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(This is the third in a series of four posts which discuss Tea Party “Political Fundamentalism”, comprised of the unholy trinity of “Constitutional Idolatry”, Liberty Idolatry, and Small Government Idolatry.)
In two previous posts, I discussed the insistence that individual liberty militates against the use of government to address issues that arise from mutual interdependence. Sometimes the interdependence itself is denied, sometimes the efficacy of using government to address it, though usually some muddled combination of the two.
Proving our interdependence, and how it is implicated in every aspect of our lives, is an easy task: How loud I play my stereo may affect how well my neighbor sleeps; how much water I pump from my well may affect how much water others have available, or if the aquifer itself gets spoiled; how I dispose of my waste may affect others’ health and welfare; how I raise my child may affect all of the people that my child affects in the course of her life. The list is endless, tentacles of interdependence permeating our existence.
But our interdependence is more than the sum of all of these isolated examples. It is the fundamental truth of our existence. Our market economy is not a means to our individual independence, but rather a vehicle for our collective interdependence, organizing a complex division of labor that produces the wealth from which we differentially benefit. Our religious beliefs, our private thoughts, our understanding of ourselves and our universe, are all culturally inherited collections of memes, only, at most, very marginally modified by any individual contribution. Every action or non-action we choose to engage in affects others, sometimes in reverberating and self-amplifying ways. A concept of “liberty,” raised to a sacred status, distilled into an absolute, and divorced from an understanding of the significance of our interdependence, is the conversion of a powerful positive force in human development into a powerful negative one.
Any casual consideration of the reality of our existence reveals, instantly, that “liberty” is not an absolute good: The liberty to kill anyone who you dislike would not be good. The liberty to dump your toxic waste into someone else’s well would not be good. More generally, the liberty to engage in actions that adversely affect others has to be weighed against the costs that it is imposing on others. Our interdependence is relevant. And each individual’s liberty is curtailed by every other individuals’ rights.
Therefore, despite our shared commitment to the value of liberty, our shared belief, that all things being equal, more liberty is preferable to less, it is a commitment that does not exist in a vacuum. It is not a value that trumps all other considerations. We are still called upon to consider how the actions of each affect the welfare of others, and we are called upon doing so in conjunction with our choices in how to govern ourselves.
It is not just a challenge of determining when one individual’s rights end and another’s begin, but also a challenge of understanding how the exercise of individual rights aggregate into system-wide consequences, and how those consequences also compel constraints on the scope of individual liberty. Children, for example, must be vaccinated to attend school, because too many unvaccinated children in close quarters day after day pose a serious danger of deadly epidemic. Our individual choices to emit greenhouse gases contribute to global warming which poses dangers of myriad kinds, including massive coastal flooding and widespread extreme weather events, as well as dramatic and highly consequential shifts in local climates worldwide. High velocity short-term stock market traders using high speed computers programmed with quick-hit algorithms can cause catastrophic market failures, such as the one that caused a rapid plummet in market values several months ago. Ignoring how the exercises of individual liberty implicit in these choices (not getting a vaccination, emitting unlimited greenhouse gases, and exploiting the market to everyone else’s potentially enormous detriment) affect others, and infringe on their liberties and rights, is pure folly.
The ideology of unadulterated absolute personal liberty is an insanity that ignores these irrefutable realities. But that doesn’t mean that the value of liberty cannot guide us. All we need to do is reconceptualize “liberty” as not only freedom from government, but also freedom to live and thrive, a reasonable broadening of the definition which can then guide us in how to use government to truly maximize our liberty. By this more reasonable definition, we have far more liberty than we have ever had before, liberty increased by technological and social institutional augmentations, rather than curtailed by blind ideological folly.
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A perennial metaphysical question has reared its implicit head on this site, as it inevitably does when discussing how to strike the optimal balance between personal and social responsibility (i.e., how much do we insist that people are responsible for doing what they can with the hand they’ve been dealt, and how much should we advocate for some shared responsibility for the hand they’ve been dealt?). The question is Free Will v. Determinism: To what extent do we choose our own destiny, and to what extent is it chosen for us?
