The combination of themes #3 and #7 from
the previous two essays are pivotal to the functioning of our present Story and
so I am addressing them in some detail.
(3) Belief in agency (human
agency and supernatural agency) rather than events being moved by the immediate
and direct action of preceding events and the statistical properties of
randomness.
(7) The belief that humans
are individual self-reliant units of action: each person is seen as a fully
independent actor making from the world’s opportunities what they can (moved
properly by acquisitiveness).
Success and failure are equally earned only by the amount and quality of
effort. Circular reasoning is
generally applied: success (by the standards of #4 and 6) equals effort;
failure equals sloth.
Agency is both one of the most powerful
themes and one of the least thought about or realized. The human world seems to operate on
pure agency: we imagine something, study the possibilities, design a method, gather
the requirements both informational and material, execute the details of the
plan and produce the result; looks like agency through and through. But what if this is not how things really happen?
When agency is combined with #7 –
individual self-reliant units of action – an image of how the world should, and
must, work is formed: an every ‘man’ for himself image. When selected bits for story are
gathered and the missing pieces rationalized, it is a powerful and compelling
narrative. Woven together with God
given rights, human exceptionalism, the practical and social utility of
material possessions and the attractiveness of personal superiority, the
narrative begins to concretize into an unbreachable bulwark against criticism
or the concerns of those who have not attained equal levels of impunity over
the masses and nature.
The trouble, of course, is that the
narrative and its supporting structures are just wrong in every detail, but
most importantly and least obviously in its most basic assumption of
agency. But, if agency is not the
explanation, then why does it seem to be?
There are several reasons, a central one being a fallacy of inductive
reasoning: only recognizing the class of cases that support such a view. Another failure of reasoning comes from
the uncritical acceptance of the independence of action.
Viewed from the perspective of distance
it is clear that the conditions of a society, the state of technological
development and the general process of idea formation combine together to
produce the possibility of particular changes, ideas and “discoveries.” Any look at the history of new ideas
finds several people discovering the same thing independently within, often,
only months of each other [1]. And
for those who have made an impression on recorded history, there are certainly
many more who would have produced the discovery (possibly in even better form)
in a few additional months or years.
This is clearly the case with scientific and technological developments
and there is no reason that the process should be any different for commercial
enterprises.
In this revised Story theme the society
sets the tone, the technology and intellectual environment supplies the tools
and the population supplies the people.
The people who find themselves in a position to reap the greatest
benefits realize that theirs is the good fortune bestowed on them by accidents
of birth, genetic good luck, being passed over by disease, abusive treatment or
other debilitation and generally being in the right place at the right time. A plot-line in this alternative theme
would be that while the desire for success and the effort expended for it can
be seen as personal virtues, and that a person can take pride in them, such
positive qualities belong not to the person alone, but to the supporting
community as well (that personal action is nothing without the community within
which it occurs is so obvious that it is often missed – does a man alone on a
desert island printing a million dollars make a noise!?).
A subplot would be that the person in the
focus of success recognizes the supporting structures and accepts the benefits
with humility making sure that the larger community is compensated for its
contributions. In this Story
millionaires/billionaires would be immoral thieves stealing from the community,
taking vastly more than their actual contribution to either the community or
its economic system; stealing from the only source available, the compensations
that should rightfully be made to others for their contributions supporting community.
It is understood, in this subplot, that all productive action arises from the
whole community through its supporting infrastructure: physical, intellectual
and emotional.
In this new Story, agency is a short-hand
for the summary of history and present state creating a focus for action into
which walks a single person, group or community. This only appears to be a more difficult idea because it is
not well formed in our present Story, but is still an important part of the
Story of many other societies and has been a central part of the Story of
ourselves from our past. Very particular historical trends have led us US of
Americans to the peculiar design of our present Story.
Self-reliant individualism is just as
fragile an idea when removed from the protection of its dominating story; and
for many of the same reasons (it is expected that a society’s Story would be
broadly internally supporting).
The origin and metaphor for such an idea can be seen with great clarity
and emotional affect driving from eastern New Mexico into west Texas
(especially effective from the seat of a motorcycle – an ‘individual and
self-reliant’ form of travel):
The “empty” plains, cactus meadows, mesas
and arroyos gradually give way to fields, clearly carved from the native
soil. The fields surround isolated
stands of various farm buildings, which in turn surround a house, usually at
the end of a narrow gravel track, well off from the paved farm road. It is easy to see why the inhabitants
of that house would feel that they had “done it all themselves.” The present Story doesn’t count the
laborer, the subduing of the Kiowa, the education and inculcating of work ethic
and so much more.
