Charles M Rupert

The Social Construction of Sex: A Formal Argument

April 9, 2023 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Epistemology, Philosophy, Social Responsibility

Introduction

Everywhere nowadays there seems to be what some are calling the denial of common sense: the argument that sex is socially constructed, or made up by social practices. Arguments from J. K. Rowling and a seemingly endless armada of right-wing provocateurs have spread the message that this is woke nonsense and yet another attempt of the left’s attempt to reimagine everything. This, in turn, has led my students to question my teaching of this subject. They simply don’t accept social constructionism as a theory and dismiss it without due consideration as an “agenda”. So, in this post, I am going to create a tedious but hopefully brief argument showing why philosophers and many other scholars and scientists believe that sex is socially constructed and not biologically determined.

The Deductive Arguments

The formal arguments are comprised of two deductive arguments and a series of inductive ones. The first deductive argument is a modus ponens type that goes like this:

If sex is not biologically determined, then it is socially constructed.
Sex is not biologically determined.
Therefore, sex is socially constructed.

The first thing to note about this argument is that it isn’t so much an argument for the social construction of sex, as it is an argument against the biological determination of the same. The second thing to note is that this first premise is perhaps the weakest assumption of my whole argument. It is assumed that if no biological determination can be made that the best remaining explanation for the concept of “sex” is a social one. As there remains the possibility of a third alternative, this can only be as good as whatever the alternatives are. But most likely this argument’s opponents would challenge the second premise, so we need a second argument to support it, such as follows:

If sex is biologically determined, then there must exist at least one definitive biological attribute which all members of that sex possess and no non-members of that sex possess.
No biological attribute can be found that satisfies both criteria.
Therefore, sex is not biologically determined.

This Modus Tollens argument starts by simply defining the meaning of “biological determination” as having some biological attribute that can distinguish all members of one sex from all non-members. The second premise assumes that no attribute which would satisfy the logical requirements necessary to serve as the defining element exists, and so the argument concludes that sex cannot be biologically determined. Again, the second premise stands in need of support. The only reasonable way to justify this claim is with a series of arguments establishing counter-examples to any and all proposed biological attributes that presume to determine sex.

The Inductive Arguments

It would be impossible to refute every would-be contender, not because it couldn’t be done, but because it would take an infinite amount of time to do so. Rather then, let us first see if we can narrow the field of contenders. We know abductively that a successful biological attribute cannot be shared by multiple sexes, nor can there be any member of a sex who fails to possess the definitive attribute. Suppose “having arms” is taken to be the definitive biological attribute for the female sex and we can easily see how it would fail both criteria: there are some females who do not have arms and some non-females who do have arms. We don’t need both to fail however, either the one or the other failure would be sufficient to rule out whatever supposed attribute as a distinguishing attribute and so fail to establish biological determinacy. It should also be noted that no criteria could be an average since averages are by definition social and not biological attributes. For example, it would be impossible to claim that females are humans that are “shorter on average” than other sexes since we are looking for a way to determine an individual’s sex. No individual is the average, even if they happen to be the mean, the mode, or the median of some human attribute.

Most proponents of biologically determined sex argue one of four major categories: gender, anatomy, physiognomy, or genetics. It is, of course, possible that there are other potentials candidates that would meet the criteria, but if so, I have never encountered them, and as the burden of establishing such claims must rest with the proponents of the theory that believes that they exist, I will leave it to them to bring up in rebuttal. In what remains, I will argue that a counter-example can be produced for each potential attribute of the four categories, dealing with many though certainly not all possibilities as examples.

Gender

Gender would include particular behaviors or appearances that we could say define sex, e.g., females are the humans who wear their hair long. There are obviously many examples of gender that could work such as males are the ones who wear pants or grow beards or earn an income, while females are the ones who wear dresses or make-up or take care of the children.

All of these examples and indeed any you can probably think of could have an exception. To establish them as the defining biological attribute, we would have to prove that all males have beards, including young ones, or have ever had “long” hair or that no female has ever worn pants or neglected their children. Even a single example of a single instance of this would be sufficient to disqualify it as a defining biological attribute and even a hypothetical example would do the same, since to be distinguishing, it cannot be possible to show a counter-example.

All of these examples can be proven inductively false, and so none can establish biologically determined sex. Such is true of any gender act or appearance we wish to use.

Anatomy

Anatomy includes the physical parts a person possesses that we could say define sex, e.g., females are the humans who possess uteruses or ovaries or breasts. Or males are the humans who possess penises or testicles or Adam’s apples. For these, or other, examples to establish biological determinacy we would have to prove that no men have uteruses and all women have them, including those who have had a hysterectomy. That a human who lost their penis was no longer a male, even if that didn’t quite make them a female. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that whatever organ we designate as the definitive one, could be removed.

Now we could simply hardline on this point and say that it is indeed the penis that makes a human male, and were a male to lose his penis he could not be classified as male anymore, and while not female, we could make up a new category for such people. However, there are two problems with doing this and still claiming that sex is biologically determined. First, the very act of inventing new sexes seems to suggest social construction, but we could defend against this by claiming that we are not “inventing” but discovering as many new biological sexes as we need to fit everyone in. While problematic in other ways, the more difficult problem for those who wish to establish biological determinacy for sex is that, by definition, it would prove sexual transition is not only biologically possible but extremely common-place, as the male who loses his penis transitions to a new sex and if their penis is regrafted to their body would allow them to transition back to male. In the same way, a female could have a penis attached and could then, by definition, become a biologically determined male. This is a conclusion that I take those who wish to establish biological determinacy for sex want to avoid.

Physiognomy

Physiognomy includes biological functions of organs or organisms that we could say define sex, e.g., females are the humans who can bear children or males are the humans who can produce sperm or impregnate a female.

For these examples to establish biological determinacy, we would have to prove that no male can bear children and that all females can bear children. Any sterile human could not be considered female, and neither could those who have yet to prove they are not sterile, such as children. Similarly, a human whose testicles fail to produce sperm could not be considered a male, whether they were born with those testicles or they are made of plastic would make no difference.

We might think that combining physiognomy and anatomy would strengthen the case for biological determinacy, but in fact, it would weaken it because now it would be harder to prove there are no exceptions since we have multiple criteria to satisfy, any one of which could provide an exception. Ultimately sex cannot be established on the basis of the function of organs because organs can change, as with anatomy, but also because they can functionally fail.

Genetics

Genetics includes the chromosomal characteristics a person possesses, i.e., their genes, that could define sex, e.g., females are humans who have two X chromosomes or males are the humans who have an X and a Y chromosome. For these examples to establish biological determinacy, we would have to argue that no men have anything other than an X and a Y chromosome and that no females have anything other than two X chromosomes. Both of these are inductively false. There is much larger genetic diversity than is commonly understood, including chromosomal sequences of XXX, XXY, XYY, XXXXX, XXXXXXX, and more. Additionally, there are genetically related conditions, such as androgen insensitivity, where humans who possess XY chromosomes are born with functioning vulvas, uteruses, and breasts, everything except the ova.

Anomalies

One, ill-conceived way of trying to save the biological determination theory is to dismiss these as mere exceptions to the general rule of binary biological sex. The problem with this idea is two-fold. One problem is logical. As I showed above, it only takes one counter-example to undo the theory. The second problem is more profound, in that it seems to accept, at least methodologically, the idea of social construction prior to biological determination. If exceptions can be ignored, then we are not so much dealing with defining sex by a biological attribute but rather with socially constructing a biological attribute that we arbitrarily commit to. This kind of biological determination is a social construction, one step removed.

History

History might serve as another possible source of determinacy for sex. Some may argue that the sex “you are born with” is your “true” sex. At first, it may seem plausible, but yet again we find that this sort of argument assumes a social construction rather than a biological determination. To claim a child is assigned a sex at birth by the arbitrary application of some biological attribute, either by a parent or a doctor is merely to claim this authority is the rightful one to choose. The idea that sex is chosen is assumed.

But there is literally no reason why this arbitrary choice must remain permanent or why a parent’s choice should supersede the individual’s. To analogize, it’s no different than claiming a person cannot change their name because it was assigned to them at birth by their parents. If that were the case then no married woman could take her husband’s last name, because she was born with her maiden one. Obviously, this is not true. In point of fact, we allow people to change their names, precisely because it was an arbitrary decision on the part of a person’s parents and we generally hold that individuals may decide for themselves arbitrary choices regarding their identity.

Socially Constructed Sex

None of this is to suggest that things like anatomy, genetics, and physiognomy or our history have nothing whatsoever to do with the determination of sex, only that the choice of which to focus on is seemingly always just that, a choice someone is making. You or someone else is always choosing your sex. When you meet a stranger, they take a guess. You either agree with their determination or you do not. What a theory of socially constructed sex really is then is a commitment to allowing individuals to decide on what basis they would prefer their sex to be determined. And, upon realizing they have the power to make this choice, most people base it on how they feel about themselves. This internal feeling is arguably just as biological an attribute as any other we have so far considered. The point here is not what they choose based on, but that they are the most appropriate person, and perhaps the only person, capable of making that choice.

