Right Reason

Please Leave Off the Shopkeepers

 

Source.

 

Another month, another problem with police brutality in America. The flavor of the month is Freddie Gray dying a week after being arrested of a fatal spinal-cord injury. How a twenty-five year old man could have sustained such an injury in the course of an arrest boggles the mind. In a news conference, Police Commissioner Anthony Bratts admitted that "We know our police employees failed to get him medical attention in a timely manner multiple times.” You see, when the police do well in America, they’re heroes deserving a place of honor in society. When they do wrong, they’re merely employees, no different than the cashier I walked past at the grocery store today. But I digress, matters became a bit more heated in Baltimore today when rioting broke out across the city following a protest and as I am typing, the mayor has declared a curfew.  

 The riot in Baltimore is an unfortunate reminder—if we didn’t already have enough around us—that society is hard. The difficulty of getting people with widely disparate beliefs and ambitions to cooperate with each other in a social order is immense. Thankfully, the fair-weather structure of incentives in the liberal society we live in today ensures that it is expedient for people to occupy a role within that social order and to play it out in their interaction with strangers. Everyone is made better and everyone is left free to go home to pursue their own amusement. Quid pro quo reigns and it wraps itself in the glory of apathy.

 

The fair-weather incentives can only last in the face of fair-weather injustice. Usually, it's the type of injustice that, say, happens to some poor, black kid in the ghetto. Usually. However, these are the days of #BlackLivesMatter and Freddie Gray fits perfectly into that narrative.

In Baltimore today, people aren’t apathetic and they aren’t satisfied with merely going home to pursue their own individual merriment. Instead, they’re marching. Unfortunately, the very same emotion that led someone to be willing to virtuously take a stand against a corrupt society has also motivated violence. People with grievances get fed up and strike out. The problem is that they strike out against innocent people.   

The 1992 Los Angeles riots is another variation on this theme. A much larger variation, but still a variation. People recognized they live in a kleptocratic society, got indignant, felt justified in being fed up and then so proceed to strike out against innocent people. They did so all while feeling that warm glow that their wrath is just. That warm glow broke the apathy our wider society is based on. Worse, it broke that apathy while giving the rioters the feeling that they could destroy, even if innocent people were harmed. The sight of Koreatown shopkeepers keeping watch over their property after their part of the town was abandoned by the LAPD really does make one think, if just for a second, that a Hobbesian state of nature still threatens our existence today.

 

 

 

It should be a foregone conclusion that the United States has a police brutality problem. For far too long, civilian police departments have gotten away with putting the absolute safety of officers beyond serving the public interest. America slept as towns of a few thousand got SWAT teams armed to the teeth and as every officer began walking around as if he were in Iraq or Syria, with a gun at their waist and body armor around their torsos. Whatever the police may have been twenty, thirty or however long ago you wish to go back, they are certainly not civilian today. They are a paramilitary force and everyone is reminded of that every single time that they interact with the soldiers masquerading as civilians. 

Alas, the riots in Baltimore only give credence to the belief that a thin blue line is all that stands between civilization and barbarism. It only takes the spotlight away from the institutional disparity between poor blacks, most of whose ancestors were hauled to this continent as cargo, and the rest of America. At a time when the protest in wake of Freddie Gray’s death needed to be collected and civil, a few savages decided to take advantage of the situation and, in doing so, only helping to make the Baltimore police look ever more sympathetic. 

 

It feels good to be fed up. It feels good to take action against the oppressors above and to demand that the entire machine must grind to a halt if that is what justice demands. There is no denying that. But at what cost? Fiat iustitia et pereat mundus is a tempting creed, but one that ultimately undermines human flourishing. It conveniently ignores the multitudes whose worlds would suddenly end. Those people just trying to live out their lives in the situation that they find themselves in. They are the ones, much like the Koreatown shopkeepers, who are lost in the crossfire when the civic struggle for reform devolves into an egocentric orgy of violence.  

