Social Order and the Panopticon

Posted on October 14, 2010 by lukeroelofs

This post is basically expressing one of those interesting cross-over ideas that you get when themes in two separate courses you’re taking join up – a little bit thinking out loud.

On the one hand, in the context of a political philosophy course focusing on issues of social order, ensuring co-operation, collective action problems, and so on, there’s this distinction between two types of human society:

  • the anarchic communal society, typical of hunter gatherers and dominant throughout human prehistory, and
  • the hierarchical state society, typical of settled agriculturalists and dominant through human history.

On the other hand, in the context of a bioethics course focused on the work of Foucault, there’s the over-arching idea of a multi-faceted transition in the modes by which social power is exercised over the individual:

  • away from the sovereign power of a king and the hierarchy below him, embodied in the right to inflict death, in religiously-backed schemes of ideas, and obsessed with the symbol of ‘blood’;
  • towards the disciplinary power of a network of meticulous regimenting institutions (schools, factories, prisons, hospitals, etc), embodied in the skill to manage and optimise life, in a scientifically-backed scheme of ideas, obsessed (Foucault claims) with the symbol of ‘sexuality’.

It occurred to me – what if we map the second item in the first pair onto the first item in the second pair, i.e. what if we see the changes Foucault describes (assuming they’re real) are the beginnings of a potential third strategy for arranging social control of individuals.

Of course even the most technological, scientific, surveillance-and-regimentation-oriented society nowadays is run by a state: but equally, states don’t automatically do away with community or with the role of communities in maintaining order – though they have the potential to do so in some cases.

The difference is more the weight placed on various factors: a ‘primitive anarchy’ rests primarily on the role of communal feelings and behaviours, a state shifts some of the weight onto centralised instruments of force, and modern societies are able to shift that weight in turn onto their greatly increased epistemic resources.

Symbolically, one could put the point by observing that the panopticon, Foucault’s favourite symbol of modern disciplinary power, potentially removes the need for special people to play the role of guards – the people watching and the people watched could be the same people at different times. It is, potentially, an egalitarian sort of prison.

It is, of course, still a prison – even if we all participate in its exercise (perhaps especially if we all participate in its exercise) power can be too strict, too repressive, too omnipresent. And as it grows up, under the control of elites, directed towards maintaining the power of governments and of capital, it will often take oppressive forms.

But I don’t think this is necessary. After all, the state pioneered the use of omnipresent security cameras, but was still surprised and alarmed when crowds of civilians turned out to all have their own little security cameras. The powers that human society produces don’t remain in the hands of those who first oversaw their production.

To put it another way – some degree of social control of individuals is unquestionably desirable. Collective action problems, the odd violent individual, stopping people from littering and polluting, etc. The development of carceral society/disciplinary power/biopower/scientific epistemes/whatever-Foucault-calls-it-in-the-next-book means a vast increase in the resources available for this, and makes them easier to apply in egalitarian and non-violent ways.

For instance, if people performing some anti-social action are only 15% more likely to get caught, then the deterrent that will be effective needs to be much harsher (assuming it will be effective at all). Whereas if they are 85% likely to get caught, a smaller penalty can be just as effective. And that smaller penalty may require very different institutional structures to apply it.

So the paradoxical upshot is that anarchists should in a sense welcome these increases in the means available for society and the state to control people – because while the particular manifestations should often be resisted and fought, the means they make available serve to further weaken the rationale for the state.

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How Healthy Do We Want to Be?

Posted on October 9, 2010 by lukeroelofs

Consider the following two hypothetical justifications, both starting from false premises:

1. “There’s a company downtown who will catch and kill ten feral cats and extract a special liquid from their brains, and sell it to you for $100. If I drink this liquid it will strengthen my body and make me healthier, so I am going to buy some, even though I accept that it’s wrong to kill cats just for their brain juice.”

2. “If I stop eating meat, the lack of nutrients will make me less healthy, so I am going to keep eating meat, even though I accept that it’s wrong to kill animals just for food.”

Do we find one of these arguments more persuasive than the other – bearing in mind, as I said, that the premises about health are false in both cases (that’s not to say vegetarianism has no health effects, just that the effects it has, positive and negative, are enormously variable)? I can’t know in advance what people’s intuitions will be, but personally I think that number 2 sounds moderately acceptable – i.e., even though I don’t consider it an adequate justification, I can accept someone using it as an explanation of their decision – but that number 1 seems completely wrong-headed: I don’t think people are morally bad individuals because they eat meat, but I think my opinion of someone would be lowered if I heard them say that.

Assuming I’m not alone in this reaction, what explains the difference? Partly, it’s likely to be that one is unfamiliar and one familiar, and we tend to feel more ok about what everyone does. But is there more to it than this? The obvious answer is that one talks about seeking to make yourself more healthy, while the other talks about seeking to avoid becoming less healthy. One is about seeking a bonus, the other about avoiding a harm.

But is there really a difference here? I ask because I live in what is arguably among the healthiest societies ever to have existed. The level of nutrition, sanitation, freedom from disease, and overall longevity enjoyed by the average citizen of a modern society is far ahead of what most historical humans would have had. And yet I also live in a society with an enormous amount of public and private interest in ways to improve and maintain health.

And it’s not just that health is an aspiration, something desired. It’s also to some extent an imperative – people are under pressure to be healthy, possibly facing shaming or abuse if they’re perceived to fail in this duty, and they can also use their own health as a powerful justification for the actions they undertake. Argument 2, above, sounds reasonable to my ears – and yet if someone said ‘going vegetarian would cost me money’ or ‘going vegetarian would be less fun’, that sounds like mere selfishness. Doing something for your health, though, is not selfishness but ‘responsibility’.

Is there any point at which we would stop? At which we could legitimately say ‘in perspective, I’m already really healthy, I can easily afford to give up a bit of health for the sake of pleasure/money/other people’? I’m not suggesting an answer to that, or to whether we should stop at some point: I’m just pointing out the interesting phenomena of human culture.

