45 Comments

1. Uncle $cam:

   Psychotronica: Abusing and Leveraging Intelligence from Social Networking

   http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1444

   For your amusement, edification, or both. Just thought it might interest some here. Wonderful and erudite blog, thx.

   6 March 2010, 7:42 am

2. peggy:

   “One law for the lion and ox is oppression.” This is true.
   It is also true that laws favoring equal rights can *sometimes* work out in favor of the rich and against the poor.
   But human beings are all the same species. We should all have the same basic rights, and governments and the powerful should have basic responsibilities to ensure and protect those rights for everyone.
   But “should” is a big empty word.
   There are many different human cultures. Sometimes it is very very difficult to determine what is “right” and what is “wrong.”
   Sometimes, as in blatant cases of genocide, one can say with no doubt, “This wrong.”
   But having found something so wrong, what can you or I do about it?
   Just thoughts. No answers.

   6 March 2010, 4:31 pm

3. Ms Kitty:

   hmmm, ideally what some of us want is; for every human being to have equal protection under the law, equal access to healthcare, equal access to quality education, equal access to safe nutritional food and safe comfortable shelter. Those are the basics of life. (Those are the “equalities” that are under the most stringent attacks.) The other rights to freedom of speech, religion, assembly, the right to bear arms etc. address the quality of our intellectual lives. But after that, we also want equal opportunity to pursue our talents and dreams as our efforts take us.

   We are not ‘made’ equal. Thank God! How boring would that be! We just want an equal shot first, at survival in a civilized society, then at a meaningful life. Is that so radical?

   It is bizarre to me that a huge sector of our population seeks to deny what is basic to our survival in a society that can well afford it. It is even more bizarre to me that while some wail about the cost of health care, food and education, they don’t blink an eye at the cost of destroying entire countries. The same cost which is simultaneously destroying us financially. (Well, that and the gift of the bailouts from us the taxpayer to our more privileged corporate citizens and soon to come gift to the insurance companies.)

   Right now the social darwinists don’t really seem to care if there is equal opportunity. Somehow in their minds if you were born poor it is your parents’ fault, tough shit. If you are made of the right stuff, you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps and become Bill Gates. Ayn Rand would be proud of the society we are becoming. Where is John Galt? I don’t know, ask David Rockefeller.

   But now I diverge, so what? you and I and David Rockefeller were all born naked and we will all leave this world naked. Now that’s equality. 10,000 years from now will it matter? Consciousness is a blessing and a curse, isn’t it?

   6 March 2010, 4:59 pm

4. Stan:

   Ten quick random questions:

   (1) What is a right?

   (2) Where does it come from?

   (3) Did Paelolithic people have any of them?

   (4) Does an ant have rights?

   (5) Why or why not?

   (6) A monkey?

   (7) Why or why not?

   (8) Did someone just make this idea up, because I see “inalienable rights” alienated from people with absolute impunity all the time?

   (9) Do we require violence to ensure these rights?

   (10) How come, when I was being given my right to an education as a youngster, I felt like a prisoner at school? Could I opt out of that right? (Okay, that’s a double question.)

   * * *

   Not being a smartass. I mean these questions, and welcome actual answers.

   6 March 2010, 8:17 pm

5. Stan:

   “…we also want equal opportunity to pursue our talents and dreams as our efforts take us.”

   Does this mean the less talented deserve less? Do you believe in meritocracy? If so, doesn’t this mean that inequality will continue?

   And again, I ask, if equal means the same, how can it be operationalized between people who are already different?

   6 March 2010, 8:36 pm

6. Skol:

   I myself don’t believe in “the right to food”, etc: you either have food or you don’t. And people don’t necessarily take away your right to food… they just take away your food. No-one would take away your right to food and then let you keep the food. The right to equal access to healthcare is the same as equal access to healthcare. Don’t need to call it a right… If anything, calling it a right means someone doesn’t have it. If everyone had it, we wouldn’t call it a right. We can talk about the right to food, but who talks about the right to chew?

   It’s only a right if someone doesn’t have it. Its use belies inequality.

   6 March 2010, 10:57 pm

7. xenia:

   two years ago, in a third world country, i met a beggar who could not speak and whose lower limbs were atrophied. he bent to kiss my shoe, filthy with mud. i gave him some money and some food, but even his hands were too weak to hold them. he had a beautifully shaped head and was clean, but that doesn’t matter here — it just means that someone was taking his cut from what people gave him.

   always when i feel arrogance because of my intelligence, my education, my life experience or even my looks, i remember this man. it is not a dogmatic movement of my mind — it simply happens.

   i cannot accept any state, any policy, any meritocracy which does not treat him with dignity. he exists in a human shape and will die. same for me.

   6 March 2010, 11:54 pm

8. Curt:

   Oh right these are just RANDOM questions. To me these look about as random as how many children to do you want to have after you get married? If a couple have children should one of those parents be a stay at home parent and until what age of the children should they not go back to work? Should the children be raised in the father’s religion, the mothers religion, or should they be allowed to chose their own? Would you marry a policeman? Would you marry me under any conditions? Would you marry me under certain conditions?

   7 March 2010, 6:12 am

9. Curt:

   Yes, I felt like a prisoner in school at times too. Would I be a better person today if I had not gone through it?
   I saw Glen Beck on TV yesterday for a few minutes. He was saying that the public schools in America are feeding America’s children a liberal agenda. I at first thought, please some one shoot this guy. Then I realized that even if he had not said it it is something that millions of Americans all ready believe because they have heard it a million times before. I believed it once. You know what? If it is true so what. The purpose of schools is to teach what is true. The liberal agenda is more true than the conservative agenda so it is the duty of the schools to teach the liberal agenda. Beck would have the schools not do their job because it makes his job harder to deceive people.
   I have not been in school for a long time. What did I learn in schools way back when. From my 6th grade teacher Mr. Johnson I learned, do not trust authority. He said you should not trust anything anyone says because who the person is that is saying it. You have to think for yourself. Damn, not only was Mr. Johnson brainwashing us with communist propoganda he was also secretly teaching Buddhist Rule number One. But God only knows what was being taught in other parts of the country in 1972. If parents do not like what is being taught in their children’s schools how much money does it cost for a parent to tell a child something different?
   When a parent and a school system have a disagreement over the facts of a subject who is more likely to be right?
   Ahhaa I bet that you do not realize that is a tricky question!
   Should children be allowed to opt out of their state regualted education? Do children know what is good for them? Do we allow children to join the military when they are 16? I do not think so? Do parents know what is good for themselves? Really, do they? If parents do not know what is good for themselves how do they know what is good for their children? Does the government really know what is good for parents or children?
   Who makes the decisions for the government about education? Is it not just people who a few years ago were totally clues about what was good for them (because they were children) who over the years had some experiences that were just a very tiny fraction of the possible experiences that they could have had in terms of what they read, who they met, and what happened to them how they interpreted what happened to them and on and on.
   Is any of that even relevent for most of what is taught in school?
   Art is taught in school. Is there wrong art? Sports are taught in school? If the sports teacher tells his students that the defense should always blitz on 3 and 15 are we going to call him incompetent? Music is taught in school. Perhaps music should not be taught. It might offend God. He has very sensitive ears you know. He hears everything. Is there a right way and a wrong way to teach music? Languages are taught in school. Now we are really getting into some deep trouble. In Germany some years ago there was very heated debate over whether this ss should be allowed to replace this ß. Hahahahahahahaha and you all thought that Germans were only rational. Of course mistakes will be made. They teach English in US schools but they do not teach proper English in US schools. The teachers seem unwilling to recognize that languages change. They teach reading in schools. Some country’s do a better job of than others. But look it is a difficult job. Each kid is different how is a teacher supposed to understand how to maximize each child’s potential when even the parents of the child often do not understand their own children. They teach math in School. Again some countries do better than others. Is there anything about math that is controversial outside of mathematicians. Yes that is what I meant. I do not know if this is done everywhere but where I went to high school they taught trades like auto mechanics, like wood working and like typing. Is that a crime? Finally they teach science. Is osmosis debated? Are molecular structures debated? Is gravity a debated concept?
   I do have a problem with US schools. It is not with what they teach or how they teach. It is with the cruelty that I think runs rampant in US schools that is inflicted by the children upon other children. Is that a solvable problem?