First of all, we all know that, subjectively, we have free will. I can type this now, or not. I can type the word “choose” or the word “cheese” or any other word that comes to mind. Nothing forces me to type one or the other. It may be the case that I need a keyboard on which to type, and whether I have one or not may depend on factors that are beyond my control (if I were born in a dirt poor sub-Saharan village, my lack of access to one might well be something over which I had no control). But, within the context of what is available, I clearly can choose from a wide range of actions.
On the other hand, my choices are caused by a variety of mostly invisible in-puts, past and present. Just because the causes are many and complex, and are obscured by the impossibility of tracing most of them, does not mean that they don’t exist. In what way am I ever the original force of anything? Though we experience our choices as originating within us, we know that they are affected by pushes and pulls large and small, such as the need to earn a living, to take care of the people we love, to earn respect and avoid condemnation, to satisfy expectations and to realize goals that have psychological roots that ultimately originate in some combination of the genes we inherited and the environment in which they spun out their code. In one very real sense, we are each just a very complex arrangment of dominos embedded in a forever toppling, almost infinitely complex and encompassing arrangment.
If it weren’t for Quantum Mechanics, there would be no doubt that, objectively, the universe and everything in it is entirely deterministic. A simple thought experiment demonstrates this: Imagine the entire universe at any moment in history. For the purposes of the exercise, let’s say one million B.C. Freeze that universe in your imagination and duplicate it. Now set the two identical universes to run forward through time again. How could they possibly diverge? Everything in the second was identical to everything in the first, every motion, thought, impulse, event, were identical. So the spear that the prehistoric man was about to let loose in the first, he is about to let loose in the second. It will hit the beast in the same place, with the same effect. Every particle, every current, every swirl in the suchness is identical, and so all consequences of all causes must unfurl in an identical manner, throughout time, forever. The universe is completely deterministic.
Quantum Mechanics throws a wrench in this thought experiment, because, in reality, at the quantum level, uncertainty is an essential quality of nature. Quantum particles are not in one place and moving in one direction at one speed, but rather exist in a probalistic cloud, so that when the universe is duplicated, only the probabilistic cloud is duplicated, and slight variations will result at the quantum level. These variations will create tiny divergences in reality, that presumably will accumulate and amplify over time, until the two universes are quite distinct from one another. The universe is not objectively deterministic after all (at least not according to quantum theory).
Unfortunately for those who don’t like determinism, Quantum Mechanics has very limited relevance to the issues of personal and social responsibility. And mere free will matters less than how many choices that will has available to select from. Much in our lives is, in fact, determined prior to our existence, and independently of our choices. We are born into a family, with a given socioeconomic status, in a given location, in a given culture, at a given time, with a given social institutional context, with a given genetic make-up, and our range of available choices is dramatically constrained by all of those givens. Even to the extent that we buck the odds, we do so as the result of factors over which we had no control: A role model who encouraged us to be more confident and assertive; an opportunity, or a skill we happened to learn by a confluence of chances, or an inherent natural endowment; all or any of which are just the luck of the draw.
Recognition that the distribution of wealth and good fortune in the world and in this nation has very little to do with individual merit does not mean that personal responsibility has no role to play. No social system can function without an emphasis on personal responsibility, because unless we are motivated to be productive, and law abiding, and good citizens and parents and children and friends and neighbors and colleagues, then the failure to strive to be those things has consequences. It contracts the production of wealth and expands the production of suffering. Without an emphasis on personal responsibility, we all suffer more and benefit less. Personal responsibility is, by necessity, the cornerstone of any well-functioning society.