Those who would like to be the dictators of others’ sexuality or those who would prefer to defer their choice to others, sometimes like to hide behind the bulwark of objective fact or science, but no such epistemological territory exists as this argument hoped to show. Without the claim of objective fact, such assertions have been revealed to be merely the wishes of people who like to tell others who they can and can’t be. Social constructionism asserts that freedom of sexuality is always chosen and trans people, like cis people everywhere, simply demand that others respect their choice about themselves.

Why We Can’t Have a Better World

March 5, 2023 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert

Utopia is a dangerous word. It expresses both a desire for something better and a doubt about the possibility of fulfilling that desire. There is a fundamental and–on Sir Thomas More’s part–intentional equivocation at the heart of the word. A utopia is both a “good place” and a “no place”. The pivotal question, however, is can it be a real place? The problem when discussing a better place, or even more modestly, a better way of doing something, we tend to model our expectations and judgments around some conception of a thing’s efficiency. A better knife is a more efficient one, that is one that fulfills the purpose of the knife more effectively. Perhaps one that cuts better or is more durable or requires less skill or, more remotely, is more prestigiously fashionable. Whatever the aim of the knife, some designs and constructions will attain the desired end better than others. that is a measure of its efficiency. The relationship between a goal and the best way to achieve it is a thing’s efficiency. I could write forever what the end of utopia should look like, but that is not the point of this essay. Rather, I want to focus on what can derail a social project, even when a goal is clear and shared.

There is another equivocation we must deal with, one that is not intentional and lies in the word “efficiency”. Efficiency is a noun that represents the ability of a thing to enact an effect. But as we saw above, the effect is relative to the end. A knife whose purpose is to cut meat is different from the ceremonial knife of the high priest or the resplendent knife of the monarch. Different in its sense of purpose and so different in its intended effect. The most efficient knife might not even be able to cut, something generally thought of as an essential quality for a thing to be classified as a “knife”. This leads us to an uncontroversial idea: that in some manners an object can be both efficient and inefficient at the same time, given separate purposes. But I want to propose something much more controversial, that an object can be both efficient and inefficient at the same time, given the same purpose, as well. This is because efficiency is a social notion, not just an individual one. And because of this objects might find themselves individually efficient while socially inefficient or vice versa.

Let me start with an example that we may then use to propose two different types of efficiency. The layout of the keyboard upon which I am typing this essay is known as the “qwerty” layout. In one sense, this is far from the most efficient layout for an English-language keyboard. The home keys, which are the easiest and quickest to press, contain not the most commonly used letters in the language but less common ones, including one of the least used punctuation marks: the semi-colon. Meanwhile, the letter “e”, the most commonly used letter in English is left in a less accessible place. We might ask, “is there not a better design imaginable here?”, a utopic keyboard layout if you will? I think you will agree there must be. So, a reasonable question would be: why are computer designers still using this inefficient design?

The answer is that “qwerty” is the most efficient, in a hegemonic sense. The “qwerty” keyboard layout is widely known and widely accepted. It has achieved a hegemonic normativity that has rooted it in place. Any attempt to deviate from this norm would require an individual typist to relearn how to type on a new layout, and this would cause more inefficiency than the new layout would save, at least for a while. Let’s call this hegemonic efficiency “nominal”, in that it is efficient in a historical and culturally relative sense but not in an objective sense. Opposed to this we might add an “optimal efficiency”, which is both hegemonically and objectively efficient. Let us imagine a keyboard layout that is the most efficient, as far as finger strokes go, and let’s imagine that this layout, through some method, replaces “qwerty”, then we as a culture would have moved from nominal efficiency to optimal efficiency. In this way, a keyboard layout like “qwerty” could be said to be the most efficient keyboard system given the social situation already in place, but not the most efficient system when taken ideally. And, from the other side, the more ideally efficient keyboard layout would be utopic, not in the sense of impossible, but in that it must overcome hegemonic normativity before it can become optimal.

The parallel to social and political utopias is obvious enough: a better world may be objectively possible but pushing through the hegemonic membrane so that it becomes optimal is what is nearly impossible. I mean, if we are failing to get better keyboards or adopt the metric system, what chance does something like libertarian socialism really have against capitalism? And this would be true even if almost every single person actively wanted libertarian socialism. Still, I feel that a lot of arguments about capitalism’s efficiency between socialists and capitalists of all stripes may be chalked up to this sort of innocent equivocation. Is capitalism more efficient nominally or optimally? I think it is undeniably more nominally efficient. But this is not to say it is more efficient, period. To do that is to miss the point that most socialists really want to make: capitalism is not the most optimally efficient.

This is not to leave aside the idea that an economic system’s goal is often obscure. As I said about the knife, change the intended purpose and you also change its supposed efficiency. So, is capitalism a platform for enacting the most freedom? Generating the most wealth? Enabling the greatest access to resources for the greatest number of people? Enriching a single individual to the greatest extent possible? Stabilizing exploitation to avoid revolution? Obviously, our measure of capitalism’s efficiency will change depending on which of these ways we choose to conceive of it. But as an assumption of a free people, under a volunteer political system, one would assume that people would imagine the point of their economics as getting them access to the resources they need to live and thrive. Under that conception, I think the socialist would have a point. Capitalism is only nominally efficient and any optimal improvement must be utopic.

However, the point here is not to argue about conceptions of socialism or capitalism but to show how we might continue to have problems even if we all agreed on the conception. Under capitalism, we are seemingly trapped in the hegemony of a lesser system. In fact, this is the root of the so-called “left melancholia” and conservative “realism”. The disappointment and depression of those who can see salvation but cannot reach it because of the “realism” of others is the natural result of conflicting senses of efficiency. What is realistic is “nominal” while what is utopic is “optimal”, but neither of these options is impossible.

So, how do we change the hegemony? This is the work of social reformers everywhere–and frankly, not my specialty. But I will say, the goal is not to get rid of hegemony and change it into some sort of endless Revolution, but rather to replace the old nominal hegemony with the optimal and ideal one. My understanding of the historical precedents are that they have come through dictatorship or some other anti-democratic means. I believe this is the impetus behind Marx’s call for the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but a “dictatorship” made up of the overwhelming majority of the citizens of a society is hardly a dictatorship at all. Rather it is a democracy and so overcoming the hegemonic normativity of the group is not possible this way. Neither, do I think is it advisable to instill dictatorial powers in a single individual or even a small group. Instead, I think we must discover how to embrace the democratic element present in this phenomenon and simply put a hegemonic change to a direct vote. Let the question before the people be: “qwerty” or this. We may well find it is “qwerty”. But we may also find that social progress moves forward. Voting may seem like leaving it up to every individual to choose themselves, precisely the problem of hegemony I am outlining. But by calling it to a vote, we orient our thoughts from what we think individually to what we think collectively and different “self-interests” may result.

Review: The Origins of Capitalism

July 21, 2022 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert

The book The Origins of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood provides a compelling history of capitalist analysis. The story, in a nutshell, says that nearly all accounts, both for and against capitalism, have failed to really understand the generation process of capitalism, and because of that historical misunderstanding they misapprehend what capitalism is. In this concise review, I will try to summarize the main thread of Wood’s argument, specifically with an eye toward an analysis of capitalism rather than as an evaluation of historical accuracy. Towards that end, I will not challenge any assumptions of the author but accept her account of capitalism, what it means, and how it acts. Finally, I will attempt to locate this account within my own work.

https://www.versobooks.com/books/2407-the-origin-of-capitalism

Wood spends a good deal of time elaborating the competing views she hopes to overcome, all of which can be boiled down to some version of Adam Smith’s origin story with its emphasis on “man’s propensity to truck, barter, and trade.” This story reveals capitalism to be something of a natural evolution of human instinct, being gradually unfettered by political and religious control and exploitation. Once these fetters were finally dispensed with, the economy became liberated, and human beings were finally free to do what they really wanted to do all along, become capitalists. In this sense, capitalism is simply an extension of the innate desire for human beings to employ the things they own to their own advantage.

She makes several good arguments for why this explanation is erroneous, which I will not bother to recount here. Instead, I want to focus on her alternative account that finds capitalism as developing in English agriculture. In my interpretation, it is a misread to claim that Wood is arguing that capitalism is born out of English agrarian society. Rather, I believe she is arguing that when a proto-capitalist model of property relations came to be applied to the necessities of life as occurred during the supplantation of traditional agrarian society during feudalism, the only means of living were altered for everyone and a new system with its own logic and imperatives took over. This was against the resistance of the people who would come to adopt it, namely peasants.