   7 March 2010, 7:13 am

10. Ainslee:

    Re:”…welcome actual answers.”

    I wonder what would constitute or qualify as an “answer” for you.

    7 March 2010, 7:20 am

11. Stan:

    Ten more random questions:

    (1) Does someone who lives in Miami have an “equal right” to heating oil as someone who lives in Buffalo?

    (2) Does someone who lives in Buffalo have a right to heating fuel?

    (3) If so, who is responsible for ensuring that right is fulfilled?

    (4) Are there responsiblities that attend rights?

    (5) If so, are these responsibilities also “equal”?

    (6) Is there an equal right to medical care?

    (7) If so, where does that right come from?

    (8) If so, how do we define medical care? Free soap? Massages? Heart transplants? Vaccinations?

    (9) Does this right only appear when a technocratic medical infrastructure is defined and licensed by the state?

    (10) Do we have an equal right to refuse medical interventions… for our children?

    7 March 2010, 7:34 am

12. Curt:

    I forgot to bring up that history and other social studies are taught in school. It must have been a Freudian slip.

    7 March 2010, 7:41 am

13. DeAnander:

    “calling it a right means someone doesn’t have it” — skol hit that nail pretty accurately imho. just like (as feminists pointed out years ago) calling something “tabu/kapu” really means that only select privileged people are allowed to do it (get away with it).

    I’ll throw a handful of thoughts into the ring:

    what we call “rights” mean the redress or partial redress of hierarchical power. the “rights” of the peasant landholder under feudal law were a tempering of the otherwise absolute power of the overlord, an imposition of limited reciprocity or accountability between lord and peon; Magna Carta was a tempering of the absolute power of the king over his barons. “human rights” mean a tempering or restraint of the power of bullies with weapons and/or money over those with none or less; all these “rights” come down to limited forms of *sharing*, mitigations of the absolute hoarding of power and resources by a powerful minority. the “right to life” means that someone with more power (whether that be muscle or money or status) should not get away with casually killing you.

    perhaps it is not coincidental that we speak of “righting” a wrong — and we use this word “right” (as in “setting to rights” or “righting” a capsized boat) to mean the correction — or feeble attempts at correction — of gross abuses of raw power. working within a system of rules rather than individual person-to-person connections, way past the Dunbar threshold for human interactions, we assert that even the powerful should obey some rules.

    which is why “property rights” is such a slithery concept; on the one hand it can mean the protection of the less powerful from flagrant expropriation by the more powerful; on the other, it can mean the defence of the resources Enclosed by the more powerful and greedily hoarded…

    I’ve been puzzled by “rights” discourse myself. people seem often to speak of them as if they were reified and concrete — objects which one could own, like consumer goods.

    we might have a whole different political discourse if we described things in terms of sharing and hoarding…

    earlier (tribal/kingroup/clan) societies had various ways of deciding how best to share resources. some we would call very just and equitable. others accommodated inequality but mitigated it by grand and petty periodic rituals of redistribution. by the time “high civilisation” is developed, though, resources are hoarded by central, credentialled, specialised castes who keep books and dole out goods (grain for example) to the “ordinary” people. this was adaptive in the short term, evidently, ‘cos this model of organisation “won” over other (nomadic, g/h) lifeways. maybe it was at that point that we invented “rights” and other complex rules for mitigating (or justifying) the passage of control over food, water, and land into the hands of an elite core group… who knows? it was a very long time ago. it is rather like inheriting a very old and complicated building, modified and tinkered with by generations of amateur architects: who knows *why* it is such a strange shape and so very uncomfortable to live in?

    “right” is “the opposite of wrong”; by extension, the abuses of power that we correct by “rights”, we understand to be wrong. “women have a right to walk at night” translates to “it is wrong for men to attack women even if they venture into public space after dark”. “we have a right to basic medical care” translates to “it is wrong, if we have the resources to give aid or comfort to a sick or dying person, to with-hold that aid and comfort.”

    does someone in Buffalo have a right to heating fuel, if the extraction of that fuel and the burning of that fuel imperil the entire biosphere? if that fuel was stolen by armed force? does someone in Buffalo have a right to live in a house so poorly designed for the local climate that keeping it habitable requires enormous amounts of heating fuel? does someone in Buffalo have much choice about living in such a house?

    the transition from the gift/reciprocity economy to the money/exchange/contract economy has left us all stranded in a kind of desert of the heart, where we require theories and rules to tell us how to share…

    7 March 2010, 11:24 am

14. Stan:

    The last paragraph of this thoughtful rumination gets at some of my fundamental discomforts with “equality” and “rights,” both of which defy definition – especially as we use them – and neither of which describes where responsibility and accountability are anchored.

    I can give some pretty decent definitions of the state, and all of them contradict the idea that the state can be this anchor, or agent, to which equality and rights account.

    Community I’ll buy a lot more easily, but only if (1) that community coheres around some shared standards of behavior, and (2) that community consists of people who actualy know each other.

    I realize that puts some pretty severe restraints on politcal solutions, which is why I feel my heels digging in lately when anyone suggests what we think of as political solutions at all.

    The ruling class in the north went after slavery because they’d figured out that “free labor” was more efficient, not because they wanted to emancipate humans from bondage.

    I have to wonder whether or not equality – a term I grew to suspect under the tutelage of Catharine MacKinnon – isn’t this great big stone we keep pushing to our front as we attempt to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. A kind of moving obstacle that we have adopted as our (flag) standard, part of the whole cosmology of abstraction that leads us to abandon simpler, more direct ethical language, like do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

    7 March 2010, 12:12 pm

15. marsha:

    Equality means equal RIGHTS for ALL ADULTS under the LAW. If you are beautiful or man or queen or sick you have the same rights to privacy, to your property etc. It has no meaning other than a mathematical concept otherwise. It is a rule about how to treat each other so your own rights are protected and was an astonishing concept at the birth of our nation. That the individual actually MATTER and had recourse. Implementation obviously is/was prejudice, non-lateral and flawed.

    7 March 2010, 12:49 pm

16. Stan:

    So if this means “under the law,” does this mean that law enforcement is necessary for this equality?

    Does this mean people with guns to back up laws (recourse to violence) are necessary before the rights can be manifest, in order for a right to equality to be enforced… whatever equality means.

    Not being disingenuous, but simply repeating the boilerplate does not get at the essence I’m trying to find. It does not define equality to call it “equality.”

    Are generalized ideas enforced by generalizable rules the only – or even the primary – way for human beings to relate to one another? Mightn’t this notion – equal rights – be more or less than we assume when we don’t even feel compelled to question it?

    My most intimate relations are with family, and we have no laws and no courts.

    Is the recourse to violence necessary for “equality”? This is a real question, and a straightforward one.