But there is no need to confuse functionality with fairness, or a social necessity with a moral imperative. While emphasizing personal responsibility, and leaving in place a range of costs and benefits that incentivize adherence to that value, we do not need to neglect the inconvenient truth that we are not in fact born into this world with equal opportunities, and that a commitment to both fairness and functionality demands that, particularly at the bottom, we limit the costs for failure to adhere to, and increase the benefits for success in adhering to, the demand for personal responsibility.
Fairness demands it, because if one is born into poverty and fails to either claw or excel their way out, their and their children’s and their children’s children’s ensuing suffering can hardly be blithely dismissed as just deserts. And functionality demands it, because the incentives to be predatory rather than productive increase as desperation increases, and providing increased opportunities to be productive and benefit from it is a very functional restructuring of incentives. Functionality further demands it, because destitution provides a very difficult platform from which to become productive, creating multiple obstacles (e.g., childcare while training for and looking for work, and resources to be presentable and prepared in job interviews). A public investment in the facilitation of the success of those least well positioned to achieve it serves both their interests,and society’s, for we all benefit from it.
That’s what our social responsibility is: To facilitate success; to create a context in which failure occurs less often, opportunities are more abundant, and personal responsibility is rewarded even if the circumstances themselves would not necessarily have rewarded it. Personal responsibility and social responsibility are not at odds, as ideologues on the right insist, but rather are natural partners in a society that is both more functional and more fair. We do not undermine incentives to work hard and succeed by making these public investments in providing increased opportunities, but rather augment the incentives to work hard, and reduce the burdens on society of failure to achieve due to constricted opportunities and other obstacles to success.
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As the author of a fantasy fiction novel, I carefully avoided the good v. evil dichotomy, because the narratives we use to capture it routinely fail to, reinforcing oversimplifications that are already too thoroughly embedded in our consciousness. Instead, the dichotomy at the center of my mythology was Order v. Chaos, with each being in some ways “good” and in some ways “evil,” but their interplay occupying a more sublime role in the definition of our reality.
However, as I shift my focus from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from analyzing to advocating, the need to define “good” and “evil” becomes more pressing, the reality that some notion of what serves humanity’s interests v. what doesn’t has to inform both our personal choices and our public policy preferences.
The ways in which I am about to use the word “evil,” and perhaps the ways in which I am about to use “good” as well, may seem exaggerated. The familiar meanings of the words are reserved for more extreme instances, more exceptional degrees. But the point of this essay is to emphasize what an error that really is, that those extreme instances and exceptional degrees are comprised of and catalyzed by all of the small, almost trivial, instances of “good” and “evil” that fill our daily lives and our moment-by-moment choices.
The traditional meanings of the words, and the weight given to what they represent, may also create a false impression that the identification of so much ubiquitous “evil” is oppressive, that it takes life too seriously. This customary reaction to these new, more encompassing, and more useful definitions of “good” and “evil” also has to be revised; the struggle to do “good” and avoid “evil” is a constant of life, embedded in the minutia, and therefore should be taken as much in stride as the struggle to live a healthy life, to earn a living, to be a good spouse and parent and child and friend. We should be able to laugh at ourselves when we fail, even knowing that our failures in this regard make some marginal contribution to the sum total of “evil” in the world. And we should reward our own and others’ successes, as small as they may be, with the acknowledgement due to having truly contributed to ” the good”.
In some ways, we lack the vocabulary to identify the goals that define “the good.” If I say that it is the quantity, quality, distribution, and sustainability of human happiness (and thus of acting in ways which contribute to them), someone will say that it is something more than happiness that we seek. So I’ll co-opt a word to encompass that “something more,” including all that it might entail: Well-being. That which is “good” increases the quantity, quality (breadth and depth), distribution, and sustainability of human well-being. In fact, I would say that it involves increasing the well-being, along all of the aforementioned dimensions, of all conscious entities, to the extent that they are conscious.
For those who want to apply reason and goodwill without any preconceived constraints, this creates a very functional focal point. It avoids both the insinuation of mystified abstractions into our morality, and the convenient biases of various “-centrisms,” including anthrocentrism. It takes nothing for granted, but provides a framework through which to discover a morality which serves the well-being of all those who have any consciousness with which to experience it.