Rather than the traditional tail of fetters being removed, the story Wood tells shows how the powers of economic exploitation simply were shifted from direct control by lords to seize profits from the relatively independent peasant producers to one where the exploitation was formalized in the property relations with the lords established as “owners” and the peasants as “tenants” or “farmers”. The only remaining role then for the state in such a system is to enforce the property relations as a whole, making economic relations quasi-independent of political activity. This separation masks the coercion, making it feel more “natural” or “free”, rather than the obvious and direct political oppression involved in feudal systems. Such a system, Wood suggests, changes the mode of exploitation from extra-economic means to purely economic ones, and at the same time changes the incentives for lords from one of squeezing peasants to maximizing the productivity of farmers and employees. This effect accounts for both the success of capitalism in replacing nearly all other forms of economic relations and for capitalism’s intense classism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and so forth. Without its political element, it is not clear who may be exploited and so the exploitation is filtered through some or several forms of identity politics.

In general, I think Wood’s reading is accurate although I don’t claim to know the intricacies of the agrarian argument she bases it on. What I take from Wood’s analysis is simply the fact that the defining characteristic of capitalism is its ability to separate exploitation from the political sphere. This fits with the very nature of oppression, which, roughly defined, is characterized by apparent freedom and opportunity with the subtle reality being one of limited options and forced choices. With this understanding in play, capitalism is not established by private property or markets for its exchange. Those elements may be associated with a great many economic systems. Capitalism is then a particular way of preserving classism without recourse to draconian political force.

On the upside, assuming Wood is correct here, capitalism offers humanity the first glimpse of economic freedom from direct political control. This is indeed the achievement that capitalist apologists have long used to justify the system. The failing of capitalism lies not in its divorce from political oversight, but in its continued adherence to the principles of classism and exploitation. The goal of any socialist regime worthy of the name would be to devise a way to surgically eliminate that element while preserving the freedom for self-determination and individuality that comes with economic independence.

In my own work, that goal is met by the abolition of the form of rent. The form of rent is the particular facet of capitalism that allows one to make money from ownership without relinquishing the rights of ownership. It is, in my opinion, the “Pandora’s box” of capitalism, through which all the evils enter. Without the form of rent, especially manifest in profit, interest, and rent, capitalism ceases to be exploitative, and without its exploitative element, capitalism isn’t capitalism at all. In Wood’s understanding capitalism is the exploitation of labor without direct political means; so, no exploitation, no capitalism. No matter whatever elements of capitalism remain, including private property and markets, without the form of rent it ceases to be capitalist and becomes, for lack of a better term, libertarian socialism.

When are Cops Heroes?

June 13, 2020 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert

I rewatched Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 the other night, after seeing the sequel. My thoughts had been hovering on a PoliceLivesMatter bumper sticker I saw slapped to the back of a stop sign that day when I sat down to watch superheroes. This got me to thinking about superheroes and real heroes and what heroes are, philosophy. What the hell is a hero anyway? I know I’m not the first philosopher to ask the question. That was probably Aristotle while examining the ethics of bravery. But my thoughts went to Peter A. French, a contemporary expert in the realm of moral philosophy and responsibility.

In the eleventh chapter of his book Responsibility Matters, French examines the role heroism plays in moral action. Who is the moral hero? What does it take to be a moral hero? French draws the archetype of the modern hero as the comic book superhero, but he is quick to denounce this iconography. The superhero is superhuman, and thus a terrible model for the moral hero. Like the Nietzschean Übermensch that they descend from, the superhero’s abilities place them outside the moral rules for mere mortals, placing them beyond good and evil. The morality of the superhero is simpler, easier, more straight-forward, black and white, and immediately obvious. Worse, it lacks all nuance. It does not require thinking or compassion or sacrifice. It is authoritarian and comes down upon mortals from above. Like gods before them, the superheroes simply know right from wrong. When they deal out death, their vaulted place above mortals makes their decisions right, in the sense that might always makes right, since to question it is to bring unstoppable violence upon one’s self. One is entirely vulnerable in the presence of the demi-god or superhero.

Police officers, it should noted, are not demi-gods. Unlike most superheroes, the men and women of law-enforcement suffer from the pangs of mortality: they are ignorant, fearful, prejudiced, and self-interested.

French names four conditions he feels are necessary for heroism. The first is that the hero defining actions must intend a “morally desirable end” (113). For example, winning the Super Bowl is not morally relevant, and thus those players that struggle long and hard to achieve that end, even when successful, are not heroes. The second is that a heroic action must involve risk to the hero and the hero must be aware of that risk (114). Superman is not a hero for charging into a room full of armed bank robbers because their weapons cannot hurt him. The third is that the risk to life or limb or property or others is not being undertaken in the spirit of sport, that is the hero doesn’t gamble for fun (114). The hero’s motives must be fixed on the “morally desirable end” and not a risk for risk’s sake. The fourth and final condition is that “the hero’s intention to help others must be proportional to his or her sacrifice” (115). It may be a moral good to save someone some money at the cash register, but risking one’s life to do so is not heroic; it’s foolish.

Heroism, French explains, is not a duty, it is exceptional (116-119). Nor would we want it otherwise. French identifies a tension between society and its heroes that makes heroes both necessary and a threat to the common good (120). This tension tips sometimes this way and sometimes that. But French claims and I agree, that for the last several decades the tension in the US has shifted away from heroes. “We teach rules, not lives”, he writes; “[t]he turn towards litigation in the last thirty years has produced cowardly rule followers who maintain only minimum standards of moral behavior” (121). Heroism has been overshadowed by celebrity and “Courage has lost ground to security” (121). French concludes this chapter by arguing that “Ideals must be exemplified, principles made incarnate… In the end, it does not matter whether the heroes we try to replicate are real or fictional. What matters is that the heroes held before our collective consciousness are emulatable personifications of the virtues on which the flourishing of a good society depends” (121).

But what about the superheroes of Guardians Vol. 1. In that movie, none of the Guardians start as moral heroes. Star-Lord is a thief and roguish womanizer. Gamora is a ruthless assassin. Groot and Rocket are petty bounty-hunters. And Drax the Destroyer is in prison for mass murder. Not exactly the stuff moral heroes are made of. After forming a loose confederacy to sell a stolen orb for inordinate money, things go downhill quick for these non-heroes–morally and physically. After the story arc reaches its nadir, each of the characters comes to have a singular moment. In this moment the individual character finds him or her or it-self in a decisive situation. It is an opportunity both for self-sacrifice and towards a “morally desirable end”, a giving over of your one’s self to something greater and better. After Gamora realizes that the “orb” contains a planet-devastating weapon, she decides not to sell it and even to fight the powerful forces that seek to have it, in order to protect the lives of strangers. Nevertheless, the orb is taken and Gamora left for dead. Star-Lord then risks his life and gives up his freedom to Yondu (who wants to kill him at this point) in order to save Gamora from death. Drax–after summoning his enemy and endangering everyone in an ultimately doomed revenge attempt–comes to admit his weaknesses and place trust and value in his friends. Groot denies Rocket, demanding that they attempt to save Star-Lord and Gamora from Yondu despite the fact that there is no profit in it for them. Many of these transformations are done to comic effect, but nevertheless, the heroism feels pretty real.

Each self-sacrifice makes the next self-sacrifice easier. The transformative value of self-sacrifice that turns mortals into heroes culminates in the greatest moment of decision, when the group decides to attempt to stop the villain Ronin–now in possession of the ultimate weapon–despite the fact that this likely means death. All agree to the suicide mission. The last hold-out, Rocket, eventually finds his place as a hero as he leads the defense of the planet from the kamikaze attacks of Ronin’s forces. So that at the end of the movie, when Star-Lord has taken hold of the infinity stone (from the orb), which no mortal may touch, the group does not hesitate. They reach out to him, standing with him, sacrificing their individual selves to strengthen the group, because doing so is what is right. Each act of self-sacrifice has made each character–little by little–into a moral hero. Their acts do not go unrecognized. The heroes are not “rewarded” for their heroism; they are appreciated for it. They become the realization of the best of us, the ideal made flesh.

The Guardians are heroes because the challenges they faced were life-threatening, aimed at a moral good, but most importantly, they chose to self-sacrifice in full knowledge of these facts. They are instructive because we can see how anyone, even the worst criminals, can become moral heroes. However, an act of heroism is just that, a single instant. To be a hero, this moral action must become sustained. It is not enough to do a good deed in a life of bad ones. Heroism must be more than blip. The Guardians will surely go on, but they can never return to who they were when they started, or if they do, renounce their status as heroes.

