1) There is no one who can be blamed or credited for the situation humanity finds itself in, for good or bad, except humanity and nature. If you don’t like the way the world is you can either rail against nature (our biology, limited resources, etc…) or you can rail against ourselves—what we have done with the hand nature dealt us. (You could also blame God or Gods, but this amounts to blaming nature.)
Humans are responsible for human society
2) Some humans are more responsible than others. Duh. Nonetheless, as a group, we are responsible. If the 99% rose up against the 1% tomorrow, it’d be over for the 1%.
Some Humans bear more responsibility than others.
3) Unless you posit a universe without free will (an entirely intellectually respectable position), you must allow human agency. Technology changes the optimal strategies, but within each technological framework there are kinder and less kind options. Looking through the vast varieties of agricultural societies, one would have far rather been alive in early Tang China or certain long stretches of Roman history, even as a member of the lower classes, than in Early Norman England.
Technology and Nature Constrict our options and set up incentives.
We choose how we respond to the incentives created by technology and nature.
4) Humans are neither innately hierarchical, nor innately egalitarian. They can be either. For most of human existence, the best evidence is that we lived in very egalitarian societies. For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.
5) Character is created by circumstances, and circumstances constrict what character types are successful but we have a great deal of control over circumstances, especially those who are most powerful. The men and a very few women who voted to get rid of Jim Crow were almost certainly mostly racist themselves: it was virtually impossible to grow up in that society and time and not be racist. They voted against their own racism. You can look at your own character, find it lacking, and act in ways that are contrary to it. I may want to beat someone to a pulp for an insult and figure I can, yet decide not to do so. We could have decided to allow developing states to keep their agricultural sectors and food subsidies, we chose not to, for what amount to trivial gains in money which are offset by larger losses in markets in the not very long run (poor people, as has been observed, are shitty customers.)
We Can Act Good Even if Not Good.
We can change the circumstances people grow up, changing the character of the people.
The argument of free will versus pre-determination is ever-ongoing. To deny the effect of circumstances is to be inhumane: to be the type of fool who blames poor blacks for being poor blacks and not pulling themselves, en-masse, out of poverty thru sheer willpower. It is to blame Bangladeshis for being born in Bangladesh, stupid people for being born stupid or getting inadequte nutrition as children; many psychotic adults for being sexually assaulted as children.
There are injuries and circumstances which most of us will never rise above.
But to assume predestination is all is to deny any hope of improvement that is not determined by what amounts to blind fate: it is to deny human agency. It is to say that if we invent a weapon (like effective ground combat robots – about 10 years out) which tilts the playing field towards a small elite oligarchy (or does it?) then there is nothing we can do about it. It is to say that because monopolies and oligopolies naturally form, there is nothing we can do. It is to say that we can’t choose to create the circumstances in which racism, neo-imperialism, and sexism don’t harm billions.
If most of us assume predestination, assume, in effect, that we can’t make things better, then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy for those people.
Either we are responsible, or we aren’t. If we aren’t, then we admit, in effect, the impossibility of any change which wasn’t already predetermined; wasn’t already going to happen.
In some ways that’s a comforting world to live in. It allows us to say “not my problem” and go about our lives–building our McMansion, trying to snag the Homecoming King or Queen as our mate; doting on our children, and ignoring the world beyond the reach of our arms.
The choice, really, belongs to each of us. As the years go by, more and more I am inclined to shrug. People complain, but are unwilling to do what it takes to live in a different world, a kinder world. That might be predestination, that might be choice, but either way it is what it is.
The rule for living in a better world is simple enough, and virtually every sage has told us what it is: to love others as we love ourselves, or at least act like it even if we don’t.
We might start by feeding the hungry, since we throw away far more than enough food to do so, and then go on to house the homeless, since we have more empty homes than homeless people. But you know, and I know, that we won’t do either of those things.
Predestination? Choice? Some of both?
It doesn’t matter to the people who are starving and dying of exposure; it doesn’t matter to the men and women being systematically raped in the Congo; it doesn’t matter to all the children in Iraq being born with birth defects due to American weapons, nor to their despairing parents.
Predestination? Choice?
Shit either way.
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Petro
Yea.
The pushback that the Left gets for clamoring for this point is the typical absolutist and breathless argument that free will is being denied, that the Left is victimist-mongering. The Right, ever in love with slippery-slope logic. As you say:
A truth that cannot be acknowledged by the foam at the top of society, and the source of Leftist shadenfreude, usually experienced with a tinge of guilt, whenever an up-by-your-own-bootstraps cheerleader of the faux meritocracy stumbles and falls.
iamyou
Dude, great post. So many things hit home.
Jonathan
Petro, the Republicans’ slippery slope argument is just the liberals’ Whig historiography inverted, isn’t it? (Let’s be careful what we call “leftist”; liberalism, being anti-socialism, is right-wing in regards to power, and New Deal “liberalism” is bait for a switch, one possibly ongoing right now.)
Celsius 233
Thoughtful and timely.
Given most of us do not live a thoughtful life, day to day; predestination probably best describes existence.