“Good” is comprised of all instances of adherence to this ideal, while “evil” is comprised of all lapses. An important point of departure is to realize that we are all some mixture of the two, all defined by some successes in committing ourselves to the ideal of the “good” as I’ve defined it, as well as by some lapses. I, for instance, recognize that my definition of “good” probably recommends vegetarianism, since when large mammals are slaughtered for my dinner, it is an act which ends the well-being of a somewhat conscious creature. But I am not a vegetarian. By my own definition, I am somewhat “evil.”
“Good” and “Evil” are not a dichotomy, but rather values on a continuum, with higher values comprised of and catalyzed by the accumulation of smaller values. Every horrendous act of violence occurs in a context rather than a vacuum, a thousand trivial cruelties having fed into it. Every glorious act of generosity or nobility occurs in a context as well, one built up from numerous small acts of kindness. To reserve the concepts of “good” and “evil” only to the exceptional dramatic culminations embodied in a few, of all the mundane and trivial choices by all of us over the course of our lives, is to disregard the responsibility we all have for both, and the ways in which our mundane daily choices create both.
But this raises another counterintuitive facet of the paradigm of good v. evil that I am advocating, one which is a rather enormous departure from past conceptualizations: “Evil” is not the inexcusable extreme that our religions have tried to make it, but rather the accumulation of mere ordinary lapses. Our traditional conceptualization of evil as the cackling villain who delights in others’ suffering is both too exclusive, and too routinely disregarded as something trivial and acceptable when it in fact occurs (as it so frequently does). “Evil” is nothing more or less than the surrender to our baser natures, while “good” is nothing more or less than the on-going effort to act with more reason, humility, and goodwill instead.
We should not beat ourselves up for our lapses, or beat others up for theirs. But we should hold both ourselves and others responsible for them. They are ordinary, routine, such a pervasive part of our lives that they become normalized, accepted as just the way things are, often even justified as good clean fun. This happens because we do not want to impose on ourselves the oppression of constant recognition that many of our own actions are in fact small instances of “evil,” and so define their evilness out of existence. Or, in some cases, we recognize that it is evil, and delight in it, knowing that we lack either the will or the discipline to alter our behavior, and so instead, to reduce our cognitive dissonance, alter our judgment.
But these choices erase the opposition to “evil” within ourselves, and instead projects all opposition onto others. Instead of being forgiving of both ourselves and others, we perceive nothing to forgive in ourselves, and no need to forgive it in others. Instead of gently holding both ourselves and others to a higher standard of conduct, we hold ourselves only to the standard we have become comfortable with, and hold others to the standard we are comfortable imposing on them, never noticing the double-standards that inevitably ensue. We lapse into in-groups and out-groups, with those defined as “the other” meriting no tolerance, while both ourselves and those with whom we are identifying meriting no criticism (the classic expression of in-group/out-group biases).
These thoughts are inspired today both by the amount of vitriol directed against me in some places (currently only by people who have never met me), some of it deserved and some of it not, and by the amount of vitriol I have directed at others, usually in reaction to provocations of belligerence, but still lapses that can’t simply be defined out of existence. One thing is certain: We should never experience joy in inflicting harm on others, whether we believe they deserve it or not. And the blogosphere has become a place where recognition of that obvious truism has apparently completely evaporated. Though it may sound hyperbolic, the internet, which has accelerated and amplified so many aspects of our existence, has accelerated and amplified this ordinary “evil” as well. It is a breeding ground of our baser natures, and a place where people inflict harm on others with glee, rarely if ever pausing to be ashamed of having done so.
I am not going to become a vegetarian, at least not yet, but I am going to make a redoubled effort not to feed my own inner-demons, not to acquiesce to my own aggressive or defensive instincts in my interactions with others, particularly in this medium which is so conducive to casual brutality. And, in this moment, I feel no anger toward those who have similarly erred, with whom some mutual antagonisms have grown, who take such continual delight in trying to “take me down a peg”.