So what about the real-life heroes? Does this moral logic apply to them? At first blush, we can imagine that the police are heroes because putting on the shield is understood to entail risking one’s life for the good of society. Police risk something in order to achieve a better world. But French, following Kant, argues that heroism is not a moral duty. And merely being a police officer is not a moral duty: a role one inhabits that may carry risk. The job itself is honorable and noble coextensively with its purpose being bent toward justice, but the job is not heroic. Police do not “put their lives on the line for us every day” as the bumper-sticker argument assures. Most days the lives of police officers are in no more jeopardy than an average citizen. And, as it turns out, in far less jeopardy than many vulnerable populations. Thus French’s second condition of heroism is not being met most of the time by most of the officers. In fact, police departments have been very complicit in giving up ground from courage to security. Officer training procedures emphasize the value of officer’s lives at the price of justice. Equipment, from police cruisers to bullet-proof vests to riot gear to arming police with everything up-to and including deadly weapons are under the pretense of protecting officers’ lives. The heroism of self-sacrifice is becoming less and less a part of the job. Shooting first and finding out if it’s justified later is increasingly the rule.

Police use guns to protect themselves not anyone else. If to be a hero is to brave death in order to see that justice prevails then some acts of self-protection violate this moral status. Again these opportunities are relatively rare, even for police. But when they occur, officers always have a choice: protect themselves first or uphold justice first. Kant held the first solution to be a moral duty, thus it is not heroic to protect oneself. Everyone should protect themselves all the time, but self-sacrifice in the name of justice demands we abandon our moral duty for something higher than ourselves. And it must become a habit. Justice must come first in every action of a police officer for us to call that or any officer a hero. Bravery does not come from self-protection, it comes from risk so that justice is carried out.

If this were all that was going on, then we could say that we live in a world where law-enforcement is simply made-up of a great deal of decent folk, a splotch of rotten apples, with maybe a small sprinkling of heroes. Fair-enough! But this is not all that is going on. Police are routinely killing citizens, many of whom aren’t much of threat or any at all. This turns the tables completely around. If self-sacrifice in the name of justice makes one a hero, this sort of over-blown self-protection that sacrifices justice should be condemned as cowardice. And it goes without saying that cowardice is no defense against murder. Anyone who kills because they believed they were under threat although they weren’t, or they were angry, or they had their pride wounded, or they were insulted, or were meant to deal with harsh words, in other words, those who cannot exercise restraint when restraint is what is due are disgraces to the uniform.

Officer Wilson’s execution of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO was an act of cowardice, if not of crime. He did his job, just the way he was trained. He violated no laws, and yet he acted with injustice. This is the heart of the complaint that BlackLivesMatter represents. Not Wilson or any other individual, but that police departments nationwide put little to no value on justice.

Please, do not misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting it’s a problem for the police to protect themselves. By all means, police have a right to self-defense. And it will be tested by them more than others. It’s part of the job, and as long as it is in keeping with the name of justice it is acceptable. What is not acceptable is the fact that cowardice seems to be an instillation in the modern police culture. Officers are trained to be cowards, not heroes. Trained to react on prejudices and fears, rather than staying cool. The police can take a (white) mass-murdering gunman alive. Someone known to be armed, someone who has shot at police, and maybe killed one. If that is a possibility, it is a possibility for every single incident police have to face. How embarrassingly cowardly then does it appear to shoot an unarmed (black) boy?

And it’s so pervasive it’s fueling a rebellion. Putting on the shield doesn’t automatically make you a hero, but following your police training, following the rules, certainly seems to be making police cowards. Saying black lives matter is not saying that police lives don’t, but police are expected to uphold justice, even at the cost of their lives.

It is allegiance to justice above life, above liberty, above all else that makes the police something more than a violent gang pursuing their self-interests. I believe the job of police deserves respect; the task we charge them with is not easy, but respect for individuals is earned. This systemic cowardice should not be tolerated by the police and the cowards should be drummed out of the force. No union should defend them, and I say that as a socialist. The union should have a clear cut line on this issue of brutality, negligence, and conduct. Individuals who cross it are on their own. Neither should the courts grant immunity to any of these acts. Immunity, after all, is meant to guard civil servants from frivolous legal actions, and accusations of homicide and police brutality are never frivolous.

Like being a hero, it is little moments, little decisions, that over and over again make the next one a little easier. To be worthy of respect police must put themselves second to justice in every decision. In order to do that, they must know what justice is. What it looks like. How it feels. It is not the law. Even where the law and justice are in perfect harmony, it is not the law. Justice is above the law. The law aspires towards it. I don’t know if police training teaches cops to consider what justice is so that they can put it above themselves and by so doing earn the respect of heroes. Police have the monopoly on violence, the discretion to hurt and kill, and when enacting justice is not the primary concern of police, they fail in their responsibility to everyone.

Finally, I want to end this by circling around again to where we began: with superheroes. There is one, interestingly mortal, who ought to serve as the example for all police: the Batman. Perhaps because Batman is mortal, with no extraordinary powers, he is one of the few superheroes to live by a strict code of conduct. His code does not permit him to deliver death to anyone, and neither does he deal with guilt or innocence. He is the moral opposite of the Punisher, a terrible, if frequent, role-model for police to emulate. Batman very simply and very shrewdly tries to minimize harm for everyone, including himself lastly. He does not kill, he does not hurt, in fact, he risks his own life to protect the lives of the dastardly supervillains he tries to apprehend, putting them before himself. To a coward, this would be foolish, to a hero it is perfection. The Punisher is not a hero, but Batman is, and is precisely because he puts justice above all else.

The Political Architecture of Democratic Libertarian Socialism, Part 3

July 8, 2019July 8, 2019 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics

In this third part of my series on the political architecture of democratic libertarian socialism, I hope to articulate and resolve some practical questions. It would be impossible to nail down every question or even all the important theoretical and pragmatic questions in this short work, but addressing a few should provide enough of a sketch that my readers should glimpse an image of the final portrait.

So far I have argued that a libertarian socialist democracy would require organizing its populations into small deliberative bodies of a hundred or fewer people. These political communities would form the basic democratic units, be responsible for the legislative decision-making at all scales of politics, elect representatives to govern and report the activity of government back to them, and finally demarcate particular zones of enforcement of laws at different scales in the form of jurisdictions.

This is all well and good in theory, but how does it work in reality. Obviously, there is no way to inductively determine the best procedures on all counts. However, we may abductively suggest some procedures that would keep with our libertarian socialist ideals. The first question we must address would be, who counts? We have already determined that individuals do not count by themselves as political units and that the smallest democratic unit is the community. But the community is made up of a certain number of individuals. So, who counts as an individual? It might be tempting to say everyone, but this is misleading. Do we mean newborn children? Invalids? The insane? Criminals? “Everyone” may be an unwise policy. I think, what we want are humans of a certain age, who have not demonstrated a tendency to abuse others, and are in reasonably good mental health. But what age? What kind of abuse? What good mental health?

The concern with children is two-fold. First, at what point have they become wise enough to direct their own affairs and partially the affairs of others, and second, this being a voluntary political architecture, how do they affirm the rules they live under. As children have the prevailing tendency to become adults, so do they have the tendency to go from not counting to counting or to put it another way, from being mere persons in a jurisdiction to citizens of a community in that jurisdiction. Whatever the education process a community chooses, political education must be mandatory for the health of a democratic society. Children should be involved at every level of the deliberative process, even if they are denied a voice and a vote until a mature age. Their participation should evolve in stages. Perhaps, say, at ten they watch the younger children, and at fifteen they begin to be allowed to speak to their communities about what they think on certain matters. At age twenty, I imagine, they would become full members with all the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.

The hegemonic aspect of any dominate political architecture would seem to overcome the voluntary nature of individual affirmation. We can’t restart the whole system every year for the sake of children’s voluntary affirmation. However, we might incorporate a revolutionary element in the laws themselves, which would allow them to require periodic reaffirmation, say once every five, ten, twenty-five, or one hundred years. Laws that are basically universally accepted would only need a reaffirmation vote every hundred years, and the vote total could be lower for affirmations. Were as lower order laws may need to be affirmed more frequently. If a law is ever not affirmed it would be considered repealed.

Criminals offer a different challenge. Having forsaken the laws of the society they are proven untrustworthy in politics. Yet they too deserve a voice. The question of how to treat criminals is also two-fold: first, punitive and second, rehabilitative. To be stripped of your voice and your vote in a truly democratic society is to be stripped of your right to self-government, and so your autonomy. You become a pawn at the whims of others, and is a strong, although not an extreme, form of punishment. It seems a fitting and sufficient punishment that lawbreakers lose their power to be lawmakers. On the other hand, the punishment must not be permanent or even long-lasting, for, without recourse to restoration, criminals would quickly become a permanent underclass of non-political citizens; such people are easily exploited and if the interests serve the majority, criminals can be easily created. This punishment is the only punishment criminals should receive. The prohibition on voting must be finite for every crime and last no longer than the rehabilitative element. Also, it should be noted that the vote of the criminal is neither cast nor counted. It would be unfair to let their community count them as though they voted.