    7 March 2010, 1:38 pm

17. DeAnander:

    some wild blue yonder musings…

    seems to me that law, in essence, is the failure of love. if we do not live in a loving community, where we care deeply about the happiness of all of our kin, then we need law and rules to enforce some idea of “fairness.” law makes it easier to judge the disputes of strangers — in mediations where the judge and jury know nothing — are required to know nothing — of the history and character of the disputants. in earlier days, a deep understanding of history and character were considered a requirement for settling disputes (the grandmothers or other elders were usually called in because of their long history and acquaintance with everyone involved). now, we consider it a disqualification for jury duty if you know too much about the people concerned in the case. now, we believe in objectivity, and most of our law is about the enforcement of contracts. we even see the project of living together in society as a business arrangement (“the social contract”). [btw some communities in Canada have been experimenting with reverting to indigenous justice/healing traditions as an alternative to imposed, RCMP-enforced Anglo-Roman law/policing. the results -- in terms of recidivism and rehabilitation -- were positive iirc. I'll try to remember where I read about this and dig up a URL]
    …
    I suspect that the triumph of reification came with the great achievements of reductionist science in the late 18th, early 19th centuries. in those heady days the radical reformers believed that there was a mystical union of “scientific laws” and “human progress” — that things like justice, liberty, equality and the like were the logical outcome of inexorable law like the laws of physics, and that a *rationalisation* of society would inevitably produce happiness. the objectivity required for the scientific method became an ideal for the regulation of human affairs?
    …
    no matter how ill the shoe of law fits, I honestly can’t see how we can manage the affairs and conflicts of very large aggregations of human folk without codified law: eventually we must deal with and resolve disputes with strangers, because there are so many of us. but our law as it stands is a mishmash of rules imposed by the powerful on the weak (hoarders’ rules), and rules intended to protect the weak from the powerful (sharers’ rules). what can we make of a system (US) in which high-profile people are afraid to speak publicly about their food choices, concerns, etc, because of “food libel laws” that enable agribiz to sue the pants off anyone who criticises their product? or where corporations are presumed to be humans or human-equivalents with “rights”? or where “health insurers” can legally define an abusive domestic partner as a “pre-existing condition” and deny medical insurance to a battered woman? all these are not only hoarders’ rules, but obscured as such by that cosmology of abstraction, our ability to twist words and concepts until the powerful can pursue their hoarding project unfettered by compassion, charity, empathy or even the tenuous restraint of law and rights.
    …
    simpler, more direct, more ethical language might be a good start. we might ask how a culture so dedicated to hoarding, enclosing, and controlling can expect to produce “freedom” as a social result particularly when some of our best objective science reports that our brains are somehow wired for discomfort with gross inequality. and a recent book that sounds well worth a read suggests strongly that criminality, violence, even ill health and depression, are associated with societies in which gross inequality is enforced and paraded.
    …
    so if our brains resist gross inequity, and negative consequences arise from it, how the heck do gross inequity and abusive hierarchy establish themselves in the first place? how do we “fall from grace”? some people claim that there is a fairly fixed percentage of sociopaths in any population. 4 percent has been mentioned, or 5. I am wondering whether there may be some kind of scale issue: we might call it Gresham Meets Dunbar where in populations far larger than the D-number, we are dealing with strangers and anonymity aids the sociopaths in operating without accountability, undetected, w/o the web of observation, reciprocity and gossip that keep people informed of each other’s reputation and character in smaller groups. if the sociopaths can operate without this natural or traditional restraint, then wouldn’t they start to displace and out-compete “nicer” people, by succeeding at intraspecific predation (i.e. cheating and robbing other people)? we see many signs that either sociopaths rise to positions of power in hierarchies, or that hierarchical power corrupts anyone who gets near it, turning them into sociopaths; it’s hard to think of any other explanation for a Bush or a Blair. the ruling class — enforcers of rules, writers of law, and directors of the state — would (in this depressing theory) be predominantly sociopaths. it’s not a nice theory, I would prefer not to subscribe to it, but it offers an explanation for the apparently recurring, systematic abusiveness of ruling classes worldwide…
    …
    and now — really off into the blue yonder — is our fascination with the internet and its compulsive attraction some kind of attempt to restore the universal mutual surveillance and reputation-service of D-number communities, for a population in the billions? the ability to “look people up” online and learn about their personality, achievements, even (in some cases) what they had for breakfast (some bloggers like to tell all!) is very similar, though digitally mediated, to the seamless web of gossip and mutual surveillance in a village or clan environment…

    7 March 2010, 1:41 pm

18. rootlesscosmo:

    <i.(1) What is a right?

    (2) Where does it come from?

    I’d suggest that the (fairly modern) notion of universal human rights, distinct from their specific content and from any claim about their source (“endowed by the Creator” e.g.), gets a lot of its strength from the examples of what happens when rights are expressly or in practice allocated unequally. If this is more or less accurate, then working to achieve something closer to universal (which is one meaning of “equal”) human rights is a response to structures of oppression that rely on preserving inequalities–or ineqities, not quite the same thing–in the exercise of these rights.

    And while it’s true that the discourse of rights is generally framed in terms of the rights of individuals, again we have by contrast the ugly history of asserting that members of some groups, just in virtue of belonging to those groups, don’t enjoy the same rights as non-members. In other words we can only uphold the standard of universality by applying it equally to every individual; universality and equality are inseparable. Note that “rights” in this formulation is not the same as “opportunity” or “actual condition;” it’s not an imaginary “level playing field” (in practice, an excuse for the victim-blaming inhumanity of Reagan-Thatcher et al.) or an enforced uniformity (what critics of Mao called “barracks Communism”) but a claim about an essential component of being human. What’s this claim based on? I don’t have a problem acknowledging that it’s metaphysical (so are Thatcherism and Maoism, though they don’t like to admit it), which is to say its truth can’t be “proved” but only asserted. Still, and in spite of its having been upheld in words by hypocritical regimes that disregard it in practice, it has at least no worse a historical record than competing theories.

    Finally as to the application of universal rights doctrine to non-human species: this is a very difficult problem, I think partly because it entails trying to draw boundaries where none obviously exist. My own inclination is that universal rights accompany the capacity to be a moral subject, that is to choose one’s conduct according to (or in violation of) a standard of right and wrong; by this measurement, ants and starfish and rosebushes don’t qualify, though we may have compelling reasons not to harm them. (We may also have compelling reasons to harm them–say, to destroy pathogenic microorganisms that sicken human beings–and we should remember that even going about with a cotton mask over one’s mouth to prevent inhalation of insects, as practitioners of the Jain faith do, is no guarantee that we aren’t sowing death as an inescapable consequence of our own survival; as Michael Pollan points out, harvesting crops destroys the lives and habitat of uncounted creatures, so pure vegetarianism is an unattainable standard.) But chimps, pigs, cetaceans, elephants? Much less clear-cut, and probably we should err on the side of caution, assuming provisionally that they do have some capacity as moral agents, and thus also can lay claim to universal rights–again, leaving the content of those rights to another discussion. Chickens? Flounder? Tough call.

    7 March 2010, 1:42 pm

19. DeAnander:

    I think that recent work with chimps suggests that they have the same brain responses to inequity or injustice as humans (see above links). if a negative response to injustice, and a taste for fairness, is the measure of moral agency, then it seems that at least these cousins of ours qualify…

    8 March 2010, 12:49 am

20. DeAnander:

    PS sorry, I have been sloppily using “inequality” and “inequity” interchangeably: I believe I have meant “inequity” in each case. thanks rootless for the reminder.