This is our true shared endeavor: To seek to lift one another up rather than knock one another down. To forgive ourselves and others quickly. To admit to our own errors more eagerly than we criticize or ridicule others for theirs. To take no delight in others’ weaknesses, but rather to help them find their strengths. To be more committed to acknowledging and addressing our own foibles, without losing our sense of humor in the process. To laugh with one another rather than at one another. To refrain from inflicting suffering as a form of entertainment. To sincerely strive to increase the quantity, quality, distribution, and sustainability of human (and animal) well-being. To be good, and to help one another be good, in our shared effort to improve the quality of our lives.
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…the ‘them’ are those who believe in extremism.” This is a statement just made in closing by a participant in a discussion of American Muslims on “This Week,” discussing the anti-Islamic ferver in America today.
More generally (and currently even less attainably), I would argue, the “us” are those who are global humanists who strongly identify with no other in-group/group distinction, and the “them” are insular “tribalists” who live in a world most saliently defined by the intersection of their various in-groups (racial, national, ethnic, socio-economic, religious, sexual orientation, etc.), and all of the out-groups against whom they stand in opposition.
Of course, as with all such things, it is not really such a tidy dichotomy, but rather a set of interacting continua, with individuals falling at different points along different continua, some being quite nationalistic but not very racist, or quite classist but not very concerned with sexual orientation. However, those who tend to be “in-group/out-group” oriented in some spheres tend to be so oriented in others, because it is a way of viewing the world more than it is a set of positions on discrete issues.
Being committed to a non-tribalistic orientation does not mean being ignorant of current realities: We live in a world divided in many ways (politically, religiously, culturally, socio-economically, etc.), and those divisions have real consequences, and real implications for what kinds of public policies we can and should pursue. We can’t legislate globally, because we have no global government. We can’t magically create universal non-tribalism by embracing non-tribalism ourselves, as individuals. The question we should always address is, “What decisions, among those that I can make, best serve global humanity, given the current realities of the world?”
To many Americans, a phrase like “social control” makes fingernails on a chalkboard sound like dulcet strains. But, in reality, our national birth amidst cries of “liberty” was a particular response to a particular situation, one which has fed a national mythos lopsided in its orientation, and loath to explicitly address the flip-side of liberty: Governance. The U.S. Constitution, despite the ahistorical myth treasured by most right-wingers, was not drafted in order to guarantee individual liberties and preserve states’ rights, but rather to constrain them both. “Federalism” meant stronger, not weaker, national government, and the constitution was the dramatic response to the toothlessness of the Articles of Confederation, which failed to bind the nation into a single political-economic entity.
The real challenge we must face is not how to preserve liberty, or maintain social control, but rather how to balance and integrate these two simultaneously competing and complementary demands. Following, in the comments, is something I wrote a few days ago on another blog, incidentally addressing this issue. I would love for others to jump in, and engage in this most salient of all political discussions!
Our commitment, as a nation, to protect the civil rights of all people affected by our policies is a sacred one. It defines us as a people. We have often fallen short, and we have just as often redeemed ourselves with impressive reforms. We believe ourselves to be a world leader, a shining example to humanity. It is incumbent upon us to live up to that self image.
The most pressing civil rights issue facing us today, I believe, is the issue of gay rights. It is time for us all to support, without equivocation, complete equality under the law for gays and lesbians, such that all committed couples, regardless of sexual orientation, can enjoy the same benefits and rights, and such that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is treated as the civil rights violation that it is. We Coloradans believe in personal liberty: What more fundamental liberty is there than the liberty simply to be who you are without penalty? Let’s put an end to this enduring bastion of bigotry.
