Has anyone presented a coherent, orderly strategy for ethically changing the world for the better?
Social progressive effort is frequently chaotic, sporadic, erratic, impulsive, and ultimately impotent. It is a lot of noise, without much substance. In a word, anarchic.
Anarchy is a religion. It seeks heaven on Earth. But there is no saviour to delivery it. Anarchy is a waiting game. It is predicated on faith that certain aspects of human nature will, eventually, on their own—or just by talking and writing about it—come to dominate. The more problematic aspects, meanwhile, will fade away.
Perhaps all we can do is wait. Society is a complex system. Such systems find their own equilibrium. Complex systems are emergent. They cannot be directed.
The quest for order is suspect. It is so often associated with authoritarianism and totalitarianism. As long as people are diverse, order may appear to be a fantasy. But by the same reasoning, so is harmonious disorder.
Thus, the much-maligned “centrists” expect the world to continue to follow the middle path. Or perhaps “rut”. The rut of compromise. It accepts and adapts to the perpetual tension between order and chaos, control and freedom, or similar dichotomy.
Of course, reality is more complex. Every person wants both freedom from control, and some degree of control, or at least restraint, over others. That is the nature of social interaction. I might have something you want. But I need it. Or I don’t need it, but you have nothing to trade for it. Can you find another way to acquire it? Or will you try to take it by force?
Order is negotiated, through persuasion, with varying degrees of force.
The progressive, or anarchic, ideal is the complete elimination of coercion, including force. But this would require a collective agreement about an ideal form of order. It would require everyone to follow the same protocols for attending to their needs. It implies that all needs are met.
In reality, humanity is stricken with more “needs” than we can satisfy. The seemingly intractable problem is, how to make us all satisfied. Many of our “needs” are not material. Material needs are finite, while emotional needs are potentially infinite.
Such insatiable emotions are, in theory, the product of pathology. If we can find ways to satisfy all emotional needs, then urges to control, and associated harmful behaviours, will evaporate.
Is this likely? What do we know of human beings? Some percentage of people are inherently anti-social. Some people are born without the capacity for empathy. They are incapable of compassion. It is assumed that they are a tiny minority. In a compassionate world, society would have the resources to protect them, and everyone else, from the threat they represent.
Other people become anti-social in response to sufficient trauma. What counts as “sufficient” is dependent on the individual. There is no way to eliminate all sources of trauma from the world. The universe is perilous, dangerous, risky.
Risk is inherent to life. No risk implies no uncertainty. What is a life without uncertainty? Meaningless, perhaps, and also impossible. The universe is vast. The Earth is vast, compared to human beings. The Earth will always be a dangerous place, even if it is vastly more hospitable than anywhere else. There will always be natural disasters.
Aside from that, the artificial world is just as unpredictable. Machines break. Humans make mistakes. Even if they don’t, the laws of complexity guarantee that outcomes will always deviate from expectations. The world is more complex than our brains, or any artificial brains we might build, can predict. (Again, what would life be worth, if it were predictable?)
Humans are frail and weak, relative to both the forces of nature, and the power of the machines we have unleashed upon the world. Even if the machines were conscious and perfect and could avoid ever harming a human being, humans are not ourselves predictable. We are not perfect, and we will inevitably put ourselves in harm’s way. We are statistically predictable, if not mechanically so.
Some people will always be injured or killed. Physical harm begets emotional harm. And not all harm can be healed. Such harms affect both the direct victims of accidents, as well as indirect. When one is harmed, those who love them and depend upon them are also harmed. Should we aim for a world completely free of such emotional inter-dependence? Should all people seek to be immune to the pain of loss? That would make them ostensible psychopaths.
I don’t begrudge people who want a better world, or even a perfect world. I dream of all the ways we could spare ourselves of pointless suffering. But it does have limits. We might aim for perfection, even if we know we cannot achieve it. But if we aim for it, we ought to understand the implications of what we our attempting. We ought to be informed of the obstacles. We should have feasible strategies to overcome them.
We should not be naive. But we are. Painfully so. Our naiveté is even deliberate, which makes it worse. If I believed in sin, I would call it sinful. Instead, it is merely stupid and selfish. It is dishonourable.
I would like to live in a world that understood the nature of honour. Honour has been corrupted, it is true. Like so many things, it became a path to status. Its meaning changed. Honour became birthright. And it was earned through dishonourable actions, like war and violence.
Today, we mostly seek status, and a kind of degraded honour—or fame—through money and attention. But these are inferior substitutes. Real honour comes from doing real good for the world. Unfortunately, we now live in a legalistic society. A consequence of the size and complexity of the social machine. And so we had to find dispassionate, systematic, mechanical ways to measure human value. We chose money and position, which bestow prestige, status, and honour, implicitly.
But our laws do not reflect the virtues of social contribution. Or only a few. Because most virtues cannot be quantified. Whereas the law only works with some quantification. While the marketplace is almost completely quantified.
It is likely that, as long as our society reduces us to tokens in a calculation, or line items in a ledger, that we will never have any hope of real and lasting moral progress. We will simulate it, when different demographic groups find and consolidate their power, in order to protect themselves from the depredations of other groups.
For now, that seems to be our only hope. Power restricts power. Within such groups of moral equals, we can find qualitative honour, integrity, and justice. If such groups even exist. But they cannot themselves be quantified or delineated, without their being destroyed. So, for now, we must each seek out such invisible and fragile communities. While interacting with the outside world through the methodology of power.
The goal, then, of universal honour, integrity, and justice, requires expanding the boundaries, until they include everyone, without having to rely on mechanical systems, like monetary transactions and property law, to track and manage relationships. But we have not invented such a system yet, and are unlikely to do so.
Some people will always have more power. Some people will always have more honour, status, and protection under the law. Because the individual human is incapable of recognizing and respecting more than a few hundred other people, let alone billions of them, in all their cultural and individual diversity, which inevitably means disagreements and conflicts, enemies and hatred.
Then again, if we can admit this is the real obstacle—our own natures—then maybe, we can make some incremental improvements. But only if that is what we aim for, and do so with sufficient understanding of the territory through which we travel, and its perils and pitfalls.