In Baltimore, there are people who will return to their shops and find them looted. They will continue on with their professions whatever happens to the Baltimore police department. They are the meek of the earth and, ultimately, the foundation of the social order that we all are enriched by. Any movement that would hurt them reveals its barbarism the first moment it lifts its fists. Rage against the machine all you want, but do respect the sacred rules of society. 

Amour-Propre: Free to Choose?

 

The good man is an Athlete who delights in fighting naked: He despises all those vile ornaments which would hinder his use of his strength, and most of which were invited only to conceal some deformity.

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

 

 

Despite his influence on the generations that followed him, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had little interest in battling his contemporaries who disagreed with his ideas. Whether it was the Frenchman Voltaire or the Scotsman David Hume, few contemporary readers sympathized with Rousseau’s ideas. Immanuel Kant, whose sole painting in his spartan home was one of Rousseau, was almost unique in that regard. Rousseau, though, didn’t much care for that lack of appreciation. 

“The majority of my Readers,” he wrote in The Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes “must often have found my discourses poorly structured and almost entirely disjointed, for want of perceiving the trunk of which I showed them only the branches” (OC III: 106). Unlike the vast majority of writers who decry commentators not getting the main thrust of their words, Rousseau has a point. A brilliant rhetorician, Rousseau is, all too often able to rouse the sentiments towards whatever end he wants—it was the singular compliment paid to him by Adam Smith in the pages of the Edinburgh Review—yet the end result of such elocution is all too often the precise line of the argument getting away from Rousseau. But the arguments are certainly there and, for those who care about Rousseau’s influence, worth piecing together.  

 

One of the main trunks of Rousseau’s thought that is manifest from the very beginning, in The Discourse on the Sciences, is the notion that society does genuine damage to our human nature by fettering our free will. That man is free is close to a tautology for Rousseau. Insofar, as someone is not free to choose, Rousseau would argue, he is less of a human being. 

The natural state of man was suited to  “that original freedom for which he seems to be born” (OC III: 7), but such a state cannot last long with the cultivation of society and the demands of social existence:

Need raised up Thrones; the Sciences and Arts have made them strong. Earthly powers, love talents and protect those who cultivate them! Civilized peoples, cultivate them: Happy slaves, you owe them the delicate and refined taste on which you pride yourselves; the sweet character and urbane morals which make for such engaging and easy relations among you; in a word, the appearances of all the virtues without having a single one. (Ibid)

 Once civilized, Rousseau argued, man cannot be entirely who he really is; rather, he shall always be a puppet to forces beyond his will, be they market forces or monarchical edicts. In a natural state, “men found their security in how easily they saw through one another” (OC III: 8), but that is not so in a refined society. Virtue is therefore foreign to civilized man because he never lives his life by his own free will. Civilized man will always have to appear to be different things to different people. It wouldn’t be until The Social Contract that Rousseau would proclaim that man was born free, but everywhere in chains; nevertheless, the idea that civilized society puts man in such a state of serviitude is clearly present to his thought as early as The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.

 

In that discourse, Rousseau tackles the question: “Has the restoration of the Sciences and Arts contributed to the purification of Morals, or to their corruption?” (OC III: 5). For Rousseau, that there has been a decay in the virtue of the human race is obvious and he sees the cause as being in the advancement of the arts and sciences: “Where there is no effect, no cause need be sought: but here the effect is certain, the depravation real, and our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced toward perfection” (OC III: 9). Amour-propre, that part of our esteem which depends on the approval of others, is principally to blame for the corruption of human souls. “Every Artist wants to be applauded. His contemporaries’ praise is the most precious portion of his reward” (OC III: 21). 