A related point – maybe part of any difference in reactions to the above two justifications is that the first, unlike the second, doesn’t sound like what we normally file under ‘health’, but more like something a villain would do in a film – strengthening your body with the juice from cat’s brains sounds sort of like stealing souls or sucking blood: an unnatural, unholy attempt to attain forbidden powers. Yet we don’t feel that way about most of the medical procedures that have contributed to our life expectancy. If not ‘natural’, they are at least not ‘unnatural’. What does that mean though? What is actually going on in our minds when we think this?

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Meat and the Body

Posted on October 6, 2010 by lukeroelofs

This is Vegetarian Awareness Month, from World Vegetarian Day on October 1st to World Vegan Day on November 1st. Consequently my posts may have a slant towards such topics, and that includes this post, about the concept of ‘meat’. What is meat? What is meant in saying that one person sees another as ‘a piece of meat’ – literally or metaphorically? How does ‘meat’ relate to ‘the body’, if we suppose that the latter is an important object of philosophical attention?

Body Parts

Let’s put meat in a broader context: how do we respond to a body part that is separated from the body that it is a part of? It seems that our typical reaction is to be repelled, but this can be in two different ways, depending on the sort of body part involved.

On the one hand, things we might call ‘inessential’ body parts produce a disdainful repulsion. Stray hairs, nail clippings, scabs, pus, saliva, sweat, urine, or excrement – the kinds of things which are ‘in our bodies’ but are regularly lost – generate revulsion without any feeling that they are important, like dirt.

On the other hand, ‘essential’ body parts, those that can’t be lost and replaced, like a hand, a heart, a leg, an ear – these generate horrified revulsion, which is the opposite. As before, we want to stay away, to avoid touching them, but this is now because they have such an awful significance, a kind of aura of wrongness around them.

Order

Why do we feel revulsion at all? Observe that none of these things is disturbing when it’s inside the body – as long as it’s ‘in the right place’. Saliva all over one’s face is a mess; the same saliva inside one’s mouth is not. Or consider that each day we swallow a pint of snot, just from it slipping down the back of our throats, without any unease.

So what’s important is the organisation of parts, the special order that defines the body. We may not understand all of this order, but our everyday lives are suffused with a sort of trusting awareness of it, a brute conviction that our body works to a sort of plan, in which ‘we’, sentient active beings, are an integral part.

So what makes the difference between the horrified revulsion at, say, a severed hand, and the disdainful revulsion at a glass of urine or snot? Obviously part of it is that a severed hand may indicate that some hideous crime has occurred. But even when the hand was removed for benign, already-understood purposes, such as a surgical amputation, something of that horror remains on it.

I’d suggest this: the ‘inessential’ body part is seen merely as something removed from order – therefore out of place, unwanted, to-be-washed-away. But the ‘essential’ body part is seen as still in some sense a part of it’s body – still belonging to that person. This enters into a much more intense conflict with the recognition that it is now removed from that person, and so generates much more anxiety. Seeing such a body part is, in a sense, like seeing a ghost: the person is there, present in the body part, and yet also not there.

Science and the Body Part as Tool

That’s two categories, neither of which includes meat. Here’s a third, that I’d roughly as a body part that retains its functionality distinct from the body, and thereby becomes a tool, something that could in principle be ‘used’ by a range of people. The examples here form a rather motley collection.

For instance, consider a sperm sample. In some sense it is seen as still ‘belonging to’ the man who produced it, at least until he signs the requisite forms. Yet it’s not really a body part, but an expressions of a power of his body, namely the power to fertilise. He has some responsibility (legal, financial, etc) for this power it can exercise.

Conversely, consider a prosthetic limb, especially the futuristic sort that’s popular in the Skywalker family. In some sense it can be experienced as a body part, but the possibility of its re-use, re-attachment to a range of bodies gives it a ‘sanitised’, ‘mechanical’ quality.

And, lying behind and creating these practical examples, there’s the theoretical example of biological science, which can focus in on a single body part in isolation and analyse it in great detail, illuminating the precise causal mechanisms that enable the part to function, to serve the rest of the body efficiently.

Insofar as the sort of revulsion mentioned above is absent here, it seems to be because even as we isolate the body part from the organisation of the body, we re-embed it in a different organisation – namely, instrumental organisation, the causal organisation of tools and means and what they can do. This organisation makes the body part no longer seem ‘out of place’, in the way that provoked our revulsion.

Meat

So, at last, to meat. Like the body-part-as-tool, meat doesn’t provoke revulsion, because it the body part is embedded in a new, public, external, organisation, but this time not as a tool, but as an object of desire.

And this is a big difference, because the body-part-as-tool, while it does dethrone the original body as the only subject able to use that tool, at least leaves as one among others. The functional organisation of the body part is still consistent with the lived, personal order of the body.

But the desire-based order into which we integrate ‘meat’ isn’t – it replaces the living body’s organisation, and is incompatible with it (no body could survive by eating itself). And observe this consequence – where the parts of a body that is not meat can inspire either disdainful revulsion, or horrified revulsion, those of a body that is meat can only inspire disdainful revulsion.

This is because the horror we feel as a human limb or organ – indeed, the horror that we feel as a human corpse – is based on a sense that it still belongs to, still ‘makes present’, the internal order of the body it comes from. But a body which is seen as meat has no such internal order, and so there is nothing to unnerve us. The entrails of a pig are not like the entrails of a human being – they are like the vomit or stray pubic hairs or stale sweat of a human being. They are a mess to be cleaned up.

This is why there’s a sense in which we don’t perceive eating meat as eating an animal, as eating something that used to be alive. To think of the active living animal – as is definitionally necessary for meat – is to bring to mind the evident fact that this being had an internal, meaningful, organisation, in which it as sentient and active was centrally embedded. Yet this is precisely what ‘meat’ obscures. So to minimise the tension, we separate them as sharply as we can, even at the cost of inconsistency (e.g. being appalled at eating cats and dogs, but not pigs and cows).