What remains of criminal elements should be handled in a rehabilitative and restorative manner. The goal of the former is to prevent repeat offense while the goal of the latter is to restore to the victim what can be restored. Obviously, there are limits on both of these, but the goal of a criminal justice system must be the bringing back of both the criminal and the victim. This prevents turning the criminal justice system into a defacto slave system for society justified by the fact that these people are lawbreakers. Therefore the state has a vested interest in not allowing convicted criminals to work for any reason. The guaranteed income established by the principles of libertarian socialism would suffice to meet their needs, but no labor can be extracted from them voluntarily while they are under the authority of the justice system and any labor arrangement entered into involuntarily amounts to a form of slavery.

Finally, the sick and invalid present us with dangerous political waters to navigate. Be sure here, I do not mean removing voting rights from disabled persons. What I have in mind here is more or less permanently incapacitated. Anyone who can communicate in any manner is capable of casting a vote and so ought to be allowed. Surely those who cannot speak out for themselves simply won’t, but should their votes still count? Does a community have the right to count citizens who for health reasons cannot represent their own interests? I think not. The greater danger here is that of exploitation of the “votes” of the invalid would give a minority undue legislative power. Now, how a vote is counted can be determined by the community, a nod or a thumbs up or a spoken word or even blinking twice might all count. This would hopefully clamp down on the desire to have people removed from the rolls as invalids while keeping their political power for the community.

Mental health may represent the greatest hazard. The other question is what about those who are so mentally gone that they cannot think rationally. I’m disinclined to restrict their vote unless they are incapable of joining a community. This community standard, the ability to interact with others is crucial to a free and democratic society. Those who are a danger to themselves and others or simply incapable of communicating intelligibly, must not count politically. At any point, if they can join a community then obviously their vote would count the same as any other person.

After knowing who counts, we need to establish the process whereby votes determine laws in this political architecture. The basic unit of democracy is the community and not the individual. Thus, laws should be elected by the number of communities that approve them in a given jurisdiction, but we need to also understand how votes are counted. One problem our distinction between individuals who are not democratic units and communities that are is that we must determine if individual voices are being silenced by the political architecture itself. I do not mean here that voices are being silenced by other individuals in the community, but that the method of counting votes is somehow unfair, e.g. gerrymandering in current election systems.

Let us take the following example as illustrative of the potential problems that would need to be addressed: Image three communities, where community A has 100 members, community B has 50 members and community C has 40 members. Further, imagine that the municipality has split on an issue. These three communities are the deciding vote. Let’s say that A rejects the motion but B and C favor it. If we count votes by the smallest democratic unit, then the motion passes, in this case, two to one. But if we count by individuals we can see that the motion doesn’t pass, 100 to 90. How we decide to count votes then will determine the outcome in this case.

The problem with counting votes per community, as we see above, is that communities vary in size, and it would be disenfranchising to the number of individuals inside a larger community to have their votes equaled to those in a smaller community. This is similar to the problem with the electoral college in the contemporary United States. The easy solution would be to count community votes as either for or against but give them the relative strength of the total membership of the community’s individuals. In the above example, the motion would not have passed because there would have been 100 votes against but only 90 for. Inside each community, the total votes of the community would be up for grabs. If community A voted 49 for and 51 against, while community B voted 49 for and 1 against and community C voted 39 for and 1 against, the result would be 100 against and 90 for, and this despite the individual votes being 53 against and 137 for. This is because communities are the basic unit of democracy, and so they speak univocally. However, the communities strength is relative to their numbers.

But what of those who don’t want to participate? We have incentivized them, yes, but should we force them? Well, one more addition to the political architecture will ensure their participation whether or not they are actually there: every vote of the membership is counted, whether or not you cast your vote or not. For example, let’s say a community of seventy members votes 38 for to 22 against on a measure. The measure will get seventy votes for it, even though only sixty actual votes were cast. The community has spoken and that “community” speaks with the voice of seventy people.

Requiring communities to speak with one voice will occasionally cause doubtless disenfranchising to some voters. However, this disenfranchisement does something positive for society as a whole by avoiding a particularly thorny “prisoner’s dilemma”. How do you encourage participation among everyone, which is vital to the supposedly voluntary nature of this political architecture? Those who show up to communities where the votes are determined univocally, make decisions for all in the community, but only those in the arena of community politics will get to decide for others. This action level is anarchistic. Those who choose not to participate by not attending or abstaining from voting are in reality allowing the other members of their community to cast their vote for them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as long as an individual understands that that is what they are doing, and it establishes the universal affirmation of legislation required by libertarian principles.

This creates an interest in people to participate if they want their actual opinions heard. Showing up allows for the exchange of information, fosters discussion and debate, encourages seeing other perspectives, and a host of other deliberative goods. Were votes to be counted individually, as in a pure democracy, then there would be no need to deliberate with one’s political peers, and one could make all political decisions in isolation, forming idiosyncratic opinions, bereft of relationship knowledge. In short, it would be to make individuals the basic unit of democracy, which I have already argued is not possible. This point is worth hammering on. The individual is incapable of rendering a judgment about the society outside the context of their group. They simply can’t understand their own needs or the responsibilities of others, and so could not make good judgments about political issues. The community helps to spread those subjective prejudices out, force them into open dialogue, and then and only then allows a univocal decision. The univocal decision is necessary to put the individual in a place to participate. Democracies work best, indeed, they only work at all, when the overwhelming majority of the citizens participate.

That said, the disenfranchisement is a problem, however, it can be slightly mitigated in two ways. The first mitigating circumstance has already been established for other reasons previously: our political architecture does not require a mere majority vote to carry the day, it requires a supermajority significant enough to overcome most objections to ensure victory. In the above example, 55% approval would be required to pass the law, so that if the numbers were reversed and community A was for the measure while B and C were against it (assuming these three communities made up the total municipality) the measure would not pass. This is the conservative aspect of government, preserving freedom and ensuring a great deal of voluntary support at high scales.

A second mitigating circumstance is possible if we set a minimum on the number of members a community could have. I have previously suggested that the number of members in a community be capped at one hundred, but perhaps I should make a few modifications. First, let me ask if a minimum number is necessary? The real reason for the discord between the three communities in the above example is their relative sizes. This example was chosen precisely to bring out this peculiarity. The feeling that one’s vote doesn’t count comes as a reflection of the scale of the arena, so that difference between the highest and lowest possible membership reflects the number of voters whose voice can be discounted. For example, were the minimum members in a community two and the maximum one hundred, then it would be possible for a form of democratic gerrymandering where groups split to form separate communities in order to have their way. In general, there is nothing wrong with this, but its effect must be limited by creating relative equality between all communities, in other words, we need to set a minimum and maximum that are relatively close together. This should help to minimize the damage in communities, the only place where such division between univocal decisions and numeric strength is allowed. Pragmatically, I would recommend a minimum of fifty members and then change our maximum from one hundred down to ninety-nine, so that upon the addition of a hundredth member, the group splits into two separate communities of fifty. With these numbers, the largest number of individuals that could be disenfranchised at the most actionable level would be forty-nine.

Now scaling up, the only thing that changes is the required percentage of the population to pass the measure and the number of communities participating in the vote. We might ask what if no one in the whole community votes, then that community has simply abstained. Communities themselves can, of course, set quorums if they wish to abstain, so that if less than half of the community members vote, the result is abstinence. This is their right as the basic democratic unit. And there are of course other hurdles to overcome; most notably, how do we get from here to there. Whatever transition we might take, it will be chaotic and anxiety-provoking. I’m not sure there is a right answer here. But I have faith that such a thing may be managed by the numerous talented persons who make up this world.

In the next part of this series, I will go beyond the legislative and explore some of the issues of practical governance this political architecture must deal with.

The Political Architecture of Democratic Libertarian Socialism, Part 2

June 27, 2019June 26, 2019 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics

In the first part of this series, I developed the idea that a democratic libertarian socialist political architecture would be necessarily voluntary, deliberative, consist of political units of fewer than one hundred individuals, and would require representatives to scale up. At the end of part 1, I listed some potential problems with this scaling process. I break these problems into two main types: the jurisdiction problem and the representation problem. In this second part of the series, I will address these two problems.

The Jurisdiction Problem

The question of jurisdiction centers on the freedom of individuals to conduct their lives as they see fit. If all individuals have the right to live as they like and any two individuals disagree, by what process can a decision between them be made? This being a democratic libertarian socialist state, as opposed to an anarchist one, the right to retain private property is still a viable option for settling disputes, as long as the conditions of use and labor that justify exclusion are met. Private property then successfully solves the problem and given the two conditions of use and guaranteed income we avoid exploitation through it. The decision goes to the owner on principle, in fact, that is what it means to be an owner, you get to decide how and when a thing is used.