With the refinement of society, people are ever more vulnerable to the arousal of their amour-propre. Life becomes ever less about our own self-love—our amour de soi as Rousseau calls it—as it becomes about people appeasing their vain appetite for praise. No longer do people look to themselves and their own virtue and for their meaning. Now they look to the approval of their fellow herd:

Before Art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak in ready-made terms, our morals were rustic but natural; and differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance. Human nature was, at bottom, no better; but men found their security in how easily they saw through one another, and this advantage, to the value of which we are no longer sensible spared them a good many vices. (OC III: 8)

When we consider that this theme will motivate Rousseau’s writing through The Discourse on Inequality to The Social Contract, just how well-developed the theme that civilization dehumanizes its constituents by supplying them with ready-made roles, whether those roles be as senators, fathers, farmers, merchants, men, priests, women et cetera, is so early in the The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences is shocking. 

Once society, along with the arts and sciences, has advanced, that civilized man has to deal with the demands put on him by social existence. “One no longer dares to appear what one is; and under this perpetual constraint, the men who make up the hard that is called society will, when placed in similar circumstances, all act in similar ways unless more powerful motives incline them differently” (OC III: 8). In a very real way, then, amour-proper binds us to society and to becoming one with the herd. If it weren’t for the society around us, then we would free to pursue virtue and would be free to fully be ourselves. 

Rousseau therefore argues that, outside of man’s natural state, people are not free to choose. Amour-propre enslaves us. Rousseau makes a none too subtle reference to the arts and sciences as the fetters of men in the first part of The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences: “While the Government and the Laws see to the safety and the well-being of men assembled, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are laden…” (OC III: 6-7; italics added). Here we see the corruption of the notion of corruption that has affected modern academia, but I get ahead of myself here. 

 

Society corrupts the human soul because it reduces its scope of free will. In the context of society, people are free to be themselves; rather, they have to be what they need to be to get by. They become cogs in a greater machine; rather than seeing Jacques the free agent, we see Jacques the accountant. To the eyes of someone else in a refined society Jacques is less an end in and of himself as he is a means towards their own ends. The demands of social cooperation can therefore be seen in the light of The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences as dehumanizing. As Rousseau laments: “The ancient politicians forever spoke of morals and of virtue; ours speak only of commerce and of money” (OC III: 19)

Rousseau’s celebration of natural man makes sense in the context of his views on amour-propre. Natural man knows little of amour-propre. He knows not the applause of the a greater society; instead, only knows of himself as the sole spectator to his behavior. He is mainly motivated by self-love, by amour de soi, which inclines him towards both to self-preservation and, when augmented by reason, to virtue. For natural man, since each man follows the beat of his own drum, “differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance” (OC III: 8). 

 

The theme that amour de soi is identified with natural man and with the development of virtue will be made more apparent in Rousseau’s later, more political, works, yet it’s still manifest in The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Natural man in his natural society, people get their just deserts. But in a refined society, “Rewards are lavished upon wits, and virtue remains without honors” (OC III: 25), which leads to Rousseau becoming one of the leading critics of the refined society. Back to nature! Exorcise amour-propre and return to rustic virtue, which doesn’t rely on the approbation of those around us.   

In the end, amour-propre is one of the main trunks of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thought that unites his entire corpus into an intelligible whole. Once human beings started to congregate in society, amour-propre fettered people to predetermined roles and thereby alienated people from their humanity, “that original freedom for which they seemed born” (OC III: 7). Insofar as the sciences provided opportunities for amour-proper to be our primary motivation, the sciences corrupt our humanity for that man is a free agent is pretty much a tautology for Rousseau. Amour-propre chains us to the opinions of others. It puts us in positions where we are not free to choose. 

Turning to contemporary politics, a lot of radical left’s curious positions, especially among college radicals, about society can be understood as them taking the view that amour-propre is coercive. Insofar as we don’t give somebody the respect they think they deserve, whether they’re a member of the LGBT community or a Muslim, then we are coercing them to follow another path in life. It doesn’t take much of an intellectual lead to go from here to the talk of micro-aggressions polluting campuses today. The pursuit of virtue in Rousseau’s thought can be identified as the pursuit of self-expression mindlessly praised in college campuses across the nation. 