    8 March 2010, 12:49 am

21. Stan:

    I appreciate Cosmos’s thoughts, and the honesty with which he admits the metphysicality of “rights.” But I’m still having the problem with definition. It seems that both of you, De and Cos, are rescuing the term “equality” as it is understood by a smaller fraction of folks who might be comfortable lurking here.

    The assertion of a right (the noun for something that attaches to, but is not synonymous with, a person… and as Cosmos points out, some claim it attaches to peoples) doesn’t clear up the variable – albeit usually suggestive – definitions of it. Is it what people oughtn’t be allowed to do to one another? Or is it an entitlement?

    This distinction is important to libertarians of various stripes (not merely the Randians).

    Venture away from our community of ideas, and “equality” generally means (1) equality of opportunity or (2) equality before the law.

    These notions are Liberalism 101, and we’ve seen how they are built on the foundation of ahistoricity. They are, in a word, a trick.

    Equality of opportunity eschews any material corrections of history – property expropriations and redistributions, for example. And not exclusively because in the real world this would result in conflict, even war. But also because redistribution can’t correct for the accumulation of other advantages in the form of networks, special skills, acceptance; or concommitantly the accumulation of disadvantages, ie, the generational effects of poverty and social disorder.

    And as MacKinnon, Anatole France, et al, point out, equality before the law gives us the absurdity of forbidding the rich from sleeping under bridges, lawsuits pitting Monsanto against an indebted farmer, or determining “consent” in sexual relations at the point of penetration.

    I realize that people will say don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I wonder if there’s a baby there any more. There was when the Civil Rights struggle argued to break discrimination law in the apartheid south, but that struggle has long past that phase. Segregation is back, except in consumer spaces, and where integration has taken place (more and more in the suburbs, eg), class heirarchy has simply stepped into the breach. In our cultural and legal understanding of rights, class differences – whether measured by property or net worth or relation to the means of production – is untouchable by political power. It is recognized as the outcome – true or not – of people acting on the right “to pursue our talents and dreams as our efforts take us.” Meritocracy. And history has rendered the verdict on meritocracy… it leads to concrete inequality that trumps abstract equality.

    Which leaves us with Xenia’s poignant exception… whereupon, we have to further expand the idea of rights into the realm of entitlement. Universal human rights as entitlements (to food, shelter, etc) are not generally accepted in our culture.

    This is a different conception of rights – one the right to non-interference, and the other the right as entitlement – and a different conception of equality… not equality really, but a new metaphysical assertion of some baseline.

    Historically, these baselines keep moving. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness” didn’t apply universally, nor “The Rights of Man.”

    Various and often violent struggles expanded the definition of personhood as the basis for the “attsachment” of these rights, of this equality before the law (always strictly limiting the definition of equality to an abstraction, or as Cos points out turning equality into the equality of the barracks).

    Always, the trajectory of these struggles, and of these ideas, has been an extension, and expansion of personhood without a change in the search not for the local and the specific but for universality.

    It looked like “progress” during Reconstruction (to some), and again during the New Deal, and again during the Black Freedom movement, but in every case there was an unseen (and perhaps indeterminate) future that waited. The epoch of Reconstruction was also one of westward expansion; the New Deal was the basis of US imperial ascendency ( a “new deal” for the rest of the world); the Civil Rights struggle was followed by the abandonment of Black communities in deinsutrialized city centers and sharper stratifications inside African America, as well as the thoroughgoing assimilation of African America into the consumer culture of late rentier capitalism.

    Moreover, this attempt at the catholicity of rights and equality inevitably strengthens institutional control over our lives generally, especially that of the state. The right points this out, even if their conmplaint is utterly hypocritical in the face of their militarism, etc.

    This is why I sense that in the larger schemne of things we might find that the flower of equality might be poisonous.

    I know that people admit this impasse, and that they suggest we struggle then for more democratic control over institutions as the hard solution. But De’s reference to the Dunbar threshold is apropos… is this kind of control even possible as the requirement expands for administration? Does universality inevitably lead to administration; and does administration inevitably lead to alienated and alienating power?

    Is there such a thing as an insoluble problem?

    And is the resort to violence inherent in any practical attempt to achieve “equality”?

    8 March 2010, 8:04 am

22. Mark:

    (1) What is a right?

    (2) Where does it come from?

    ***

    Rights are creations of law and custom that arise from the necessities of human interaction. A lot of reading on history and anthropology has led me to conclude that rights in societies that existed before anyone ever thought to write them down were a fairly complex affair that existed within the constant push and pull of the individual’s relationship to every other group member. The necessity of codifying rights came from the fact that increasingly large and complex societies involved the individual constantly brushing up against people with whom they had no relation – that is to say, abstract people.

    8 March 2010, 9:17 am

23. Jim Giles:

    Dear Mr. Goff,

    I request a telephone interview with you concerning your view of things especially on race, religion, politics and war.

    Yours Truly,

    Jim Giles
    Radio Free Mississippi
    http://www.radiofreemississippi.net

    STAN: Thanks Giles, but I am in Costa Rica without an international phone.

    8 March 2010, 10:15 am

24. Stan:

    @ Mark. My point exactly.

    My question is whether or not the privileging of the political response to this dilemma, eg, the arena of the state, is in itself problematic?

    8 March 2010, 10:46 am

25. Curt:

    Is there an insoluble problem that will just sit there and allow itself not to be “solved” without morphing in to 4 unsolvable problems because the first unsolvalbe problem was not addressed? Then the 4 become 16. This is why I call for a revolt!
    I am not talking about a revolt against Obama or Bush or Mullin but against the Gods themselves. They (he) are complete asses.
    The purpose of the revolt is not neccissarily to destroy the Gods. It is to get them to account for thier behavior. The revolt continues until the Gods justify themselves. Religous people may claim that I am extremely arrogant for demanding an explination of the Gods. I say that it is the Gods who are extremely arrogant for refusing to inform their constituents. They may say that we have not been listening. I challenge them to show exactly WHO has not been listening and when they did not listen. Secrecy is poison to a civilzed society. Ok sometimes just a tiny tiny bit of poison can save your life, or perhaps your country. But, the Gods are in no way shape or form acting in Good faith.
    Will such a revolt accomplish anything at all useful? How should I know. I am not a fortune teller. The Gods have so many advantages. They know what we are thinking before we do. So I would think that understanding ourselves is important. So, rather than having the Gods always two steps a head of us we can at some point get to be two steps a head of the Gods.

    When someone is as intellegent as a God would they always agree with someone else that is as intellegent as a God or would there be some issues that would divide them, such as home schooling for example? Would it be possible to get defections from their ranks?

    I think another way to attack the Gods is to embarress them. This is not as difficult as it seems. For all of its cruelty Mankind is a kitten when compared to the Gods. They have set a very bad example for their children.

    Now atheist will say that we have only ourselves to rescue ourselves. I say that the Gods are just in hiding. I do not know why. Could they be embarressed already?

    8 March 2010, 11:03 am

26. m.c.:

    Peer Pressure can work both ways when it comes to socio-economic status & equality. Norman Mailer has written that Portuguese-American fishing communities like New Bedford, Provincetown, and Wellfleet Mass., the wealthiest & poorest families houses could be next door to one another and from the outside you can’t tell the difference. Their families also go to the same church.

    Take a Logging/Lumber mill town in the Pacific NW say 25-50 years ago. The owner’s kids probably went to the same schools as the worker’s kids. They met at PTA meetings. The kids shared the same swimming pools, tennis courts, & horseshoe pits during the summer. Their wives & girlfriends were in the same bridge and book clubs. Now, if it still exists, the company is owned by a Hedge Fund from New York or Chicago and brings in a management team from Portland, Seattle, Boise, or San Fransisco.
    Ken Kesey’s best book, “Sometimes a Great Notion”(1964) was made into a fine film(1971) starring Paul Newman who also directed.