The farmer can look at the fields of
Sorghum, seeing in the distance the raw scrub country of the Llano Estacado,
and feel a pride both justified and unjustified. With his work-rough hands, sunburned skin and eyes, his
various injuries and suffering all summarized in the miles of red fields that
represent not only his labor, but the money that will pay the loans, the
workers and suppliers; all of ‘it’ on his and his family’s shoulders: it is
easy to not see the army of others that made it possible, easy to see the
payments made to bankers, taxes, to farm laborers, to services, insurance, suppliers
and others as payment more than enough, easy to ignore the debt to the larger
community that, frankly, cannot be seen from the front porch or the seat of the
tractor.
But this farmer is no more individual, no
more self-reliant, than a baby in the womb; it is a self-serving illusion. Acting in self-interest is not
self-reliance. He or she is
surrounded by literally millions of people without whom all that is taken pride
in would be impossible. And in an
ethic of this part of the country – “charity from no one and a helping hand to
all (unless you are not sufficient like me)” – an argument can be even be made
to the farmer that those millions are owed a compensation for their
contribution.
The first on the list is the governing
structure that enforces contracts, guarantees certain economic protections,
combines the taxes of multitudes to improve roads, to make towns possible, to
create a climate of safety so that the doctor, lawyer, hairdresser, auto parts
store, gas station and a hundred other businesses are just 15 miles down that
improved road. At the other end of
the continuum of contributors is the meat marketer and meat-eater that buys the
beef feed by the sorghum from the nearly endless and lovely red fields. And
less obvious, but just as vital, is the social stability created by education,
communication, challenges to bigotry and a broad social expectation for the
acceptance of others as honest brokers.
An interesting and vital twist to the
present Story is that the farmer has some justification for believing the theme
of individual self-reliance; the farmer doesn’t have to be crazy to have that
crazy idea. The great danger comes
when investment bankers, politicians and the like try to cloak themselves and
their actions in that part of the story.
They have to be insane to believe that they are individual, self-reliant
or anything other that a cog in a machine from which they have found a way to
steal [2].
* * *
The other themes in our present story can
be similarly treated, but I will only briefly rewrite them in forms for the
Story that I am proposing as more appropriate to reality.
(1) Humans are a species with exceptional
qualities, but so are all the others; our adaptations are just more powerful
and therefore more dangerous than most.
We must actively arrange our lives, communities, societies and
productions to function compatibly with ecological reality.
(2) Human life has no special permission
for our activities. The mystery
and beauty of earth, life and universe require no imagined supernatural entity
to give them validation. That we
have come to exist by the billions-to-one chance motion of planet and molecule
is more awe-inspiring and spiritually engaging than an imagining distilled out
of our own needfulness and lack of understanding.
(4) Humans create hierarchies of value as
a way of organizing behavior. It
is natural, but unjustified, to assume that one’s own community and ways of
being are superior to others. But
since each community (ethic group, racial identification, etc.) considers
itself to be superior to another that, with equal justification, considers
itself superior, then the table is set for either conflict or laughter.
(5) It is in the biology of humans to
follow, in general terms, the evolved primate patterns of social organization
(it is this fact that makes ape and monkey social behavior seem so familiar to
us). However, this normal part of
our biology needs to be tempered by the incredible power of our numbers and
technology. We need to be aware
that our biology can be easily fooled now that we are out of the woods and that
a small consistent percentage of people will attempt to dominate others by
methods fair and foul.
(6) The biology of humans makes easily
identifiable differences the basis for worth and value; that is why all
societies develop “badges” of various kinds. The bases of worth and value are determinative of the
motivational structure – the incentive system – of the society. Material possession as raison d'être is
characteristic of a degenerate social order and must be struggled against as it
continually presses forward its form of easily identified difference.
* * *
With these 5 new themes, with some
distillation of the above argument to replace the present #3 and #7, with the process of plot and subplot
filling in the holes as elements of the themes are made into narrative, then a new Story structure would form.
I leave it to the reader to tease out how these new themes would address and
modify our actions on the specific issues that we face today.
[1] Chuang Tzu and Socrates, Newton and
Leibniz; Darwin and Wallace; Marx and Henry George; Michelson, Lorentz,
Poincare, Einstein, Planck, Minkowski; the list of mutual and multiple
discoverers/uncoverers would be endless.
[2] I do not intend hyperbole. It is true
insanity to consistently believe and act in denial or violation of reality –
regardless of whether those around you are also so acting.
No comments:
Post a Comment