The idea that amour-propre drives us to abandon our own self-expression and to adopt a false courtesy to others is a trunk of Rousseau’s thought that deserves attention, if only for the damage it has done to a proper understanding of coercion. In The Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek targeted Rousseau in particular for corrupting the notion of coercion:

It was Rousseau who—declaring in the opening statement of The Social Contract that `man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains', and wanting to free men from all `artificial' restraints—made what had been called the savage the virtual hero of progressive intellectuals, urged people to shake off the very restraints to which they owed their productivity and numbers, and produced a conception of liberty that became the greatest obstacle to its attainment.

When a lefty shrill decries the patriarchy’s coercion, she is apart of an illiberal tradition with roots in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences in identifying the demands of living socially with coercion. Rousseau isn’t an advocate of a free and open society where one can do as one pleases within the rule of law; rather, he is an advocate of a society where one can never be exactly free to make one’s own identity. 

State of Nature Theory is Bunk

 

From Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis' A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution:

It has been conventional since Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan to attribute the maintenance of social order to states. But for at least 95% of the time that biologically modern humans have existed, our ancestors have somehow fashioned a system of governance that without the assistance of governments avoided the chaos of the Hobbesian state of nature sufficiently to become by far the most enduring of social orders ever (Bowles and Gintis 2011, 110). 

Every time someone uses state of nature theory to make a point, I want to cringe, and I have to gnash my teeth to get through it. Whatever state-of-nature theorists have attributed to human origins have been proven wrong. Really ever since Darwin, scholars should have accepted that human groups have had a self-ordering character throughout human history, recorded and otherwise, without any need for Hobbes' leviathan, or Locke's social contract.

State of nature theory is blantantly fictional, and hurts out appreciation for human society's self-ordering nature. With a bit of biology, we can do much better than it, and start talking about early human social orders as they actually were rather than as we wrongly imagined them to be.

The State of Nature is a Fatal Conceit

 There is no such thing as the state of nature and it is a fiction that inevitably corrupts any inquiry that makes use of it.

 

Homo sapiens evolved within a social group just as all other species within the genus homo evolved within a social group and the pressures of natural selection resulted in genes that were more conducive to human cooperation gaining a larger frequency within populations of animals within homo. In addition, culture has has not only played an increasing large role in equipping each successive generation with innovations and knowledge of the previous ones, but as human groups became more complex and expansive culture has played a critical role in providing the rules and institutions by which human action occurs.

The result has been a species, which even though its genetic similarity is amazing, is widely varied due to differences within the cultural traits of different populations of homo sapiens across the world. Each person is constituted by genes that have over millions of years favored sociability, is born into a very specific cultural context and over the course of his life is very much a product of the group he lives in.

 

There is no bellum omnium contra omnes. No human being is naturally independent of society. The constitution of a society is not decided upon by agents who are consciously coming together into a polity nor can a just society be deduced from rationalistic axioms about the nature of justice. All of these philosophical perspectives are either factually wrong, as is Hobbes' assertion about the state of nature despite thousands of years of peaceful cooperation sans Leviathan, or they completely misconstrue the issue of social philosophy, as Rousseau's state of nature does by creating the fiction that society is created rather than inherited. It is all philosophical rubbish and needs to be condemned in such harsh language lest more discourse be led astray.

The questions of social philosophy are very much about the situations faced by populations inheriting institutions of governance that not only did no one have a choice in being born into, but the population does not agree about the problems and no one mind within that population can actually understand the institutions in any meaningful sense of the word. State-of-nature philosophy draws our eyes away from those features, often lead us to completely misunderstand the nature of the human being and at best, as in John Rawls' Theory of Justice, lead us to constructing absurd foils to society that no human mind possibly could create.

 

Ergo, in the pursuit of ever sounder human reasoning, it is time that the entire notion of state-of-nature philosophy be unkindly shown the way to the dustbin of bad ideas.