    8 March 2010, 3:13 pm

27. m.c.:

    The Hedge Fund is probably fiercely anti-union, too.

    8 March 2010, 3:35 pm

28. Waldow:

    “(4) Does an ant have rights?

    (5) Why or why not?”

    “(4) Does an ant have rights?

    (5) Why or why not?” -Stan

    If humane civilization is to continue much longer, our values and our laws will have to change very quickly. The slower our values change, the more strict laws will have to be imposed. From this point, humanity will be quite lucky to muddle its way through to Brave New World. An effective technocrat would have to recognize ants as indispensable to a “well-run” planet, and the treatment of them would probably be codified, hence “rights”. Nobody looks forward to Brave New World, and because we cling to hierarchy and a “world of made… not of born”, we are by default being lead back to 1984 (I say “back” in part because medieval European courts used to put animals on trial, which is a sort of right).

    8 March 2010, 5:49 pm

29. Curt:

    @ Jim Giles,
    Pleased to meet you in a manner of speaking. I hope that it has occurred to you to read through Stan’s archeives as a substitute for having him on your radio.
    If you can not do it yourself perhaps you can ask someone to do it for you to find the answers to the questions that you most want to know. I could do it for you, for example. If you want I can get a good conduct statement from the police that I am not yet a criminal.
    Curt

    9 March 2010, 9:15 am

30. Curt:

    So Rebel hahahahahahahahaha
    “We can still turn things around and win in Afghanistan” just like we have won in Iraq?
    You betcha

    10 March 2010, 4:53 pm

31. Ms Kitty:

    Wow! Lots of thoughtful people weighing in with lots of thoughts.

    re “…we also want equal opportunity to pursue our talents and dreams as our efforts take us.”

    Does this mean the less talented deserve less? Do you believe in meritocracy? If so, doesn’t this mean that inequality will continue? – Stan

    Well, I am an artist, so I look at my efforts as win-win and not like sports where I win, you lose. Every artist (person) has a unique point of view, each potentially of interest to someone else. If I make art and the making of art pleases me, I win. If you like it too, you win when you look at it and I win again. No losers. If I make some art I don’t like, I learn from it and start over. If you don’t like it, fine, you don’t have to have it. I can draw in the sand or use the most expensive paints. (I prefer the paints, but if I don’t have them it won’t stop me. A lot of Toulouse Lautrec’s most famous works were drawn on cardboard).

    So, I don’t know about meritocracy, I wasn’t intending for that to be the direction I was heading, but maybe that is how it would work out. I guess maybe eventually it would. I am definitely not a social darwinist. It is a cruel philosophy.

    I think DeAnander is totally right, that the need to establish rights is a failure of love.

    I think the attempt to create equal opportunities for everyone is the best we can hope for in a mutually agreed upon set of laws. Anarchy means the strongest thug wins and unless a government is an arrangement of agreement amongst those being governed, then the thugs will work for the government and you hope the government is working for you, (or the government will work for the thugs) The farther the decision-making of a government is away from the people being governed then the greater chances are that thuggery will be the ruling order.

    re Curt’s blaming God for our suffering. I’m not sure I agree that God causes more human suffering than humans. We are the ones who say hurtful things, do hurtful things and make war and jails. I think the natural disasters and diseases pale next to how humans hurt each other personally and massively in war. If you stand outside in a place of natural beauty, unblemished by our interference and pollution and listen to the quiet songs of nature, it makes you realize how crazy we are in creating this imaginary world of laws and social mores.

    Our laws and rights really only exist in our minds, and most of us have, in some form or another, agreed to it.

    Because it is critical for those being governed to have a say in what happens to them, it is critical that the vote is protected. Hackable electronic voting machines that have private corporations count our votes have ended any pretense of having a real democracy. The SCOTUS ruling that gives corporations the same rights as citizens has moved us into a bizarro version of what ‘equality’ means. It is also high time to demand that third parties have ballot access. Then maybe we could choose between Ralph Nader, Ron Paul or Cynthia McKinney instead of dueling Republicrats.

    11 March 2010, 11:14 pm

32. Curt:

    MS Kitty, It is not even close. God created Small Pox. Who cured it? God created Malaria and then he created sickle cell anemia to correct that mistake. Man tried fighting Maleria with DDT. DDT is easier to selectively employ. God created the locusts, god created the Plague, which by the way has probably been unfairly blamed as the culprit which wiped out millions in past centuries, The real culprit was probably hemorrhagic fever. The amount of people who have died prematurely from maleria, and several other diseases far exceeds those who have been killed in all of mans wars, including non combatants.
    God is the devil pure and simple. If the devil is responsible for the child molestation cases that have been rocking the Catholic church as the Pope says, then God is really behind it because is behind the devil.
    If there is a lack of love among the human race it is not our fault it is Gods fault for throwing us in to the deep end of the pool with know swimming lessons. Anyways I do not think that it is a lack of love that plagues us it is a lack of UNDERSTANDING. People do not understand how to share their love. Some people have been so stunted by their environment they have trouble sharing their love with their families. But an even bigger problem is sharing our love with strangers. And there are some damn good reasons that we have trouble sharing out love with strangers. Strangers are sometimes repulsive. But more importantly than that our love is not inexhaustible, despite what the clergy has been telling us. I can give moral support to anyone that I think deserves it. That IS inexhaustible. But as far as material support goes every bit that I give to strangers is something that comes out of support that I could give my family. I love children. I love my own the most.
    Because I created them I feel more responsible for them. Their joys and sorrows are much more visible to me.
    So it should not come as any surprise that millions of Americans do not want the poor to have health care.
    They think that they will have to pay for it. Some of them probably remember a time that they did not have health care and they survived with out it. In fact when you get right down to it health care is for most people a rip off. The companies in the US that provide health care make a profit. What should that tell you? That we need nationalized health care? Perhaps, but I live there. It has its own IEDs. I think that if all those people who did not want the poor to have health care realized that they were going to have to pay for that one way or the other they really would’nt care about be taxed for it.
    I digressed a little bit the point is if humans are making serious errors in judgment and there is a power that could correct those errors but refuses to take the necessary actions to do so whose fault is it? If this power responds that it has been taking the necessary steps to correct the problems but that we have not been listening I demand to know who is not listening and when they have not listened. Perhaps God will say that we will be better off in the long run if we figure these things out for ourselves. To that would say what kind of a parent would let grevious harm come to their children just to teach them a long term lesson? A sadistic parent would. Children in such an environment need to be removed from it.

    12 March 2010, 4:34 am

33. rootlesscosmo:

    @Stan:
    My question is whether or not the privileging of the political response to this dilemma, eg, the arena of the state, is in itself problematic?

    I would say it is, but that’s not necessarily a reason to neglect this sphere. As I understand (what I’ve read of) MacKinnon’s work, she too begins with the idea of universal human rights and then questions why women’s rights usually don’t get included. If the sphere of politics is (very, very, very broadly) the arena in which collective decisions are made (via authority or consensus etc.) then it’s also a sphere in which a theory of rights can be–probably has to be–developed. We’ve come some distance from the original question of equality/inequality, I know; I’m not sure how to get beyond the principle that human beings as such have rights (content deferred to further discussion) just because they’re human, which is a circumstance we all share equally. This is, again, only the beginning of a discussion which (among other things) has to address the question of human beings who can’t assert their rights (children? up to what age? people in comas?) and when (if ever) it’s legitimate to limit rights. (May we lock up a murderer? A murderer who has promised to murder again?) But we should, I think, start from the principle of universality before going on to the very difficult questions presented by specific situations.