Human Meat

So that’s paradigmatic meat. What about saying that a person is seen as ‘a piece of meat’? I think the foregoing analysis provides an answer: to be seen as ‘meat’ is to be seen as organised around an external desire which displaces and obscures one’s internal organisation around oneself as sentient and active.

We might sketch four symptoms that would indictae such an attitude (all matters of degree):

Firstly, meat typically requires to be marked as meat – cut a particular way, with skin and blood removed, cooked, seasoned, to distinguish it from the body it used to be. The same would be expected in human bodies seen ‘as meat’: that extensive work would be required to alter their appearance and make it visibly announce its organisation around external desire;

Secondly, since meat was defined as a way for isolated body parts to not revolt us, we would expect a preference for seeing particular parts of ‘human meat’ presented in isolation from the rest of the body, arousing aesthetic pleasure without needing to be organised in relation to the whole person;

Thirdly, a preference for seeing the ‘human meat’ in passive poses which display the body rather than displaying what it can do, since deliberate action brings to the fore the body’s internal order;

Fourthly, a willingness to see the ‘human meat’ presented as a dead body, on TV shows or music videos for instance, since as long as it has fully satisfied the cosmetic requirements of the first symptom, the natural horror of a dead body can be subsumed into an aesthetic thrill.

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Average = Total/N

Posted on October 3, 2010 by lukeroelofs

An argument against vegetarianism that I’ve encountered a few times is that any individual’s consumption decisions will have no effect on the actual production of meat, and so are ineffective. In particular, this argument was made recently at Bad Conscience.

This argument cannot be right.

We know that production decisions are based, ultimately, on sales and hence on demand. The proponents of this argument accept this, by granting that if everyone stopped eating meat, there would be no meat production (or barely any).

How sensitive are production decisions to demand? Either they are precisely sensitive – they can pick up the signal from each individual purchase and respond to it – or they are crudely sensitive – they use approximate, gross, indicators, perhaps involving hundreds of individual purchases as a single data-point.

If the former, then each vegetarian is directly responsible for preventing the manufacture and destruction of all the animals they would otherwise eat in their life – which is a large number.

The anti-vegetarian argument focuses on saying that this is not the case – markets are not this precisely sensitive, and if (as is implied) vegetarians think they are, then vegetarians are idiots.

But even if markets aren’t precisely sensitive, they must have some sensitivity – crude, rough, sensitivity. But the sensitivity still governs the same effects – does meat get produced, and if so how much. This means the same total effect is divided up among the consumers, just divided more roughly and unevenly.

This means that some purchases will have no effect – but only because other purchases have more effect, disproportionate effect. And since we can’t tell which our purchases will be, each one still on average has their proportionate effect of preventing a large number of individuals killings.

Ducks

This is just maths. Let me do some tables.

Suppose there are 10 people, who each year eat a total of 100 ducks. The ducks are killed only to feed these people. 0 duck-eaters: 0 ducks killed. 10 duck-eaters: 100 duck killed. This is (analogous to) what everybody accepts – the two extreme points. The incomplete table looks like this →:

In a sensitive system, each individual could reduce the number of killings by 10. There would be this table ←:

Now suppose – as the anti-vegetarian argument asserts – that this isn’t the case. In fact, when the first of these ten people go vegetarian, it makes no difference to how many ducks are killed. Suppose the same holds for the second and third people as well. This gives our incomplete third table↓:

See how you still have the gap between 0 ducks killed and 100 ducks killed? That change has to occur at some point, wherever the change comes. For instance, the table might look like this ←:

Here, vegetarians 1-3 make no difference, as do the 5th, 7th, and 9th. But the 4th vegetarian saves 40 lives, and the 6th, 8th, and 10th save 20 each. So most vegetarians have no effect – but the average effect is the mean of 40, 20, 20 20, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, and 0. Which =10. That is, the vegetarians have exactly the same average effect as in the sensitive system.

At risk of belabouring the point, suppose a different, very ‘rough’ system, with systematic irrationalities, as here →:

Here, two vegetarians have no effect at all, and three (the 3rd, 5th, ad 7th) actually increase the number of ducks killed. But what’s the average number of ducks saved per vegetarian?

Mean of 0, 0, -10, 29, -19, 50, -12, 42, 13, 7 = 10!

Noticing a pattern? It’s always 10! That’s because if everyone being vegetarian eliminates all meat production, which everyone in this dispute accepts, then the average effect of being vegetarian must always be the total meat production divided by the number of people who need to go veggie (in this example, 100/10).

Now, sometimes we shouldn’t act based on averages. For instance, if the 7th person in the last system knows how the system works, and knows that the last two people are definitely not going to become vegetarian, then they shouldn’t go vegetarian because they know they’ll cause an increase in killings (by whatever mechanism).

But that’s because they know the details of where they are in the system. Typically, consumers don’t. This is analogous to voting: my one vote could have no effect, or it might be a crucial decider that has a disproportionate effect, and I can’t know in advance. In this situation, I have to act based on what the average expected result is.

Of course, it might be that the people who use this argument against vegetarianism know where the critical points come. But that implies they know when, where, and how to have maximum, exaggerated effect on meat-production. They should tell us.

One last time: if N people doing x would produce total result R, the average effect of doing x is R/N. For vegetarianism, that means a dozen or more killings prevented per year.

The maths is simple: reality is complex, but when we can’t trace out the complexities we must act on whatever simple maths is available.

I’m aware that I’m starting to sound like Paul in his post: my argument is just so obvious, so evidently true, that I can’t understand how anybody could fail to accept it. Just as he feels about his opposite argument. One of us is wrong, despite our shared confidence. All I can say to this is that the one who’s right is probably me, because I’ve got tables.

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Inconclusive Thoughts on Comparing Prostitution to Things

Posted on September 29, 2010 by lukeroelofs

So a judge in Ontario has ruled that laws against prostitutes working in brothels, communicating about prostitution in public, or giving their money to other people are unconstitutional, because they make prostitution more dangerous.