The problem persists in joint property and in public property, however. We must ask how people set rules about, for example, littering on a public street, without violating the rights of the individuals who did not explicitly agree not to litter on that street? Voluntary society seems highly susceptible to collapse into petty sovereignties. A principle of jurisdiction could solve this problem, but this must include some amount of tyranny. It is my hope that we can devise a jurisdictional principle that would mitigate the tyrannical effect to the greatest extent possible so that people would voluntarily agree to subject themselves to the rule of others out of respect for the autonomy of those others and so preserve their own autonomy in their own sphere.

Jurisdiction, as it is generally construed, concerns what relationships count as politically relevant enough that people have the right to create rules in their sphere of action with the effect of restricting the freedoms of those who enter it. At base, we need to know what makes an association of people a body politic empowered to self-govern. Is a relationship between enemies politically relevant? What about business partners? Or geographically distant close friends? The answer is that they all could be, but none necessarily are. Such categories of identity and relationships are too subjective to be useful here and should be replaced with spheres of action. As the individual must be in touch with their own interests they must be in touch with the interests of those who make up their basic democratic unit as well. Their decisions will impact that unit more than any other units. Therefore, those who have the greatest chance for proximal interaction have the greatest concern with each other’s behaviors. Alternative forms of interaction are all less effective. Interactions through media, for example, are always shaped by the media itself and thus constitute a less direct, less effective, and so less politically relevant form of relationship. Political relationships need to be local enough to present direct physical interaction, but not necessarily externally defined. A geographic feature, such as a river or a mountain range, might well divide one political area from another, but this should be because the feature genuinely affects the locality of the individuals who inhabit the body. The building of a bridge or a tunnel could effectively change the political jurisdiction. So, while it may be possible for a community to straddle opposite sides of the globe, it’s very, very unlikely; and even if it is the case, it is more unlikely still that so greatly separated peoples should remain a small scale political unity for long.

Whether a person inhabits a place or is merely visiting is an important question. Those who set down roots seem entitled to a say in that sphere of action, precisely because it is theirs, but those who are just there for a weekend, don’t. Caution must be exercised at this point in any government claiming to be a voluntary association, as a rule affects all (persons), not just those who decided upon it (citizens). If the citizens of a given area enact a biased rule that favors themselves over minorities and non-citizens, this is the worst tyranny and is easily accomplished despite a principle of equality before the law. This tyranny is simply unacceptable and must be mitigated in the name of a just society. James Madison dealt with this problem of faction by allowing larger spheres of action to supersede lower ones. We see this in the United States when the constitution makes lower laws void. A city cannot, for example, enact slavery statues because it is illegal at a larger sphere of action. Madison’s solution, however, suffers the major drawback that each sphere is governed by representatives and it becomes all too easy for wealthy and powerful factions to capture the higher spheres for themselves. Something that Madison thought would be highly improbable.

Although locality makes up an important part of the basis for determining jurisdiction, it is also not limited to a specific externally marked domain. Political boundaries at the scale of the community are nearly fluid and correspond neatly to the areas directly inhabited by their members. This is the most voluntary form of government. It is at the municipal level that the need for defined jurisdiction covering spaces not privately owned enters the political architecture. These public and quasi-public spaces cover areas frequented by the members of several communities but not necessarily wholly bound inside their combined private property. In other words, the laws of a community apply only to the members of the community themselves, they have no jurisdiction beyond the community members and their property. The community is purely voluntary and as close to completely anarchist (at least for adults) as possible. Municipalities, on the other hand, govern several communities at once. The bounds of the municipality must somehow designate which communities are a part of the municipality for terms of voting and where the laws set down by these collective communities are applied. This is the first scale at which laws must be written down and publicly posted and where the law applies beyond the citizens of the jurisdiction. The municipality is the smallest unit of government and law and most likely sphere for tyranny. It is also the most flexible, allowing for the greatest diversity of relationships and laws, biases, and individuality. As with Madison, every scale above the municipality works similarly and each one’s laws would bind the ones below it so that a county that forbids a thing binds all municipalities in that county to forbid it as well.

Here is precisely were democratic libertarian socialist values clash with anarchist ones. For this is where voluntary agreement first begins to drift off. To see this, let’s ask the question: must all who enter a municipality be bound by the laws of the municipality, whether or not they are members of it? Let us say that the members of a municipality unanimously decide to forbid the spitting of chewing gum on the sidewalk. Let us further say that you are a visitor to this municipality who did not and would not have the opportunity to vote on this particular issue. Must you follow the rules of the municipality and not spit your gum on the sidewalk despite having never agreed to this rule? This example highlights a clash of values in libertarianism itself. Does one group, when imposing its rules on its sphere of action, have the right to impose those rules on non-members of the group in their territory? Libertarianism places a value on the voluntary agreement to rules in order to be legitimate but at the same time allows people the freedom to set their own rules. The solution to this apparent paradox is recognizing that all visitors have agreed to the rules establishing how laws get passed in each place and that inherent in that agreement is the agreement to respect the laws set down by others in their own jurisdictions. In other words, like Madison’s solution, there is an agreement at a higher scale which supersedes the lower disagreement. The problem with this solution, as with Madison’s, is that of capture which allows political tyranny.

To prevent capture, I offer a two-part solution. First, individuals must have both a jurisdiction of their own and at the same time alternatives jurisdictions to enter should they wholly disagree with the rules they are subject to. If one is a visitor, one is free to simply not visit. However, for citizens, relocation offers less of a solution. As a citizen, one has a voice in a given jurisdiction, and could simply try to prevent laws. One might not always be able to escape the biases of a group through the vote though, and if one resides in the area, getting up and leaving, while an option, is not always economically advantageous or feasible. Fleeing a jurisdiction is easily accomplished at the community scale where it most likely would not even involve a move. But higher scales bring increasingly greater difficulties to this method of preserving one’s liberty.

This is the reason we need a second part to this solution: higher percentages of popular support must be required to establish a law at larger scales. Rather than force people to relocate to communities that are ideologically homogeneous, we could instead raise the bar for passing laws in correlation with the scale of the jurisdiction it would affect. The goal would be to equally allow groups to create laws governing conduct in their spheres of action and at the same time protect dissent. As stated above, a biased community rule is easily escapable by simply changing communities if you so strongly disagree. A higher order law, however, is more difficult and so should require greater assent to pass. And so on, with each scale up requiring more affirmation. The ability of the large jurisdictions to supersede the lower ones would still have the desired effect as Madison envisioned. However, the ability to capture the larger spheres of action would become increasingly difficult, since the percentage required to secure a decision would change in inverse proportion to the scale of its effect.

Practically, we might imagine that at the smallest level, the community, a simple majority is all that is required to pass a rule. At the highest level, universally, we might require something extreme, like the assent of 95% of the population, to pass this entirely inescapable legislation. The scales between would be higher or lower accordingly. A municipality could require only 55% of its population to affirm a law before it passes, whereas a county may require 60%, a territory 65%, a district 70%, a nation 75%, and hemisphere of the globe 80%. This architecture will result in the majority of laws existing at the smallest scales of government and thus applying only to a few people; at the bottom, only those who voted for them. Only overwhelmingly agreed upon laws would exist at the greatest scales. This is the best that can be done for dissident without allowing minority dictatorship over the majority population.

This solution, however, presents a further challenge. What happens to a person who dissents from the social order? What happens to the minority vote? And while we’re at it, how does one become a community member? These questions are all related to the idea of who counts, which I’ll deal with later, but for right now, let me focus on what recourse persons have in a system they disagree with. The problem is more concrete if we take any social norm that is rather one-sided as an example. Genocide might be an easy one. What would happen if you lived in a community who condoned genocide even though you reject it? Well, first you could leave the community. All individuals are political beings, and so all individuals must belong to a community. But you are free to choose your community to some extent. If you choose to leave a community, it would be necessary for you to be accepted by another. However, it can never be acceptable for a community to eject one of its members. Members may leave voluntarily or die, but they must not be removed. The ability to leave allows members who do not wish to live under certain laws the freedom to take refuge elsewhere. At the municipal level and above, this may involve physical relocation. The costs of which will have to be weighed against the strength of the individual’s beliefs. But we can very quickly see that the greater the scale, the more implausible this “freedom” becomes, and it is indubitably the case that without the actual opportunity for leaving no freedom exists.

It seems clear that any democratic libertarian socialist political architecture must be directly democratic at some point. The above assumes a directly democratic legislature, although not a directly democratic executive or judicial government. Dissent is healthy and should not be immediately suppressed, but at the same time, a large majority has a right to live how they choose and not under the anarchist tyranny of the minority veto. This compromise between our respective interests seems to offer us the best of these mutually exclusive positions.