    13 March 2010, 6:58 pm

34. Stan:

    Thanks for this, Coz. I appreciate it even when I have to play devil’s advocate.

    Couple of philosophical sticking points still; and you get at the point at which I begin to diverge from MacKinnon and others who called – in particular – the marxists to account when some of them proved willing to throw women under the political bus with their “secondary contradictions” and whatnot.

    I think both marxism and radical feminism, who share a great deal even with that elephant in the room, are still predicated on defining a collective enemy. When smart women who were involved the study and-or practice of marxism (as I believe MacKinnon was once) began to see how structural power defined the collective enemy for marxists, they raised a very good question: Doesn’t this formula work for women vis-a-vis men?

    MacKinnon said “sex is to feminism what work is to marxism, what is most one’s own and most taken away.” Then the orthodoxy hit the fan.

    Where I keep running aground is on what seems the selective and separated critiques that demonstrate bourgeois or male or racial or national power – structural and hierarchical – then treat the state as if it can be temporarily neutralized by abstraction for the purpose of following through with a praxis that seeks the power of the same state.

    Marxists are clear that the state is a bourgeois state – that its very emergence is the outcome of structural antagonism between classes; feminists showed – successfully, in my view – that the state is also male, in the same way. With the very key difference being that the bourgeois power is visible in the workplace, where obedience is ensured by dependency and a money-system, while male power is more visible in personal relationships and in the patriarchal home with its peculiar and sexual dependencies.

    I agree with you that circumstances override principles (like a principle of “never dealing with the state”). There are times for any activist, and more importantly any stakeholder (like African America in the 1960s), to confront, and even tactically engage the state. The complexity of the world requires us to (a) discern, then (b) bind and loose based on what we discern and who we are.

    I am guilty of having conflated rights and equality to a large degree. They are co-dependent notions, but not identical.

    But there are other ideas that have come along to challenge the presumptions of these two great hermeneutics of suspicion – marxism and faminism – in particular on this question of politics.

    Illich and Duden, et al, challenge us on the grounds of phenomenology. The socialists and the feminists and the racial/national freedom movements began with the individual, and they found an aspect of modernism that characterized the experience of personhood. Alienation, the inescapable sense of inauthenticity, the “having had what is most one’s own be what’s most taken away.” The response to this zeitgeist of alienation, which is reflected and reproduced in social structures – political, economic, cultural – is to seize (state) power and wield that power against the enemy.

    Enemy in this sense does not mean I hang a sign around your neck with a big E. It means those people who treat you antagonistically. The boss wants more work for less money, and ther worker wants more money for less work. The seller and buyer, even in friendly-sounding exchanges, are in a state of antagonism based on interests. The store clerk is certainly not an Enemy, but when direct collective antagonisms come to the surface despite ruling fraction mystifications and diversions, then a collective Enemy is identifiable by its hosile actions toward us. So I’m not saying that the oppressed collective is choosing their enemy, but that they can identify hostile activity once the bullshit is cleared away.

    Duden – in her pop-gene riff – shows how we get thrown off track, phenomenologically, well before we get to the politics, however, if alienation is the experience we are trying to rid ourselves and others of. The experience of inauthenticity, or distance from the first-encounter (the erotic, for Audre Lorde), from the first naivete, is inscribed on us by the naturalization of phenomena like the pop-gene, like medicalization and its regime of incessant self-monitoring, by psychological notions, by the culture of performance.

    If we are phenomenologically disabled – my tentative hypothesis here – by the time we get to Politics, we have arrived with no knowledge, no experience of the alternative we are called to. We are navigating without a compass.

    Moreover, there is that (also hyopothetical) Dunbar threshold De and I keep bringing up. If there is something to that, and I suspect there is, then the structures most likely to reproduce social alienation – in the sense of not having a sense of belonging to an intersubjective community where accountability and mutual care are possible (this has been shrunk down to some families and a handful of small communities) – are precisely those collectivities that are administered/managed. Socialist management, capitalist management, patriarchal management, or feminist management… the problem may be managerial, inherently so.

    Seems a pretty important obstacle, if true.

    One of the problems with confronting collective enemies – in pursuit of rights, equality, etc. – is that these movements themselves come to rely on administration and management, because they go well beyond the Dunbar threshold, and require administration to prevent them coming apart through an accumulation of petty squabbles. And administration inevitably seeks its own interests, leading to the imposition of discipline… from the standpoint of the administrator.

    The Freedom Rides overcame this problem in a decisive way, albeit incompletely, because the missionary organization was a small group (replicated several times over). I’m aware that there was inesapable administration involved, but where the rubber met the road, so to speak, accountability had not been divorced from intimacy.

    My point is, these managerial forms, that are (hypothetically) an outgrowth of some real limitation mapped onto the human brain, are fundamentally warlike. War is violent, and that may be a figurative analogy in many cases; but war is also a Game. Gamesmanship begins by requiring the subordination of all intermediate goals to a single goal; and this is the recipe for The Ugly Compromise.

    Is what we seek “equality”? Or is it belonging, access to that “first naiviete” as the basis for communities based on accountability with intimacy?

    Are these within our grasp in ways that state power is not? If so, can these kinds of communities “stand against” the established order, not in a warlike posture, but as examples and poles of attraction? I know I just leaped off the planet with that one… but these are the thoughts I am struggling with.

    14 March 2010, 7:20 am

35. DanceDreaming:

    Interesting.

    This reminds me a lot of a piece on libertarianism that’s kicking around the blogosphere. http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/03/02/liberty-equality-solidarity-toward-a-dialectical-anarchism/ Reading through it, I found it to be one of the most thoroughly reasoned justifications of anarcho-capitalism I have seen. It helped greatly in cementing in my mind exactly what is wrong with libertarian ideology. Obviously not the intent of the piece, but valuable for it none the less. I’m liking Feral Scholar because you seem to be talking about a lot of things that have been on my mind.

    Talks of the failure of love have me idly wondering about the meaning of that. And wondering if universal love is an ideal that holds much value in the actual intentions of most individuals. Forgive me for going into some ground that is a bit evo psych, but some interesting ideas have percolated out of evolutionary games theory. Research on thought experiments like the prisoner’s dilemma, situations where cooperation is advantageous for everyone, yet ‘cheating’ is more advantageous for the individual, has come up with some interesting notions.

    One being that in many situations, the most effective strategy is a tit-for-tat solution. This strategy has an individual cooperate the first time they interact with an individual, then respond each subsequent time with whatever behavior they observed from the other last time. This does seem to hold some similarity to actual human behavior, at least in small groups.

    One of the interesting things I’ve been thinking about is what happens when this strategy is used in groups that surpass the D-number. At a point where individual interactions start to be based on character abstractions instead of actual interpersonal history.

    One aspect of this is the idea that culture norms and social behaviors follow a basically evolutionary path, parallel to and far more rapid then genetic evolution. Successful behaviors are mimicked and flourish, unsuccessful ones are marginalized. Also that most of these interaction strategies occur on a basically subconscious level.

    The circumstances of abstraction give rise to, or interact with, group identification. I think they can also magnify the effects of a statistically small number of sociopaths. If one identifies a group by interactions with singular members, and follows the tit-for-tat strategy, strange formations occur. If one interacts with a sociopath(or anyone who ‘cheats’), and is cheated, and identifies that individual, and interaction , with a specific group, then one will cheat the next person of that group one interacts with. Who, if they follow a similar strategy, will go on to cheat the next person of your group they encounter, and so on. Eventually, interaction along that entire group dynamic gains a psychotic character, and all due to one action. Perhaps by a sociopath, or maybe even just due to simple accident.