The government disagree and are taking the case to the Canadian Supreme Court; if the ruling is upheld there, prostitution will be effectively legalised/decriminalised for the whole country. This has prompted Debate.

It seems to me this ruling, in itself, is something to welcome, insofar as it removes means by which the state harasses prostitutes and impedes their efforts to work as safely as possible. But I think there’s also space for reasonable disagreement between supporters of gender equality over what would ideally replace it.

Of course, some of the debate actually going on is not within that space for reasonable disagreement, such as this this article, which explains that

“…the kind of men who frequent prostitutes…don’t have a lot of respect for them on the whole. Nor should they. Being a prostitute is a shameful, indecent activity, and any sex worker who demands respect as a matter of course is fooling herself. She is not respectable. Politically correct people will say she is, but she isn’t.”

I had always thought that everyone should demand respect as a matter of course, but clearly that’s just political correctness (possibly gone mad). Indeed, in the same newspaper as the above article is another, arguing that it’s “time commodities got some respect“, which puts things in perspective.

I fear that positions on prostitution are often subtly influenced by this kind of bigotry, even when expressed in feminist terms. Factually, it seems that both these women, hoping to organise a workers’ co-operative in Vancouver, and mounting a similar legal appeal to the one in Ontario, and also women like Natasha Falle, publically opposing Tuesday’s ruling based on the trauma and exploitation she suffered, experienced the reality of prostitution. So the reality of prostitution has contradictory aspects.

Which aspect is more significant? Since both present powerful emotional images – of women as manipulated, abused victims and women as trying to get by in the face of society’s contemptuous fear of their sexuality – the one that a person takes as more significant is likely to be heavily but subtley influenced by the strength of their emotional response to those pictures.

Can we emerge from the confusing realm of competing valid emotions by carefully phrasing and answering questions in philosophic style? Not easily.

For instance, one way of framing the issue is to ask “is prostitution significantly different from other forms of work?” That sounds like a good question until you start thinking about the standard for comparison.

A lot of work is so unpleasant that you’d only do it if you really needed the money; a lot of work involves cutting off your feelings for 8 hours and ignoring the demeaning or alienating behaviour of everyone around you; a lot of work involves getting bossed about by an exploitative parasite who imposes petty, insulting rules and takes most of the money you produce. And a lot of the kind of work that gets taken by illegal immigrants is all of those things.

Another framing device is to ask ‘is prostitution a form a rape or sexual violence?’, based on the idea that having sex with someone you don’t want to have sex with, even if you outwardly consent, is still a violation and a more subtle form of emotional abuse.

But then if that standard condemsn prostituion, it also condemns a great deal of everyday sexual life, whenever people have sex because of being pressured into it – including, potentially, cases where both partners would rather not but do it anyway because of messed up communication (which in Heideggerian terms amounts to being raped by ‘the They’).

So the questions are relatively precise when you make big assumptions that everyday work and everyday sex are just fine and ok. Which are very very questionable assumptions. But when the assumptions are dropped, the questions become unhelpfully broad: should we tolerate people being economically coerced into shitty jobs, or emotionally coerced into shitty sex? And if not, what on earth do we do about it?

Posted in Canadian Politics | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Happiness, Beauty, and Oppression

Posted on September 26, 2010 by lukeroelofs

On magazine covers and adverts and other such cultural dandruff, I’ve often seen an intriguing phenomenon: the grouping together of health, happiness, and beauty. These are what you will acquire from the latest miracle diet, secret lifestyle tips, or biomedicalised yoghurt.

It’s an odd grouping, when you think about it. In particular, I was struck by the idea of linking happiness and beauty (try googling the phrase “when you look good, you”, and read the first page of results unanimously answer that “when you look good, you feel good”).

It’s not just that they’re not the same thing – you can be ugly and happy, or miserable and beautiful. It’s that they have quite different structures – or so we might think. What I mean is that to be beautiful is to look good to some observer. Even if that observer is yourself, looking at your reflection or your legs, there’s still an analytical distinction between the you-that-sees and the you-that-is-seen. Beauty is mediated by a viewpoint that is, substantively or formally, external.

This is why it’s relatively common to see criticisms of beauty, of the beauty industry, of beauty ideals, of the cult of beauty as a means of oppression. But happiness, surely, is different – it’s a prime example of an unmediated, intrinsic good. When you feel good, that feeling is good, after all.

I want to suggest that ‘happiness’, like beauty, carries suggestions of a relationship, potentially a power relationship, to outside people. I’m not arguing that in a particular culture or cultural product it does actually function as a means of oppression – that verdict I leave open. I just want to show how it could make sense to think of it that way.

So first, we need to put some cracks in the obviousness of happiness as a direct, simple, personal good – what might be expressed by saying that ‘after all, everybody wants (their own) happiness, that’s what drives us.’ This sort of claim, that happiness is sort of necessarily what we’re after, works with an exceedingly abstract, maybe even meaningless, definition of ‘happiness’. We pursue happiness because happiness just means ‘whatever we pursue’.

That’s fine on its own terms, but we also use ‘happiness’ and ‘happy’ in very different, very concrete ways. To be ‘happy’ is a particular emotion, a mood, a particular set of physiological responses and neural patterns, which typically are pleasant but don’t apply to every possible pleasant experience.

In particular, ‘happiness’ is associated iconically with the smile. Smiling stands, perhaps, at the extreme pole of concreteness in our concept of ‘happy’, opposite calculable ‘utility’ at the extreme pole of abstractness.

But now observe that smiling is an enormously social activity. People are far more likely to smile when talking to or facing someone than they are when they’re just feeling happy on their own. That, after all, is why the urge to smile is sometimes a response to a very negative emotion: embarassment. In this case, the smile functions to appease, to try to ‘break the tension’ as much as possible.