Having said that, we cannot afford to be complacent about the enduring prejudices that have plagued American society throughout its history. Racism still exists, and remains the same odious social disease that it has always been. Not only do we still witness viceral reactions based on racial identity, but, more insidiously, we still bear the burden of the legacy of history, a subtle form of institutional discrimination whereby those whose ancestors had diminished opportunities are themselves born into a context of diminished opportunities. But this latter problem is best addressed by addressing the primary vehicles of those diminished opportunities (poverty, and a lack of commitment to investing in all of our children), rather than the historically determined racial disparity in the distribution of opportunities.
Our challenges do not stop there. We must strive to improve our record of tolerance, and to improve our commitment to the rights of all people. In our criminal justice system, for instance, there is a need for reforms that would both increase the rate of conviction of those guilty of crimes, and descrease the rate of wrongful conviction of those innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been accused. We need to implement strict policies regarding the preservation of DNA evidence, and make an effort to address some of the known factors that contribute to wrongful convictions. And we need to move away from the failed policies of mandatory sentencing and criminalization of non-predatory behaviors.
Finally, we must be vigilant in protecting the civil rights of all Americans, in all contexts. We must steer clear of racial profiling, and the false trade of liberty for security. The key component in all of these aspects of the challenge of preserving civil rights is the error of thinking in terms of “in-groups” and “out-groups.” It’s time to recognize that we are all human beings, first and foremost, far more similar than we are different; no group has a corner on the market of either good or evil, and we should recognize that the crimes of individuals belong to them individually or organizationally, and not to any racial, ethnic, or gender group with which we identify them.
America is bedeviled by misguided political generals not merely fighting the last war, but endlessly fighting our first war. Every act of government, and every attempt to fund government, whether federal, state, or local, is greeted with a “patriotic” opposition to “tyranny,” even though our own Founding Fathers not only saw a need to create a strong federal government, but also viewed state and local governments as vehicles for, rather than threats to, our individual liberties.
More importantly, we have resoundingly won our first war: Americans are more free today than they have been at any previous moment in American history (except in one ironic sense mentioned below). Not only have we extended the original grant of liberty won in the American Revolution to the vast majority who were excluded from it at the time (African Americans, women, Native Americans, and, to varying degrees, other non-white or non-propertied or non-protestant people), but even propertied, protestant white males are more free today than they have ever been before. There are fewer legal and actual constraints on our freedoms of belief, expression, religion, and action than ever before. There are more, and more vigilant, protections of our civil liberties. And there is more access to a host of liberating educational, informational, recreational, and organizational tools than our ancestors could ever have dreamed of.
To the extent that our liberty is currently threatened, it is threatened most by those on the far right who claim to be defending it. There are two forms of “big government,” that which encroaches upon the constitutional protections of our liberty and that which acts as a vehicle of our collective will without encroaching on our constitutionally protected liberties. Ironically, those who shout “liberty!” the loudest tend to support the former type of big government and attack the latter type, justifying this inversion of priorities (as it is always justified, in all times and places) with the imperative of preserving our domestic tranquility and national security. Equally ironically, it is the latter form of “big government,” when implemented wisely, that is most effective not only at facilitating our collective welfare, but also at maintaining our domestic tranquility and national security in the long run.
But more than our “liberty,” it is our well-being that is currently under attack. We rate abysmally in comparison to other developed nations on measures such as poverty, crime, percentage and absolute number of people incarcerated (by which measure we are literally the most unfree people in the world), infant mortality, educational achievement, and access to health care, to name a few. The primary reason for this comprehensive failure of The United States government effectively to “promote the general welfare” (a principal purpose of our government identified in the preamble of the United States Constitution) is the degree of success of the blind ideological opposition to the use of government to accomplish that task, one completely unmatched in other developed nations.
Rather than continuing to fight the ancient war we have long since won, maybe it is time to start fighting the current battles we are so tragically losing.