    This phenomena is further complicated by the fact that infants and children comparably have much lower d-numbers and therefor rely even more heavily on abstraction. And childhood is when many prejudices and general social strategies form.

    All this could give rise to vastly schismatic social landscapes, and a variety of strange and apparently irrational coping strategies, some of which will exasperate and some alleviate this problem. This also gives some explanation for us vs them dynamics. I’m not saying any of this behavior is rational or justified, or that this model is actually True(capitol T), just that it seems to have some similarity to the existent social landscape.

    This model has the capacity to describe the current system without requiring massive agency of large numbers of sociopathic characters. It also explains why, regardless of what group gets into power, if they get into power as a group they always seem to exhibit basically sociopathic behavior. It’s basic us vs them dynamics played out on a horrific scale. It also points to inherent issues with any power structure that creates centralized group administrative castes, at the same time as pointing out the obvious flaws of an anarchic state.

    It feels to me like appealing to love, or blaming our problems on a failure of love, particularly in the form of blaming those people, as abstraction, is generally an oversimplification of the problem, and might actually exacerbate the situation. This seems to be a fairly basic level of interaction that we all do, at least some of the time, and in varying degrees. And are more likely to engage in the less we careful inspect our behavior. A telling example would be the circumstance where a child is hurt by a blond man, and then tends to be distrustful of strange blond men in the future. It’s unfair to characterize this as a failure of love, or sociopathic behavior.

    On the bright side though, there is some evidence that might give rise to the belief that such strategies are primarily cultural in their formulation. As I said, cultural strategies seem to follow a fairly evolutionary development themselves, and mutate and propagate at a higher rate then genetics. So if a core strategy was developed that could thrive in this environment, and benefit the individuals and groups that utilized it, it is possible it could eventually take over the entire cultural landscape, to the benefit of all.

    None of this is really fully developed in my mind, I’m kinda making it up as I go. It likely has any number of holes in it, but let me know what you think.

    22 March 2010, 1:24 am

36. Stan:

    Wow, a lot ot unpack here, and I’m tied to a wireless connect in Nicaragua right now. I hope I can come back to this later.

    One thing that leapt out at me though was the colocation of the term ‘failure of love’ and ‘universal love.’ Everybody’s scared of these words – and rightly so given how often the term love gets kneaded into the most outrageous kinds of cognitive dissonance.

    From the git, it seems like we need to reinvest the word with its practical essence. We think too much about ‘love” as the nearly involuntary sensations of felt-affection, a passive thing. If we call love an active verb however, then it has to mean something both passive and active – maybe concern and care. Feelings of concern, when compared sensually with feelings of affection… or passion, may seem somewhat pale, but it is this more sober reaching out that forms the basis not of universal love but of something more akin to agape, which includes an obligation – willingness to serve the loved other.

    Agape, as I choose to understand it now, is catholic, but not universal. Catholicity implies availability across social boundaries and community membership above and beyond those boundaries. The notion of universality, while it may suggest some of the same things, is a lot more problematic. Universal love becomes a disembodied abstraction; and it confuses the intersubjective essence of love generally, and of agape specifically, with proclamations and principles of concern, even and especially when people begin to substitute the proclamation and principle for friendship with real people.

    23 March 2010, 10:25 am

37. m.c.:

    @ DanceDreaming: One of the things about Dunbar’s Number is that is some ways it can be overridden by the Meme concept. Any idea that can be transmitted widespread, i.e. via the internet(or in the old days the printing press) doesn’t have to stop at the ~150 threshold.

    On another topic: Libertarianism doesn’t have to mean Anarchy, Chaos, and Lawlessness. Small-l libertarianists like myself for example don’t even belong to a political party that professes to call itself Libertarian. All it means is that the State/Government does not have unlimited power & authority; and that in many situations particularly individual civil liberties & rights, like habeas corpus to use one example, the State must justify its actions, hopefully to a third party like and independant judiciary and do so in a relatively open manner which can be observed by the public.

    23 March 2010, 12:23 pm

38. cabdriver:

    Stan, you have a knack for broaching the Big Questions.

    Contradictions of “equality”: it’s supposed to provide an “objective comparison.”

    So you have not only the pretense of “objectivity”, but it’s comparative.

    But- especially in political questions- the subject asking the question is always an interested party.

    Woops. There goes objectivity. (Also: the subjects doing the judging are Human Beings. That mass study in less than totally fulfilled potentials. Not to overstate the case.)

    And note also that only factors can be objectively compared- not cases. And there are an infinite number of factors. Which means they need to be qualified, and prioritized. (Otherwise one simply ends up with a “univariate analysis”, of one single factor, which is where most people stop. Intellectual dereliction of duty, at that point.) But once you start to include two factors, you’ll realize that isn’t nearly enough…

    By the time someone has done that exercise in “objective number-crunching” to serve the abstract goal of assessing Equality…if they’re at all diligent about it, maybe they’ll eventually realize what an inefficient and unproductive question that is.

    Aren’t the more relevant questions relating to what we call “fairness” and “justice”, rather than “equality”?

    And old saying I heard once: “I don’t know what’s right, but I know what’s fair.”

    23 March 2010, 4:50 pm

39. DanceDreaming:

    Stan:

    Hmm,

    Well put. I have always had an issue with the idea of universal love. It has always seemed so impersonal. It’s always felt like true universal love would require as complete a loss of intersubjectivity as pure as misanthropistic sociopathy. And indeed, many portraits of saints and prophets seem to paint them as distant, impersonal. Bringing the intentional concern, and empathy back into it makes it more human, more real. And in some ways, harder, more frightening. Because unlike the egomaniacal messianic figure of pure love standing above a lesser humanity, the ideal is one of intense intersubjectivity, of empathy, of concern, and most tellingly of vulnerability.

    I think this confusion about the meaning of love is one of the (several) main distortion points in most patriarchal organized religions. By idolizing messianic men who have risen above the petty concerns of the world, they simply seem to be idealizing a kinder, gentler sort of sociopath. I think we need a better mythos.

    The patterns I describe are simply, if anything, what tends to happen. Not what is inevitable. It seems to be partly formed by our nature, and part by culture in a bidirectional fashion. It arises out of our maturation process and our mythos. A more powerful mythos, a strategy by games theory, would be one that emphasizes connection, empathy, concern, responsibility, humility, forgiveness. And that recognized the intense courage required in allowing oneself to be vulnerable. Many of these things are given lip-service in ideologies, but rarely do the hero characters in the stories, the aspects that carry the most impact, actually exhibit these traits. Most particularly missing are often empathy and vulnerability.

    Creating an ideal of responsibility-based, as opposed to rights-based, social code is complicated. One can stand up and demand rights. Fight for them. Make others respect them, by force if necessary. How does one work for responsibility? What would a responsibility based social code even look like? How would it be enforced? How would it even be encouraged? It’s well and good to say the world would be better if we all acted in a responsible fashion, but it requires a majority willing to do so, and willing to trust that others will do so. Willing to trust that others won’t cheat.

    It feels preferable to have a system that rewards those who do act responsibly, rather then, or at least more then, punishing those who do not. How can this work? How to create an environment where acting charitably, ‘selflessly’, is specifically rewarded? It’s a tricky thing. In small communities, it’s simpler. Those who cheat are known to cheat, and are slowly cut off from resources. To a large degree cut out of the sphere of others’ responsibility. But take this to a larger scale and things start to fall apart rapidly.