That’s not to say all smiling is appeasement. But there’s a reason why the same expression is linked to embarassment and to happiness – in both cases it works similarly, to reduce tension. Tension, bear in mind, is often what we expect (and hope for) from things which are challenging, difficult, novel, or otherwise important.

Recall the point made in this post, that anger is a privilege: some people are accepted and respected when they express anger, while others are looked down on or rejected. Seeing someone angry would certainly be the sort of thing that tends to raise ‘tension’.

So I’ve pointed out the two extremes of what ‘happiness’ means – abstract utility and a concrete pattern of muscle contractions. Presumably, when we hear or use the word, we have some mixture, some ambiguous in-between, in mind. It follows that encouraging people to be happy, or telling them how to be happy, or offering to help make them happy, shares this ambiguity, this shiftiness of meaning.

And one side of that shiftiness, the once concerned with the concrete, specific, expressions of the emotion ‘happy’, is strongly associated with a tension-defusing, unchallenging, social role.

If, in our heads, the image of ‘happiness’ is the energetic, unperturbed, smiling person, then happiness is a way of acting more than it’s a way of feeling, and it’s a way of acting towards others that aims to make oneself as unthreatening as possible, i.e. which actually functions partly, just like beauty, by the mediation of an outside person, the person who isn’t challenged or threatened, the person who your sweetness gratifies and reassures. And that can easily be part of oppression.

(To put it another, more grammatically-minded way: ‘to be happy’ can be turned easily into ‘to be happy with’, which means ‘to accept’, ‘not to complain’)

Now as I said, this doesn’t directly imply that any particular reference to ‘happiness’ is in fact participating in oppression of any particular victim. It’s just meant to outline how it might be, to enable a critical stance towards ‘happiness’ as an ideal and as a marketable goal, in the way that is already commonly done for ‘beauty’.

Posted in Political Philosophy | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The End of Mongooses? Predation and Historicism

Posted on September 22, 2010 by lukeroelofs

In a recent opinion-piece at the New York Times, Jeff McMahan argues that the goal of gradually eliminating meat-eating from the animal world is, in principle, morally desirable, to prevent the needless suffering that it causes.

(It’s worth clarifying, off the bat, that strictly it’s only predation, not meat-eating, that’s the target, since meat-eating includes useful things like scavengers. Secondly, the right animals to focus on are probably not the oft-mentioned lions, since they have small populations and will probably be extinct in the wild soon anyway. A better example to focus on would be small predators of birds and rodents, things like weasels, cats, foxes, and even, dare I say it, mongooses. Thirdly, we shouldn’t think of this in terms of going and killing anyone, but more in terms of industrial-scale use of contraceptives)

I was going to post on the analysis of this argument, but actually there’s not much to analyse. The argument can be summed up pretty well thus:

“If I had been in a position to design and create a world, I would have tried to arrange for all conscious individuals to be able to survive without tormenting and killing other conscious individuals.  I hope most other people would have done the same.”

No, what to me seems more worthy of analysis is the fact that almost nobody seems to agree: the comments, of which there seem to be a few hundred, are overwhelmingly negative, some vitriolically so. I came across the story via. a post at In Living Color, which also has a negative, though more cautious, reaction. So why is there so much opposition?

The first argument that comes up is that removing predators/predation would have catastrophic unintended consequences: not only would there be subtle knock-on effects that we can’t predict, but very likely herbivore populations would explode, depleting plant supplies and imposing slower, more painful deaths from starvation and epidemics.

This is a very good argument, because of our present global situation – which is that we as a species (or as a society? as a civilisation?) have the capacity to seriously disrupt natural systems, but don’t have the capacity to deliberately alter natural systems. Moreover, we are in the process of semi-unintentionally fucking everything up, and have been for a few centuries at least. Call this situation 1.

Given this situation, our practical priorities in environmental matters should be to stop breaking things, put things down, step away from the things, and try to let them recover on their own. Humility, reducing resource use, and ‘conservation’ are the order of the day. So the ‘unintended consequences’ argument is a good one.

But the thing is, McMahan knows this, and explicitly concedes it. He explicitly says that his concern is with a hypothetical different global situation.

This might either be situation 2, in which conservation – leaving nature alone to recover – just isn’t possible, because the whole biosphere has gone into a hideous freefall, and the only prospect of any animals surviving is if human ingenuity, in all its weakness, manages to reconstruct and re-engineer a new ecological equilibrium.

Or it might be the more optimistic situation 3, in which “our scientific knowledge advances to a point at which we could seek to eliminate, alter, or replace certain species with a high degree of confidence in our predictions about the short- and long-term effects of our action.”

If someone presents an argument that “If problem X could be avoided, we should aim for Y”, you can’t argue back by saying “we shouldn’t aim for Y, because of problem X.” That’s just not bothering to pay attention.

Another argument that arises is that we should want to preserve genetic groups per se. It’s better for there to be 10 frightened mice and 2 hungry mongooses than for there to be 12 happy mice, just because there are two families in the first case and only one in the second.

This might be a bad argument, or a good one, but it’s beside the point. That’s because we’re either considering situation 2., which is so desperate that we don’t get to preserve families but rather must decide which of the remaining families we can save and which to let vanish

-or else we’re considering situation 3., where humanity has sufficient unity and resolve, sufficient resources and technology, and most of all sufficient ecological, psychological, and physiological knowledge, to save all the families you want, but just stop them being predators.

Let’s just flesh out this latter scenario, since it’s the best expression I think of the anti-predation ideal. The idea would be that you still have mongooses and mice running around, foraging for their diverse and exciting sources of food. But just as mongooses grow up with inhibitory mechanisms that allow them to interact peacefully with other mongooses, those mechanisms are also directed onto mice (and, indeed, cobras). How can this be done? That’s a question for the mongoose-psychologists, but we know it’s possible in principle, because we have abundant examples of animals, even predators and prey, forming friendly relationships, as the various images here illustrate.