Not living a thoughtful life necessarily means we are not even aware of the choices we make moment by moment. And then we wonder how we got to our present state.
Choice vs. Predestination is probably irrelevant (as you say) for the herd.
Tom Allen
Petro, conservatives are quite willing to appeal to predestination so long as it justifies the status quo, or the return to a past era. They’ll argue that, say, the English race is biologically superior to all others in some area, or that men are inherently better at this task or that, or that “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”.
The difference between left and right, as I think Ian suggests, is whether we want to improve the circumstances people currently grow up in, or whether we prefer things as they are (or were); and whether we personally are willing to act to make the change, or instead think someone else should do it.
batalos
‘For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.’ – may I ask which exactly exceptions?
Celsius 233
@ batalos
May 21, 2014
‘For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.’ – may I ask which exactly exceptions?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
You might want to check out The Chalice and The Blade by Riane Eisler.
An excellent source of the pre-old testament, egalitarian cultures of the Mediterranean area.
This was the era, pre-Kurgan invasion, which brought with it patriarchy and the beginnings of the Yahweh cult.
It’s, historically, very much pertinent to Ian’s thread.
jump
Just for the sake of argument, the choice pole can be taken further to we are the sole agents of our experience; we choose, and are thus responsible for everything we experience in our lives often in co-operation with others. This does require a re-think of what is considered good and bad more in the lines of some eastern philosophies. Not a view often considered, particularly with victims of rape or starvation, but not precluded solely by logic, maybe our biases though analogous to Euclid’s fifth axiom.. Euclidean geometry is functional in terms of our life on earth but not as functional in astronomical terms. It also requires a re-think of ‘victim’, blame and judgement. Abdicating our own agency thus also becomes a choice in how we wish to experience the world. Interesting thought experiment at least.
batalos
@celsius233, thx 4 advice, i’m reading it now
Jeff W
The “ever-ongoing” choice vs. predestination argument really should go the way of Descartes’ error. “Choice vs. predestination” dooms us either way—we’re not acting either because we are choosing not to or because that is our destiny. It’s not just false—it’s counterproductive.
The issue with not feeding the hungry or housing the homeless or any of the myriad of problems we face is not one of being predestined not to or choosing not to. It’s that (1) those controlling the overall environment have arranged that environment so that activities such as feeding the hungry/housing the homeless (or solving the other problems) do not occur (while, obviously, other things—like those who control the environment arranging it in such a way as to get enormously rich—somehow do occur) and (2) those who would like things like feeding the hungry/housing the homeless to occur cannot themselves arrange the environment so that those things do occur, i.e., they have little or no power to get those things done and, perhaps, most importantly (3) this same group—who cannot themselves arrange the environment to get those things done—cannot arrange the environment to be able ultimately to arrange the environment, i.e., they have little or no power to get the power.
Most of those people with little or no power will not act to get it. That’s the way the environment is set up.
Some of those people with little or no power will act to get it. That just means they are better at managing their own behavior so as to act against the prevailing circumstances.
That account might seem mind-numbingly obvious but it is a lot more productive than the completely fruitless (“shit either way”) choice vs. predestination argument. Why?
Because then we can talk about arranging the environment so as to be able to arrange the environment (using/getting power to get power) and, as that happens, arranging the environment so as to able to do things that we might want to have done (e.g. feeding the hungry, housing the homeless). People might be “unwilling to do what it takes to live in a different world”—again that’s how the prevailing conditions are set up, including talk about “predestination vs. choice”—but the answer is to set up, or start to set up, conditions so that some people might. It’s a lot better than wondering about who will be “responsible” enough to “choose” to.
Ian Welsh
I’m pretty sure the post makes the point that one can change the environment and I’m pretty sure that other posts have spelled out the specific sorts of changes which are needed. But ideology is important in many ways, and one of it is as justification.
stirling
the problem is, it is 1% against the 99%, its which 49 % wants to kiss up to 1% and screw over 49%
jcapan
What Stirling said. And what Zinn said:
“In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.”
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
S Brennan
“For most of agricultural history, we lived in non-egalitarian societies, with a few exceptions: but those exceptions existed.’ – may I ask which exactly exceptions? – batalos
233 is correct, something the dude would say about me…regardless of the facts.
All who are not familiar with Minoan culture should make effort to read up.
Perfect? No, “nobody is perfect..not even a perfect stranger”. And unequal? Sure, but unless you believe their conquerors [Mycenaean] legends, far better than what has come since/before. From the archeological record, there appears to be a 10:1 limit on wealth, top to bottom.
Those living on Thera [all], had access…or…in home HOT & cold running water. Unlike Pompeii almost two millennium later, all citizens, [AND ANIMALS] were evacuated before the Island blew [largest explosion in Europe]. And while arguments still rage among vulcanologist, the most powerful in the post Ice Age world. While never the same, the society rebuilt itself…with NO OUTSIDE HELP…just the opposite, all who could, ravaged the victims.
Leon Benjamin
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. (Voltaire)