Before we move on, I want to say a word on what a community can do to discipline its members for non-compliance. There will always be those who are disruptive and whose disruptions are either apolitical or simply criminal. For example, one may remain in a community and break the law merely to do so. Given that other avenues for dissent are available this member of the community is simply breaking the rules to break the rules. This is no less tyranny than usurping a political system to disenfranchising others or seizing power. The obvious manner for stopping such activity is to expressly forbid it by law and treat offenders in the customary manner, whatever form that takes. But if the behavior does not quite constitute a violation of the law, for example, something both disrespectful and disruptive but still within the bounds of political speech, the community must take care not to ostracize the member(s). However, they do not have to listen. A de facto excommunication may be acceptable whereas de jure excommunication is not. As long as the member is still allowed to speak and still allowed to vote and have their vote counted, a community is free to ignore them.

The Representation Problem

I want to return now to the issue of representation. In the first part of this series, I showed how the mere inclusion of representatives endangers the entire political architecture of democracy making it a de facto oligarchy or monarchy. What we need to prevent this is to devise an architecture that would not allow unauthorized power to slide into the representative’s hands. The first thing we have to do is understand exactly what the role of representatives is in a truly democratic government. So, let’s begin by recalling that the need for representatives doesn’t enter the picture until the scale of the municipality. As I said, communities are basic democratic units, anarchist in nature, and so do not require an internal representative. Thus, we only need representation to organized political bodies beyond our communities, viz. municipalities, counties, territories, districts, nations and universal. Representatives then are charged with carrying out the community’s bidding in its relations to other communities and relating the desires of other communities to the represented community.

We still face the problem of where the community may not be able to determine their own “bidding” explicitly or charge in a direct and personal manner their representative with the task of carrying it out. At the same time, the “representative” may just carry out their own bidding in the name of the community they represent. Ensuring the link between the will of the group and its representative is our task. To do this will require more–not less–political architecture. It would be instructive to revisit the separation of powers theory, represented by the branches of government, viz. the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. I argued above that it is the communities themselves, as the basic units of democracy, that should legislate directly. Let me add here that the communities should act as legislators at all scales of politics. This is important for representation because it takes away the power of the representative to volunteer their constituency’s voice or sell their vote without consent.

This locus of the legislative action in the community is essential to democracy. Legislative power cannot be delegated without changing the political architecture from democracy to something else. The representative’s role in wielding legislative power should be limited to functionary duties, e.g. preparing language, conducting votes, entering decisions, codifying laws, etc. Perhaps representatives may decide which laws to vote on and at what time, but such legislative authority should mark the utmost extreme end of their power to influence legislation. This is all that can be done to satisfy Edmund Burke’s admonition that representatives exercise their individual conscience rather than mindlessly following the uninformed opinions of their constituents. It is the legislative branch of government that belongs to the people and must remain directly with the people if the polity is to be considered democratic.

However, this is not true of executive and judicial power. These important roles can be delegated with particular structuring, so that a small minority may perform the function of governing, but do so without ruling. The role of representatives in government should then be largely limited to overseeing executive and judicial functions, such as the hiring and firing of administrators and judges and making of policy respecting the administration of law, but never, under any circumstances, the enactment or repeal of law itself.

Another duty of representatives is maintaining the flow of information. It is perhaps the most vital role of representatives to act as the eyes and ears of a community so that it may confront the issues of the day from an informed position. Obviously, information may come from other sources, but representatives, as they act in higher and higher scales, have access to the most direct information available. In other words, it is not just the role of the representative to serve as the voice of the represented, but as the voice of the government to the represented, empowering them with the information they need to make good decisions. They are an important pivot point between a community and all the greater scales of politics. The worst representatives will hide information from their constituents in an attempt to manipulate the situation how they think it ought to be handled. Trustworthiness will, therefore, be the most vital characteristic to consider in the election of a community’s representative. To guard against manipulation, a democratic architecture should require that all government activities be public.

How should representatives be selected at each scale? There are various schools of thought on this, but I favor election at the smallest scales. Each community should elect, with a simple majority vote, it’s representative to a municipal council. Each municipal councilor should elect, at the determination of the community they represent, their representatives to the county council. Beyond the county level, it’s hard to know who to trust. All candidates desire power as no one runs for offices who do not. However, a solution is available if we simply remove elections at this point. The territorial council and beyond could all be appointed by the drawing of lots from the pool of current county councilors in good standing.

Why introduce a chance here? Precisely because it checks overwhelming political ambition. We can still ensure that we are getting good people into office by additionally requiring that only those who have been elected to a county council more than one time are eligible for higher offices. We can also restrict the term of office to a single six-year period; along with the prohibition on being selected for more than one term at any particular appointed scale. Those representatives who are elected should be reelected frequently, say every two years, but could, of course, serve many terms up to some reasonable limit; say, a maximum of six terms. This will assure us that even if some rather bad apples get into positions of power, they needn’t be suffered indefinitely. Additionally, a list of impeachable offenses should be made into law that would allow the recall of anyone who abused their position. And any representative, even an appointed one should be recallable by their represented lower scale. Appointments would have a voluntary component, no one would be forced to serve and may resign at any time. And the vacancies could easily be filled by another round of elections or selections.

In its most abstract terms, the representatives of the communities serve as their surrogate in the daily administration of self-government.

In part three, I will attempt to flesh out the bare bones of this political architecture by exploring some of the more pragmatic considerations democratic libertarian socialism must confront.

The Political Architecture of Democratic Libertarian Socialism, Part 1

June 21, 2019June 17, 2019 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Philosophy, Politics, Social Responsibility

Introduction

In this series of posts, I will discuss aspects of political architecture consistent with democratic libertarian socialism. My purpose is to attempt to rationally plan a functioning democracy in relation to libertarian socialist ideals. This is counter to most libertarian socialism which is generally understood to be anarchist. What I will not be doing in this series is arguing why democratic libertarian socialism is superior to anarchist libertarian socialism. Neither will I be making the argument for libertarian socialism as a socio-economic system which I have done numerously elsewhere in different ways on this blog; e.g. here, here, here, and here. Also, see my prize-winning essay on the subject.

To keep with libertarian ideology, the structure I plan will be a limited state, voluntarily justified in the places it is coercive, and run on principle and law. The goal is to protect each other from the abuse of power that comes with a community by structuring the power, through principles, in such a manner that it cannot be overwhelmingly coopted. See my post on the different kinds of political discourse in philosophy for a more about the goal of political architectures.

The point of this post is not to decide on a method of political activity, nor to find a method of resolving political disputes, but merely to ask how do we best organize ourselves into political structures as to maintain relative economic equality and liberty. I want to ignore the battle between monarchy and democracy, loosely defined, as over and done with; democracy I hold to be the clear favorite. However, democracy by its very nature comes in a multitude of configurations; from indirect republics, plutocracies, and aristocracies to more direct tribal democracy, congregations, contractual alliances and–at the bottom–simple friendships between individuals. The division I just drew stands in need of explanation, for the former represent larger forms of democracy, scaled all the way up as it were; while the latter tend to represent the smaller forms scaled down to the deliberative decision-making of individuals. Both scales have their positives and negatives. The large scale allows for mass action that generates truly miraculous feats, irrespective of whether those feats are right or wrong. The problem is that it is very hard to get decisiveness out of such a large body of people, that is to say, the greater the capacity for mass action, the lower the possibility for univocal agreement. The opposite is just the case with the smaller democratic forms. Here we see that mass action is limited by the smaller populations, but at the same time, a greater possibility for explicitly-voluntary concord among the members is still achievable. This is the nature of the dilemma for a political architecture of democracy. How best to organize a political population so that the best of both scales is preserved?

First, we must ask, is it even possible? No doubt there must be some form that maximizes the best of both scales even if it doesn’t completely resolve the issue. Every form of state even paying lip-service to the idea of democracy, like fascism, observes the rule that power is legitimated by the people. What is questionable about there highly authoritarian forms of democracy is whether or not the structure is in fact legitimated by the people. The test for the level of democratic influence is well known to political science: are the laws and decisions of the government in step with the opinions of the people at large, some larger association within the populace, or with an elite minority? On this scale, few if any real democracies exist in the world. Most republics can be defined by which association they serve. For example, the United State is plutocratic because the legislature, executive, and judicial branches of the government are more likely to enact policy following the desires of the wealthy than the general public, see the study here. My goal is to find a form that would be genuinely democratic. That is, where the policies of government closely represented the desires of the general public.