Of course mongooses have to eat, but why would they eat their small furry friends when there’s human-provided synthetic food (balanced by our future mega-nutritionists) that tastes nicer? And of course mice have to breed, but if mass contraceptives work to enable stable human populations even with abundant food, they should work for mice too, given the right conditions.

So what’s left, to oppose this idyllic vision of baby mongooses and mice playing happily together in a sunlit field? Maybe the claim is simply that we won’t ever reach situations 2 or 3. That might be true. But I think the burden of proof is on the person affirming an absolute limit to historical changes that have so far been remarkably extensive (consider that for most of human history we were in situation 0: the biosphere as a whole is unaffected whatever you do).

Moreover, that would require the presentation of explicitly historical or scientific arguments, in a tone of regret (‘yes, it would be wonderful to eliminate carnivorism, but we just won’t ever have the capability’), which isn’t the typical tone that opposition takes.

What seems to remain is a sort of quasi-religious appeal to ‘nature’: nature is good, and we should respect that and not intervene in its workings, even if (assume for the sake of argument) we could do so without causing serious harm.

Not wanting to be dismissive, this seems to rely on some sort of falsehood – either that nature was deliberately designed by a wise deity, that nature inherently embodies an overall plan and purpose, or even that “nature is good” – it’s clearly not, it’s mixed, with very good and very bad elements. And we know that the elements can be separated because often one species, one family, one lifestyle, disappears and another doesn’t. There is no plan or constancy to it.

Not wanting to compound being dismissive with patronising-by-explaning, but it seems as though this sense of spiritual humility isn’t really a different argument from the first one, about unintended consequences. It’s the same argument, but with the precise facts that underly it abstracted out, leaving the emotional core. I think this is what tends to happen to moral positions we consider important: reflectively we may see them as depending on certain specific, contingent, factual conditions, but they sink down as well, embed themselves in our emotions and our feelings. They become almost instinctual.

So, given the present situation of humanity and the biosphere, in which (contingently) humans have enormous power to destroy and very little power to build, we conclude (if we are environmentalists) that it is very important to let nature work in its own way, to respect its mystery (i.e. our ignorance), and to fight against human activities that despoil it, which includes probably most human activities.

But when it becomes ‘instinctual’, this idea – that the natural order must be left to itself, that human actions are ignorant and destructive, that most humans are arrogant and don’t care, etc. – becomes insensitive to things like “suppose hypothetically that we live in a different situation, where humans are no longer ignorant, arrogant, or structurally insane”. Because emotions aren’t good at “suppose hypothetically”.

The result is that a powerful emotional revulsion remains, and gets rationalised through arguments (or through wilful misunderstanding). And since this will happen regardless of the time period or situation being considered, the practical rule that makes sense for our present situation gets universalised into an eternal rule about human humility and how we should respect ‘nature’ for inarticulable, spiritual reasons.

Of course, maybe I’m just wrong – there is a good reason here that I just can’t understand, and which nobody can explain to me. But I’m pretty unwilling to accept that there’s something intrinsically, mysteriously, wrong about a cat and a rat being friends – that this is somehow ‘unnatural’ and we shouldn’t let it happen, if we can instead preserve the compulsory murderousness that ‘nature’ has decreed for them.

Fly! On the Wings of Love!

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Reflections on Anger

Posted on September 20, 2010 by lukeroelofs

Some slightly disjointed comments about anger.

First, empirical support for the idea that people’s everyday perceptions reward men for expressing anger, but punish women. This can be linked with the traditional, and only somewhat worn-away, custom that only men can swear, but not women and children: swearing is a primary way of expressing anger without physical aggression. The point is that permission to feel and express anger is a privilege, something that expresses one’s status. To quote Firestone, “a man is allowed to blaspheme the world because it belongs to him to damn”.

Then there’s this article by Paul Krugman, in which he argues that somehow, the best-off people in the US seem to be the angriest about present political events. He says “The spectacle of high-income Americans, the world’s luckiest people, wallowing in self-pity and self-righteousness would be funny, except for one thing: they may well get their way.”

Then here’s another study, finding that angry people make more optimistic risk estimates than both neutral people and frightened people. Anger, that is, is in some respects an optimistic emotion. It’s not just a sense that something is wrong, bad, or unpleasant (which it would share with fear, sadness, disgust, despair, etc), but a sense that something is wrong and that I can somehow do something about it. This of course doesn’t make it more pleasant – it could easily make it more unbearable, if that upsurging conviction of my own power is contradicted by reality. But it stems from a certain sense of confidence.

This coheres with something I remember reading somewhere, though I now can’t find where it was, that revolutions and social upheavals don’t typically occur when conditions are worst, or among the people who are worst-off. Typically, on the contrary, the rebellious ones are those who are quite well off, or have recently seen an increase in their fortunes, but now find their further aspirations frustrated, or their improvements reversed. This makes sense if anger, and the sorts of political behaviour associated with it, depend upon a sense of optimism.

I think there is an idea sometimes among socialists that radical progressive change is made most likely by the ‘emiseration’ of the working class – the poorer and more deprived they get, they more they’ll ‘be forced to see’ that capitalism doesn’t work and should be done away with.

I think this is largely related to a personal desire, on the part of these writers, for validation – when conditions are worse, it makes their critical claims seem more justified, it reduces their burden of uncertainty and doubt. But making something more obvious, objectively, and making people see and feel it are quite different things.

And given what’s been said above, their expectation (or tendency towards an expectation) is probably wrong: people will be more likely to rebel when they’re treated better, but not as well as this makes them feel they deserve.

It also, of course, explains Krugman’s observation – that there will often be more anger coming from well-off minorities who are getting a little less than they are used to.

Of course there are probably numerous factors, so that the effect of a social change on people’s readiness for anger won’t be predictable simply from whether it’s an improvement or a worsening.

One such factor, going back to the first link, is whether they are ‘trained’ to feel anger by having their expressions of it positively or negatively reinforced. If, for instance, members of a subordinate group were consistently dissuaded from confidently expressing anger, and members of a privileged group consitently encouraged, this might serve to ensure that whatever shifts in social power or benefits occurred, there would reliably be more anger going in one direction than in the other.