To be sure, this opposition to the growth and use of government for our collective welfare has been only marginally successful, though with the devastating effects listed above. Our federal government has grown, by necessity, to deal with the challenges of managing a technologically advanced industrial society in the modern era. But an honest survey of the impact of this growth in size of our federal government is that, not only has it done much to increase the health, welfare, and prosperity of American citizens, but it has also augmented rather than curtailed our individual liberties. Tyranny is not a function of how “big” a government is, but rather of how well or poorly its constitutional and democratic mechanisms function.
This is not to say that there are not real issues involving how best to balance and articulate government, markets, and other social institutional modalities in order to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness in the provision of necessary and desired services. But those are issues that require the finely honed tools of informed analysis applied to reliably derived data, rather than the sledge-hammer of intransigent false certainties. The tyranny that threatens us is not the tyranny of a large government that imperfectly addresses the needs of a modern society, but rather the tyranny of highly motivated ignorance and irrationality constantly trying to undermine that government as our agent, and augment it as our overlord, imposing horrifying costs and dangers on all of us in the process
Conservatives who argue that more and bigger government isn’t the solution to our problems are absolutely right: Government is just one agent of our will, with strengths and weaknesses that delimit the scope of its efficacy. Whether we address the challenges and opportunities which confront us through government, or churches, or civic organizations, or just individually, nothing supersedes the importance of personal responsibility.
But what is personal responsibility? We generally consider, for instance, not abandoning one’s children to be a personal responsibility. We consider obeying the laws, caring for one’s elderly parents, perhaps even taking adequate care of one’s home and property, all to be personal responsibilities. At the limit, some might use the term to refer to the need that each individual take care of him or herself, so that the rest of us won’t have to. All of these have one thing in common: They involve responsibilities to others. And we understand that those others bear reciprocal responsibilities in turn. Personal responsibility, in other words, is synonymous with mutual responsibility. It is a social obligation we owe to one another.
Something as vital to our collective welfare as mutual responsibility shouldn’t be treated as a casual wish, something we dearly want to see exhibited by others, but feel powerless to affect beyond meekly encouraging it. We should, instead, strive to cultivate it, to instill it in people, something we understandably implore parents to do. But imploring parents to instill it in their children is as weak and insufficient as imploring people to exercise it in the first place. We need, rather, to make the exercise and cultivation of mutual responsibility in people’s individual interest. We need to incentivize it. And, of course, we do.
There are four basic tools for incentivizing socially desirable behaviors: Hierarchies, markets, norms, and ideologies. In hierarchies, codified rules are officially enforced through formal rewards and punishments. Examples of this method of incentivizing behaviors are legal and penal systems, employment contracts, church leadership structures, and formal organizational frameworks in general. The strength of this method is that it facilitates the pursuit of intentionally formulated goals through very direct means. Its weakness involves the rapid accumulation of bargaining, monitoring, and enforcement costs as the goals become increasingly complex, the interests of the parties increasingly varied, and the population involved increasingly large.
Markets operate by facilitating multi-lateral mutually beneficial exchange. The easier it is for me to focus on one thing I do well that others require or desire, and offer it to others in return for the things they do well that I require or desire, the more organically and robustly we are each incentivized to act in one another’s interests. The strength of this method is that, for many purposes, it is the most efficient way to align individual and collective interests, and thus coordinate human efforts in mutually beneficial ways. The weaknesses largely revolve around transaction costs and externalities, creating problems such as the robust production of environmental pollution and depletion along with the robust production of wealth, and the ability of some to off-set certain costs of their enterprises by imposing them on others not involved in, or not profiting from, those enterprises, sometimes quite catastrophically.
Norms are unwritten rules diffusely and informally enforced through the social approval and disapproval of other people. They are particularly effective in small, permanent or long-enduring groups with a high-degree of interaction and interdependence, a low degree of anonymity, and when addressing visible or easily discoverable behaviors. Their weaknesses include that they become decreasingly effective as circumstances diverge from those described in the previous sentence, and that, when most effective, they tend (even more so than hierarchies) toward “overcontrol,” intruding more than necessary on individual autonomy and self-expression.