    If the phenomena I describe is a real one, if social interaction does follow this course even to some degree, then character abstraction starts to make things tricky. Responsibility based, love based, social code would require one to interact with each new individual as a totally blank slate. To put each new individual into a thought category of effectively ‘trusted’. Innocent until proven otherwise. The difficulty here is that it creates a lot of room for cheaters to get away with -a lot-. Not certain where to go with that.

    Currently we seem to have a social code that practically screams the opposite. Especially as it is coded for women. An underlying idea is a mindstate where one is encouraged to trust no one until they have proven themselves. Along with a slew of socially reinforced ideas about certain abstractions, i.e: stereotypes and prejudices.

    The other(Rand) discussion has me mulling over mirror neurons. I’ll likely ramble more when more ideas form, if my participation is welcome. I do need to get around to starting my own blog. Never know where to begin though.

    24 March 2010, 3:49 am

40. Stan:

    Smaller communities are the only places where these conditions have remedies. Once the size of a community begins to require administration, the iatrogenesis kicks in.

    The problem is that we now have this reflex, even in light of understanding this problem of scale-relevance. That reflex is the political reflex, to use political power – often in organizations that are already characterized by administrative iatrogenesis – in order to (1) enforce a universal standard of some kind that criminalizes deviations, and (2) to try and make history “come out right.”

    If, however, administrative iatrogensis is a big part of The Problem, then everything we try in the strategic framework of (1) and (2) is in fact exacerbating the problem. We are in a hole, and our reaction is to shovel faster.

    I realize, of course, that everything I say here is based on my unproven hypothesis about this relation between Dunbar’s number, administration, and iatrogenesis. And that administration always carries the potential for structural heirarchy, like an acorn carries the potential for an oak.

    24 March 2010, 10:09 am

41. Curt:

    Something is troubeling me today. It may not trouble any of you but I find it deeply disturbing. We sit in our positions and discuss ethics and current affairs like the world is comming to an end in the next 5 or 6 years. Maybe sometimes we make some movement, usually we don’t.
    This post may seem like a stupid joke and maybe it is.
    After years of reading about Dunbar’s # and about global warming and about peak oil we have failed to really develope our charachters. For example I do not know who likes walnuts in their brownies and who likes chocolate chips in their brownies.
    I do not know who is a Mrs. Fields supporter and who is a Otis Spunkymeyer supporter. I do not know who likes thin crust and who likes thick crust. I do not know who prefers a mountain vacation and who prefers a beach vacation.
    I do not know who is a ham and who is a turkey person.
    These may seem like trivial questions to you but I think that they are not trivial for some people. OK this is a web site for thought. But there is no lack of space and the contributers are few in number.
    So with those thoughts in mind I would like to make a suggestion. First we eliminate the old adminstration militarily. Then we use Euro Communists to build a new administration. That may not be a very novel approach but all the problems that humans have had up to now have pretty well been handled by effective administration, IMAO, until global warming poped up. Humans can not be blamed for that problem. If we fail to handle it blame clearly falls on the shoulders of the Gods. After all even the military does not expect a truck driver to be able to do an engine overhaul. When a problem is really big it gets handled by a higher echelon. At least that is the way it worked in the old days.

    24 March 2010, 12:14 pm

42. Curt:

    One thing is for sure US military people should not be responsible for administering any large program. I have doubts that they can properly administer any project over one billion dollars.
    Now some critic might say. Look just because you, Curt could not administer anything properly does not mean that most military people share this same charachteristic.
    My reply to that is that the problems at New Cumberland Army Depot, that I was not able to solve exsisted before I got there. If the military was any good at management there would have not been a problem for me to solve in the first place.
    Furthermore what type of idiots would assign a 25 year old LT. to solve a problem that they could not solve. At that time I did not believe that there was really a problem of theft of government materials because we were just a way station on the way to the end user. The problem just seemed to be one of people not scanning the bar codes so that we temporarily did not know where the item was. There was not a bunch of end users who were claiming what they ordered never got delivered. But now I wonder if something much more insidious was not going on. Could it have been that the end users really did not exsist in the first place and many of the items that we lost accountablility of actually disappeared in to some black hole where they were later sold on the black market in places like Afghanistan, Lebanon and Somalia enriching the trust funds of high level military and CIA operatives?
    It was a long time ago. If I really thought that things were being stollen I would have called in the CID. But hey why didnt any of my supiriors call in the CID. Either there was only a problem with tempoary accountablity or perhaps my supervisors were in on the know on how things were really working.
    Officers you just can not trust them. They are too smart for America’s good.

    24 March 2010, 1:21 pm

43. Curt:

    Oh, just for the record my supervisor at New Cumberland and I often watched the fork lift drivers to make sure that they were scanning the bar codes. So this accountablity problem was very frustrating for me. Of course the thought occured to me that maybe the accounting loss of things moving through our department was part of some gigantic scheme, but I pushed it out of my head as something that only happens in the movies. I do not remember but I can assume that I was smart enough to call one of the end users when some item had disappeared from the computer to check to see if it had arrived at the destination. The thing is who is to say that when I dialed that number to Germany or England that it really was not just rerouted to some specialist in an office somewhere who was told that he had to confirm what ever was ordered arrived.
    So has anyone figured out why items were disappearing from the computer that was tracking them? According to the GAO the military still loses at least on paper billions of dollars worth of items every year. Are us citizens suppossed to believe that nothing more than an occasional tow truck ever gets stolen?

    24 March 2010, 2:03 pm

44. Curt:

    Here is something more related to equality. An 88 year old wheel chair bound German who had been living in a rest home was sentenced to life imprisonment today for the murder of 3 Dutch citizens during the second world war. He claimed that he was acting under orders. Well we have known for 65 years that such a defense does not work for Germans. The thing is the Geneva Convention forbids collective pumishment of an occupied population. But when the Geneva Convention was written it was expected than when a government surrendered to an invading country that the people of the country would follow the governments surrender and not mount resistance. You see if you lived in a country in which the legitimate government legitimately surrenedered to an invading army the citizens of such a country were expected to follow the order to surrender.
    So when you get right down to it the German killing of hostages was seen as a legitimate tit for tat breaking of the rules. If the populations of France and Belgium and the Netherlands would have not oppossed them no one would have died as the result of executions. Now forced labor is another manner. But even with that the blame could be shifted back to the allies. We do not accept these explinations today because we were the victors then. We are the victors now and we use much the same logic as the Germans did in the 1940s.

    24 March 2010, 3:24 pm

45. Curt:

    Of course at the time I did not consider myself unqualified to solve the problem. I was a human being capable of independent thought. I far as I was concerned that is all it should take to solve any problem. Yes now many years latter it looks mighty suspicious. Why was someone who lacked even the most basic training to solve the problem chosen to solve it. I am still computer illiterate just imagine how little I knew about computers then.
    Furthermore what if someone knew something and was withholding key information from me.
    Yes with what I know now it seems possible that the reason our departments problem did not get fixed is because there was no problem at all. The conditions were just created to make it seem like there was a problem. For example someone (an insider) was deliberately deleting data to make it appear that there was a problem. My lack of knowledge on the subject was so great that I did not even know what questions to ask. But would motivate someone to delete information? I ask that question assuming that the items were not being stolen, assuming that the end users were real.
    Could any of this be relevant today? I doubt it. But then who knows for sure. After all the main point of my favorite movie is the better we understand our past, both in a collective and an individual sense, the better we understand our current situation.

    25 March 2010, 3:48 am

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