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Stupid Papal Remark, No. 1064: the atheists are gonna kill us all

Posted on September 17, 2010 by lukeroelofs

Beating up on the Pope is something of a lowest-common denominator among many bloggers – he is a large and tempting target. So I wouldn’t want to be pretentious by not joining in, would I?

Having arrived in Britain, he made the following remark:

“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’.”

This is fairly clear: it’s not that secularism (‘the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life’) may lead, or can lead, or has sometimes led, to ‘a reductive vision of the person’. It’s that it does lead there ultimately – i.e. it’s the reliable long-term outcome.

Of course, phrases like ‘a reductive vision of the person’ aren’t too inflammatory – after all, that might mean something like ‘reducing the span of a person’s life to only their mortal life’, which a lot of people would happily accept. But no: the immediate context is provided by this:

“we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many.”

So the reliable (not immediate, but reliable) outcome of secularism is the sort of ‘reductive vision’ manifested in industrial genocide. This is pretty extreme, even for God’s Bulldog.

But the underlying idea, that movement away from religious belief means movement towards wickedness and cruelty, is a long-standing staple of theistic rhetoric, sometimes expressed in the phrase “If God is dead, everything is permitted.”

This claim is wrong. It is very wrong, on multiple levels. So although you’ve probably heard much of this before, let’s go over why it, and the Pope’s specific version, are wrong.

1. The Nazis weren’t Atheists

This is the simplest, most boring point. The Nazis were certainly not strictly orthodox Christians, but they were more fond of the Catholic Church than they were of atheists. They believed in an intolerable mixture of occultish jibberish, and explicitly disparaged rationalism.

2. It’s not Atheism that’s Permissive

If God exists, and moral authority resides in Him, and if He communicates directly with humans, then He can waive any moral constraint that might bind you. To quote Zizek

“if God exists, then everything…is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations.”

Note that this might be mitigated by a postulate of Divine Intelligibility – “were God to command us to torture children, then we would be permitted to, but fortunately we can know in advance that God will never command such a thing”. There are two problems with this: firstly, if we associate God with actual religion then He has quite often commanded us to torture children, and indeed to violate probably any ethical restraint you care to mention.

Secondly, if God’s supposed goodness allowed this sort of confident prediction, it would also allow us to confidently predict that we wouldn’t live in a world awash with apparently-pointless suffering. Since we do, we must conclude that God is at worst eager to destroy and hurt us, or at best completely inscrutable. In which case, it’s quite plausible that this mysterious being might suddenly command slaughter, mayhem, and cruelty.

3. Theism has no Advantage over Atheism in Defending Moral Realism

Of course, the idea isn’t really that without God “everything is permitted”, but rather that “nothing is forbidden”, or more broadly that there is no rational system of behaviour for humans to abide by. The atheist, on this view, simply selects an arbitrary set of personal preferences and declares them ethical truth.

This is also false. What is true is that atheists cannot give a perfect, complete justification of any rules of behaviour – i.e. a justification which would leave no questions unanswered, permit no disagreement, and convince anyone paying attention. But nobody can do that: if it’s open to cynical atheists to say “I know that this action is unfair, inconsistent, would cause needless suffering, etc. but why should I care about any of that?”, then it’s also open to cynical theists to say “I know that this action is abhorrent to God, contrary to His plans, violates His commandments, etc. but why should I care about any of that?”

Theists could get out of this using a convenient conceptual analysis of value terms, i.e. by saying that you should care about God’s plan because the very idea of ‘worth caring about’ is defined in relation to God’s plan. But that analysis itself demands justification, and could be disputed. More to the point, atheists can also use such convenient analyses; three promising candidates are:

  • To be worth caring about is defined in relation to rational consistency and universalization (roughly, this is Kant’s position);
  • To be worth caring about is defined in relation to hedonic facts or preference facts in a way that includes each individual’s happiness, desires, or suffering (roughly, this is the position of Utilitarianism);
  • To be worth caring about is defined in relation to the contingent but real condition known as ‘human nature’ (roughly, this is the position of ‘ethical naturalism’ and of Aristotelianism).

Are any of these definitions good ones? Good question, maybe someone should write a book on it. But they’re just as respectable as the analyses that centre on what a cosmic Will has Willed.

4. None of this is Actually Relevant

I’m not saying these meta-ethical debates aren’t important (I am a philosopher after all), nor that people’s actual behaviour isn’t motivated by their religious (or other) beliefs. Rather, I’m saying that insofar as such beliefs guide behaviour, they do not do so in virtue of their intellectual properties. Whether a belief is consistent, or whether it validates certain inferences, have little effect on how that belief will influence behaviour.

This is especially obvious because everybody knows that these beliefs are not primarily adopted for intellectual reasons, but primarily for emotional and social reasons. Just as it’s those emotional and social reasons that motivate us in adopting the beliefs, it’s also those which mainly determine how the beliefs will influence our behaviour.

That’s why more-or-less every set of beliefs of any size has a few people of great virtue and a few people of great evil among its adherents – as well as, usually, some great pieces of art and some trash.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that the motive forces which most strongly influence our (un)ethical behaviour – empathy, resentment, enlightened self-interest, greed, panic, etc. – will persist through most changes in people’s beliefs. The most we can expect, then, is that changing patterns of belief might subtly redirect these motives in better or worse directions – and that has more to do with their details than with their cosmologies.

In conclusion: the Nazis weren’t atheists, if God exists then everything is potentially permitted, theism and atheism are roughly on a par in terms of meta-ethical robustness, and most people’s behaviour is little influenced by meta-ethical robustness.

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Projection: a game of mutual self-enslavement for two or more players

Posted on September 15, 2010 by lukeroelofs

A note: since classes have started, I am planning to aim for one post every three days or so.

