instead of hanging around idly in driveways and carparks. The libertarian reaction was swift and predictable. ‘I worked hard to get my bright shiny badge of a Tesla – daddy didn’t help me, honest – and I’m damned if I’m going to share it with any freeloading riff-raff etc etc’.
There are, of course, people pushing back against this libertarian drift. Most of them are women, it seems to me. People who support community banking, ethical investments and resource sharing. It’s an uphill battle, but it’s worth fighting, because the alternative is, I feel, pretty horrible to contemplate.
Reference
The subversive family, by Ferdinand Mount, 1982
On politics and states – some opening remarks
One of my abiding interests in life is how to organise society effectively for the benefits of its members. It’s so easy to criticise corrupt and incompetent governments and states, but it seems clear to me that, given the crooked timber of humanity, there’s no ideal form of state or anything close to it. In any case I’m a pragmatist rather than an idealogue, so I’m guessing that the posts I write on this topic will be more about what to avoid rather than what constitutes best practice.
Governments can and should play many roles in trying to provide for an effective society, and these roles often seem to be in conflict. For example, I’ve always been keen on government’s regulatory role in protecting the potentially exploited from would-be or actual exploiters. This would seem to conflict with government’s role in promoting economic success and well-being, in which, for example, traders and producers seek to sell products of highly contested worth.
Of course one popular view of government is that it should play a minimal role, allowing markets to flow as freely as possible. However the claim that government is ‘always the problem, never the solution’ strikes me as easily refuted. The hands-off approach from government led to the global financial crisis of 2007, in the minds of all but the most hardened libertarians, and in Australia, a recent Royal Commission into the banking sector, which was fought against vigorously by then Federal Treasurer (and now Prime Minister) Scott Morrison, has revealed banking corruption on a massive scale by all of the major banks in the country. Why would anyone think that self-regulation works, given the lessons of history and what we know of human nature?
So I believe that states – that’s to say governments – should have a major role to play in protecting their citizens from exploitation, while providing incentives for industry and capital enterprises to develop and thrive – with certain provisos. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, for example, that I feel that good science, in industrial and other capital enterprises, should be encouraged by government. So good government necessarily entails scientifically literate government. In this respect I believe that good government should be more interventionist than, say, government is expected to be in the USA, where, apparently, pharmaceutical products of highly dubious efficacy can be advertised. Truth in advertising appears not to be a major concern of government in that country, and I thank that’s a mistake.
Looking around the world and reading history, I find the worst governments, in terms of corruption and disastrous consequences for the governed, are those that have managed to avoid being held to account for their actions by those affected. That’s why democracy, bolstered by a free and informed fourth estate, and of course an independent judicial system, has proved to be more effective than its alternatives. But of course democracy is practiced in many different ways in many different states, and it too has its failings.
There’s also the complex role of culture in many states or governing systems. Nationalists tend to exaggerate or manufacture cultural traits, while humanists like myself tend to underplay them or wish them away, but I think the significant increase in globalisation in recent decades has been a benefit overall. Isolationism sees its most extreme examples in North Korea and the Andaman Islands, two very different cases, requiring us to think of culture, its manipulation or otherwise, in complex ways.
I’m not sure where all this is going, but I’ve been wanting to write about this sort of stuff for a long time. I’m currently reading a political history of Korea (north and south) and Russia, in the lead-up to the Putin dictatorship, and of course I’ve learned a lot about the problematic US presidential system over the past three years or so, so there’s plenty to reflect upon…
a few thoughts on libertarianism
Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behavior which are unfortunately wrong). I don’t know who wrote this.
Aren’t libertarians a lovely lot?
I might look more closely at some libertarian philosophy later, but for now I want to critique the kind of standard libertarianism I’ve heard from politicians and bloggers.
Well, okay, I’ll start with a philosopher, Robert Nozick, whose much-vaunted/pilloried book Anarchy, State and Utopia I tried to read in the eighties. I found it pretty indigestible and essentially learned from others that his argument depended rather too much on one principle – the human right of individuals to certain positive and negative freedoms, but especially negative ones, like the right to be left largely alone, to make their own decisions for example about how to contribute to the greater good. The book ended up advocating for a minimalist state, in which everyone gets to create their own communities of kindred spirits, organically grown A cornucopia of utopias. The kind of state that, ummm, like, doesn’t exist anywhere. That’s the problem. Utopia is definable as a society that only exists in fantasy.
And then there’s the exaltation of the individual. This is the problem I’ve encountered with every libertarian I’ve read or viewed – and I’m quite glad I’ve rarely had any personal encounters with them.
If I did, here would be my response. Homo sapiens are the most socially constructed mammals on the planet. Language has massively facilitated this, and in turn has become our most powerful social product. Common languages have created civilisations, and this has allowed us to dominate the planet, for better or worse. And civilisation requires, or just is, organised social structure. That’s to say, a state, that eternal bogey-man of the libertarian.
This entity, the state, has shaped humans for millennia. Today, we owe (largely) to the state the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the education we’re hopefully still having, the jobs we’ve had and lost, the houses we live in, the cars we used to drive, and the good health we increasingly enjoy. That’s why, it seems to me, we owe it to ourselves to make the state we live in as good as we can make it, in terms of health, safety, opportunity, support, pleasure and self-improvement, for all its members.