Ideologies, as I use the term here, refer to all cognitions: beliefs, values, thoughts, anything held to be true by the individual. In a sense, ideologies are norms internalized through socialization, rules that we enforce internally by the self-imposed reward of pride or the self-imposed punishment of shame. Their strength is that we can never hide from ourselves. Their weaknesses are that they generally form a relatively flimsy bulwark against the temptation to act in one’s own crude self-interest, and that, unless one is very careful in how their own ideology develops, they tend toward rigidity rather than forming a robust foundation for continuing cognitive growth.
One weakness shared, in different ways, by hierarchies, norms, and ideologies is that, while they generate in-group cooperation, they often do so in opposition to out-groups similarly organized and motivated, thus reinforcing lines of conflict on a larger scale even as they reinforce bonds of solidarity on a smaller one. Norms often accomplish this very locally, while hierarchies can accomplish it on scales of all sizes, ranging from the very small (such as a small but very formally organized business) to quite large (such as nation-states), though norms almost inevitably are more prevalent for very small scales of social organization. Ideologies, meanwhile, reinforce whatever levels and types of organization the individual most closely identifies with, from the absolute egocentrism of a sociopath to the all-inclusiveness of global humanism and environmentalism, and everything in between.
A particular variation of the in-group/out-group dynamic involves concentrations of power, which can implicate any and all of these institutional modalities in various combinations: Hierarchical control of the means of enforcing formal rules; economic control of vital resources; ideological control of “legitimate authority;” and disproportionate normative control in the hands of those most influential in the community (sometimes due to “charismatic authority,” sometimes to influence imported from other modalities). These can interact in self-reinforcing nuclei of political and social power or, in some circumstances, separate out to some extent into competing camps.
When examining the world through the lens of these social institutional modalities, it is crucial to understand the salience of their interactions. They are, in most situations, tightly intertwined, sometimes almost dissolved into a single solution. Hierarchical organizations, laced with embedded normative and ideological informal infrastructures, are major actors in market economies. Hierarchically organized churches compete in the marketplace of ideas (and sometimes the marketplace of profitable goods and services as well), often with a large moral, or ideological/normative, component to their mission. Families are largely normative, though can have traces of a not-completely-formalized hierarchical framework overlaying that normative structure.
One traditional focus in the debates between the right and the left is the relationship between hierarchies and markets, and what combinations of the two provide for optimal economic efficiency This also happens to be a major focus of Institutional Economics (and of Oliver Williamson, one of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners in Economics). But for a more complete understanding of the implications and potentials of different policy alternatives, one must also include norms and ideologies (and emotional reactions) in the mix, and consider how these too are tangled into the complex dynamics that comprise the field of human endeavors. (The inclusion of normative arrangments was the focus of the other 2009 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Elinor Ostrom).
Understanding the nature of the human social field, to as great an extent as we are capable, is a necessary prerequisite to devising effective social policies, often by applying a light touch in particularly system-sensitive ways.
In conjunction with my campaign, I have two projects on the drawing board that seek to utilize, for the purposes of improving our collective existence (rather than simply for winning an election), the two somewhat neglected social institutional modalities: 1) the creation of a non-partisan, issue-centered, hostility-free (through moderation) political blog, which will seek out and provide the best analyses, from all perspectives, of the contentious and important social issues of the day; and 2) the creation of a network of non-partisan community organizations, from the block level on up, drawing on and augmenting all of the various kinds of community organizations that already exist, but dedicated to achieving a higher degree of inclusiveness. Anyone interested in either or both of these projects should please contact me.
The world we live in is complex and challenging. But simply agreeing to be reasonable people of good will doing the very best we can, with both humility and determination, would take us a long way forward in our on-going attempt to address that complexity and meet that challenge. As we’ve proven time and again, we’re capable of doing great things together, when we’re inspired to do so. Let’s keep inspiring one another to make this the most robust, sustainable, and fair society we are capable of making it: That’s a project worth getting excited about.