1

Anyway, some reflections on psychology and gender. Suppose we define “projection” as “perceiving, and responding to, one’s own feelings by attributing them to someone else”. I think we’re quite used to the idea of projection as a defense mechanism, but it seems to me it could easily be at work much more widely than that.

Consider the standard, intuitive, model we have of a ‘projecting’ person, perhaps exemplified by the image of the outspoken homophobe who is actually a homosexual in denial.

In this model, the reason for projection is that a certain feeling or attitude or action or whatever is too difficult and threatening to attribute to yourself, even when you really are experiencing it. It’s too big a danger to your ‘sense of self’, the set of ideas about yourself and the world that allows you to function in everyday life.

2

But this factor alone can’t be sufficient. At least two other causal factors need to be made explicit. Firstly, attributing the feeling to someone else has to be less threatening and difficult than attributing it to yourself. This need not always be the case, and it will depend on which ‘others’ – sometimes it’s more important to protect your image of an idol than your image of yourself. So what’s really crucial is the difference – that one attribution be much easier to handle than another.

Moreover, there needs to be a lack of insight – if it becomes too easy and too obvious, or if the rationalisations are too weak, the projection breaks down. So there’s an epistemic precondition: the attribution must be sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently open to distortion, sufficiently cloudy. The other side of this is the absence of a strong desire for insight.

And it’s a natural assumption that the greater the lack of concern with accuracy, and the greater the epistemic difficulty, the smaller the difference in psychological acceptability that can generate projection. And the greater any of these features, the greater the degree of projection.

3

Now, the familiar model is one where the difference in acceptabilities is very high, and this generates projection even when the facts are fairly clear – even in the face of strong evidence, such as in the paradigm example of the closeted homophobe, or in people who perceive a declaration of war in the construction of a community centre.

But given the factors discussed, we could easily imagine another model, where the driving force lies in a combination of a difficult epistemic task and a lack of strong desire for accuracy, allowing quite minor differences in psychological acceptability to generate frequent low levels of projection.

For this to occur at all would probably only require these two premises:

1) Attributing emotions to others, and disentangling them from our own emotions, is often difficult;

2) However, we have to perform it so frequently everyday that we can’t devote sufficient time and energy to always doing it accurately that it would require.

Both of these, to me, seem like truisms, and the first in particular has some supporting scientific data. Moreover, for this phenomenon to occur in significant aggregate patterns reflecting major social groupings, rather than in random deviations that cancel each out, we need only add the further premise:

3) People find it psychologically easier to attribute feelings to people when it conforms with a stereotype already believed (even if consciously disavowed) than otherwise.

Which is also, I think, very likely to be true.

4

So far, though, this conclusion is fairly boring. Of course prevalent stereotypes and biases will be reflected in people’s patterns of what they attribute to who. Duh.

But here’s the point that interests me. Even projected onto another person, your feelings are something enormously personal, and in a sense unique (at least from your own perspective). If they can appear to you fully only in the form of someone else, that person might come to appear as likewise enormously unique, as having a deeply personal significance to you.

They might appear as enormously unique and personally important, moreover, even if you hardly know them, and even if you felt the same way about another, different, person just last month. Also, even when projected onto someone else, your feelings still demand that you deal with them – except that now dealing with them seems to be possible only through relating to this particular person.

The particular content can vary, and it’s probably easy to supply your own examples. For instance, it’s a cliche that insofar as women have historically been held back, both externally and internally, from pursuing power, fame and wealth for themselves, they’ve pursued it indirectly by seeking successful male partners.

So a phenomenon – widespread stereotypes – that is on one level very public, impersonal, and boring can, given only a few very plausible premises added to familiar notions, could easily generate very intense, very ‘personal-feeling’ emotions and desires.

But there’s more. What if society was set up in such a way that its stereotypes formed complementary pairs, leading some people to project feelings A-M onto certain other people, who in turn projected back feelings N-Z onto the first group? By such a cunning strategem, those stereotypes could generate intense, tightly-bound pairs of people, each feeling incomplete in the absence of a partner who is simultaneously ‘loved as a unique individual’ but nevertheless must belong to certain groups and not others.

5

A couple of qualifications. Firstly, this is obviously not a complete explanation of anything, and certainly not of any particular relationship between any two (or more) particular people. I’m just arguing that it’s reasonable to think this mechanism is at work to some degree, since it requires only very modest premises to be assumed. This at least puts it on the table as one candidate explanation of various phenomena like the existence of gender or the particular forms it takes in a given human society.

Secondly, I haven’t given any reason so far to think that this is a bad thing. A conservative might, for instance, accept the foregoing analysis but say that this a very wise system, since it inflates in people a certain sort of need for each other, and ensures that people stay together long enough to raise children.

But I think that’s very questionable. For a start, there are other sorts of relationships, and other ways of connecting people. I don’t think love has to be based in personal insecurities or misunderstandings, and it might even be argued that such love is ‘not real love’, whatever that means.

I also think it’s arguable that the sort of dependence produced by projection tends to lead to unhappiness. It’s making your sense of your self and your own mental well-being depend on the details of how another person feels and acts, i.e. on something that, in the last analysis, you simply cannot control, but can’t help trying to.

Moreover, when you do try to control it, and succeed, you do so by imprisoning another person in your own issues – whether done by an individual or by a whole social movement.

For instance, the kind of sexual puritanism that rails against immodest clothing or tries to enforce highly restrictive standards of female attire, is transparently motivated by the personal insecurities of men.

In essence, men are encouraged to project all their feelings of vulnerability, especially in relation to sex, onto women, and to experience sexual vulnerability only indirectly. The result of this social neurosis is that it becomes possible for them to experience the mere visibility of a female body as a threatening and painful form of exposure – especially so, because that exposure is outside their control, and they can only re-assert control by insane projects of legislation or social engineering.

To put it another way: if ‘freedom’ is defined as not having oneself be in the hands of another person, then any social process that encourages and rewards projection is thereby encouraging and rewarding people for a particularly subtle form of mutual self-enslavement.

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