It seems to me we have to work with what exists instead of trying to invent utopias – because, obviously, one person’s utopia is another’s nightmare. What exists today is a variety of states, some clearly better than others. The minimalist states are among the worst, and they’re understandably called failed states. There is no effectively functioning minimalist state on the planet, a fact that many libertarians blithely ignore. Their emphasis on individual liberty seems to me the product of either beggar-thy-neighbour selfishness or starry-eyed optimism about natural affinities.
Again, I turn to the USA, my favourite whipping-state. This hotbed of libertarians has not blossomed as it could, considering its booming economy. From this distance, it seems a sad and often stomach-turning mixture of white-collar fraudsters and chronically disadvantaged, over-incarcerated victims, and good people who largely accept this as the status quo. The you-can-achieve-anything mantra of the American Dream generally sees individuals as blank slates who can best fulfil their potential when pulled from the rubble of the coercive state. Or State, as many libertarians prefer.
It didn’t take my recent reading of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave, a superb overview of human behaviour and its multifarious and interactive underpinnings, or Steven Pinker’s earlier The Blank Slate, to realise that this was a dangerous myth. It was always screamingly obvious to me, from my observation of the working-class milieu of my childhood, the variety of skills my classmates displayed and the problems they faced from the outset, together with my readings of more privileged worthies and their patrician connections (Bertrand Russell on the knee of William Gladstone always comes irritatingly to mind), that there has never been anything like an even playing field for exhibiting and making the most of whatever qualities we’re gifted with or are motivated to cultivate and improve.
So this is the problem: we’re not free to undo what has been ‘done to us’ – the parents we have, the country (or century) we’re born in, the traumas and joys we’ve experienced in the womb, our complex genetic inheritance and so forth. All of these things are connected to a much wider world and a past over which we have no control. They shape us (into go-getting libertarians or bleeding-heart liberals or whatever) much more than we’re generally prepared to admit. And these shaping forces, since the emergence of civilisation and that sometimes messily organised unit called the state, are profoundly social. And even if we’re not talking about western civilisation it’s the same – it takes a village to raise a child.
These shaping forces aren’t necessarily bad or good, they just are. But all in all we should be glad they are. The social brain is the brightest, most complex brain, and such brains wouldn’t have developed if the individual was sacrosanct, in receipt of the right to be ‘left alone’. Civilisation is surely the most impressive achievement of human evolution, and as Ralph Adolphs of Caltech puts it, ‘no component of our civilization would be possible without large-scale collective behavior’.
The state, of course, has its drawbacks, as do all large-scale multifaceted administrative entities. The ancient Greek city-states produced a host of brilliant contributors to their own esteem as well as to the world history of drama, philosophy, mathematics and history itself, in spite of being built on slavery and denying any equitable role to women, but even there the (probably few) slaves who worked in the most enlightened households would’ve benefitted from the collective, and the women, however officially treated, were surely just as involved and brainy as the men.
As society has grown increasingly complex we as individuals have grown in proportion, as have our individual delusions of grandeur. At least in some cases. What the best of us should have learned, though, is that a rich, diverse, dynamic society, which cannot but be organised, produces the best offerings to its children. Diminishing the state by refusing to contribute to it actually diminishes and impoverishes the self, diminishes connection and the recognition of collective value. This raises the rather large point that the self isn’t what most people think it is – an autonomous, self-actuated entity. Instead, it is driven by complex social inputs from the very start, indeed from long before it came into being. Just as events from long before a crow is born, or even conceived, will go a long way in determining how that adult crow behaves.
Yet the myth of the individual, autonomous self is a live one, and it’s what drives most libertarians. In so far as people see themselves as self-actualising, they will argue the same for others, and absolve themselves from responsibility for others’ failures, mistakes or incapacities. Such attitudes significantly play down disadvantages of background, and even reduce exposure to those differences. Since everyone has the choice to be as successful as me (according to my own measure of success), why should I waste time hanging out with losers? By that measure, to suggest that silver-spoon libertarians would willingly provide support to disadvantaged communities is as unrealistic as expecting Donald Trump to hang out with the construction workers on his trumpy towers.
In some respects, libertarianism represents the opposite pole to communism, on a continuum that stretches into complete delusion at both ends. There have never been any actual, functioning communist or libertarian states. Both are essentially abstract ideologies, which take little account of the science of evolved human behaviour. When we do take account of that science, we find it is fiendishly complex, with the individual as a unit being driven and shaped by social dependencies, connections and responsibilities, which are generally vital to that individual’s well-being. In western democratic societies, apart from family and workplace organisations, we have government, which includes, in Australia, councils, states and a federation of states. It all sound terribly complex and web-like, and some apparently see it as ‘the enemy of individual liberty’ but in fact it’s the web of civilised human life, which we’ve all contributed to creating, and it’s a pretty impressive web – though more impressive in some places than in others. I think the best thing we can try to do is to improve it rather than trying to extricate ourselves from it. In any case, doing so – I mean, removing ourselves from organised society – just won’t work, and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of our evolved humanity.