I will generally skip over a history of political forms and assume you have a working knowledge of past regimes. However, I feel compelled to speak briefly of the form known as a “republic”. This form is interesting because, in my opinion, it is a hybrid between monarchy and democracy. Republics attempt to solve the same stability problem we are. The republican solution is to preserve attributes of a monarchy inside a democracy. One way it does this is by limiting who “counts” in the population generally and the citizenry specifically. By reducing the number of decision-makers, either by explicitly forbidding certain populations access to public affairs or by diminishing the effect of their influence or by structuring certain domains of political discourse to a select group or single “head” or some combination of all these, republics reduce the instability of a mass of decision-makers. Limiting the decision-making capacity for the majority, (to voting for representatives, for example), or relegating it to minor and insignificant decisions (e.g. voting on the occasional ballot measure) are the most common method of republics. They work by paying homage to democracy while giving the real decision-making powers to an elite few or one. Over time, the need to pay homage to the people wanes and there is a tendency for this type of government to go from a de facto monarchy or oligarchy to an explicit monarchy. Think of the Roman Republic and its civil strife that lead to the formation of an autocratic Emporer. For our purposes then, a republic of any form is not a genuinely democratic option. I seek a stable form of democracy, not a tacit form of monarchy.

Deliberative Democracy

To form a democracy it is necessary that a forum for the full expression of every individual’s political concerns exists and that every individual has a turn to speak and be heard by their political peers. This I will call the short definition of deliberative democracy. Deliberative in this respect meaning simply a democracy where people come to talk to work out their respective political issues. Deliberation is essential for democracy for two reasons: (1) it is by definition voluntary and (2) it forces a recognition of the actual political issues confronting individuals and communities. Bounding the deliberative aspect of democracy effectively eliminates participation by its citizenry. This makes any action the state takes involuntary action on the part of those who either could not participate or were limited in their ability to participate. Similarly, no individual can rationally decide matters they have not had a chance to hear argued, neither could they empower a representative to do so on their behalf. Representation, even plenipotentiary representation, is possible in a democracy. However, it is not something someone can simply empower another to do without a specific outcome in mind. How could you represent my interests, if I don’t know what is going on or what would be best for me? I don’t want to digress too far down this path, except to say that representation is a necessity to large scale democracy, but without the opportunity for all individuals to confront the issues of the day, in both a direct and personal way, representation is illegitimate.

What often happens in republics is elected “representatives” are empowered with the entire decision-making capacity of their constituents, i.e. they do not represent the people so much as they replace them as though they were the only citizens of a democracy. This is oligarchy and the first step on the inevitable road back to monarchy; once the relationship between the representative and the represented has been usurped, so that the representative no longer needs any input from the represented to make decisions, then all “representation” has ceased, and the so-called representative has become an independent lord of their constituency (a member of the house of lords) and a patrician among plebians (senator of the Republic).

Let’s consider the notion of scale more closely. Here we should ask, what is the smallest unit of a political entity? Prima facie, the obvious answer would be the individual, but a little reflection reveals that the answer is flawed. The problem with the individual is that decisiveness and action collapse and become one and the same. Individuals, barring mental disease, are considered the master of themselves precisely because there is nothing political about them. In fact, the appeal of monarchy resides in its utilization this natural apoliticality to make decisions for everyone, which are then applied through authority or force over them. We see again on the individual level that the problem of political architecture is decision versus action. How are things to be decided (e.g. by whom?) and how much action is going to be brought to bear (i.e. how many individuals will be involved)? The greater the action; the greater the power, but the decision is how that power will be utilized and towards what. Monarchy is appealing precisely because so much power can be brought to bear so single-mindedly! This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the monarch that utilizes the full power of the population for their own self-aggrandizement is what we call a tyrant.

The individual’s apolitical nature means that a single individual cannot be the smallest unit of a polity. I would argue then that the smallest unit must be the individual as he or she stands in relation to others. The pair may be the smallest political unit then. A pair of friends, of lovers, parents, or children; even of bitter enemies are all examples of the smallest political unit. There is an effect of the pair that we can see continuing in larger and larger scales, up to a point. This effect is a need to work together toward some end. Even among enemies, there is a shared desire to eliminate the rivalry, albeit mostly following the strategy of eliminating the rival. Nevertheless, the end of the rivalry would bring about the end of the relationship as enemies and at the same time the end of the political unit. Thus, we could say that all political units are relationships between two or more individuals. We can see these relationships do not change as we scale them up, at first anyway. There is hardly a difference between two rivals and three or a team of six and a team of seven. But this direct relationship doesn’t scale up like that forever, and this is again owning to natural conditions. There are important differences between a company of seventeen and a company of seventeen million. In the latter, the “company” will hardly be able to recognize each other, and it is unlikely that a direct and personal relationship will exist between all the members as it would for the company of seventeen.

So here we have our first two architectural principles: political units begin with relationships and so require at least two individuals and these relationships cannot scale up beyond a certain point. I leave it to science to determine that point, and I highly suspect that it would vary with the individuals and cultures. A group of people with excellent memories, for example, might be able to maintain a direct and personal relationship with everyone else at a higher population than a group of people with faulty memories. That said, I feel we should put some rough number to this point that is generally manageable for an average human being. For the sake of mathematical ease, I’m going to say one hundred is the threshold of direct and personal political relationships for the sake of the scaling problem. Essentially, I’m suggesting that under a hundred individuals most groups could manage their own affairs through direct democracy, without the need for written laws, procedures, representation, or much political architecture at all. This is the threshold of anarchism. Talking and relying on each other would be all that it would take to resolve nearly all of the group’s problems. So, let us call this anarchist unit of one hundred or fewer, the basic unit of democracy. My goal is to introduce political architecture so that these units can combine and scale upwards with similar stability, all the way up to the incorporation of humanity as a whole.

The Scaling Problem

My guess would be that each democratic unit would require a representative in the next scale up. So, let’s call this basic democratic unit a “community”, we might imagine a municipality that consisted of representatives from each community of one hundred or fewer individuals. But again, we encounter the same scaling problem. Fifty community representatives could all know each other and function as a community of representatives, but fifty thousand would just lead us back to the same instability we saw before. The obvious solution then is to repeat the same process again and limit “municipalities” to groups of one hundred community representatives. And so forth, we might see this same scale repeat so that a “county” consists of the representatives of a hundred municipalities, a “territory” of a hundred counties, a “district” of a hundred territories, a “nation” of a hundred districts, and “world” of a hundred nations. But there is a problem with this model, several in fact.

One problem is that each scale up removes the representative from those they officially represent. Another problem is who elects these representatives or who are these representatives ultimately accountable to? How does information flow in both directions in this system? And there is the problem of jurisdiction, how are laws geographically applied? What if I want to be part of a “community” made up of individuals spread across the globe? We may not even have the same political concerns. Another problem involves the politicization of other forms of human distinction, such as race, class, gender, age, etc. Doesn’t a demographic identity, say black males aged twenty to thirty in the southern United States, have shared political needs that form a kind of quasi-relationship even if no direct and personal relationship exists between them? All these problems point to the fact that our political architecture requires more than simply scaling representation up at the threshold of direct relationships. It’s not enough to have direct democracy at all scales and that each scale is likely to require its own unique design.

In the next part, I will address these problems as I paint a picture of how representation may be managed on a rising scale.

The Heap Fallacy

June 11, 2019June 11, 2019 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The nature of truth can be confusing, and rarely is it more confusing than in the metaphysical distinction of groups and members. Is a chorus nothing more than the individual tones? Or a symphony nothing more than the individual notes? On some level, we must answer how could it be anything more? And yet the relationships between tones and notes seem to play a relevant role, and relationships do not exist when considering everything individually. What I take from this and will examine in this brief post is that sometimes a general truth means something entirely different from the particular truths from which it is abstracted. For example, it is true to say all living humans require food to remain alive, but it is not necessarily true to say they need apples or oranges or grapes or meat or cheese or bread or pizza or pork belly and sauerkraut sandwiches, etc. Thus, there is no particular food that humans need to eat. But it does not follow from this that human beings do not need to eat any food. Food is still required.

I have often encountered arguments of this type, particularly in political economic debates. They go in both directions. One variety says, the needs of the group cannot be determined and so individual needs are indeterminable. The other variety says, the contributions of individuals cannot be calculated and so the value of their combined inputs are indeterminable. Arguments of these types are often invoked both in support and condemnation of markets. But both of them are in fact heap fallacies, which turn on a conceptualization problem. Heap fallacies exploit ambiguity and are all too common in philosophy, politics, and economics.

The heap fallacy is related to the “sorites paradox” and is sometimes called the “continuum fallacy”. The fallacy works by rejecting a claim based on the vagueness of the terms used in the claim. For example, imagine I lay a single straw on the ground. This surely does not constitute a “heap” of straw. Now let me lay another on top of it. Still, we would not call it a heap of straw. And if I were to lay a third, still no. The fallacy would be then to conclude that since no single straw could be responsible for the change from a non-heap to a “heap” of straw, there is no heap of straw. The problem in this example is the term “heap” itself, which is arbitrary. However, in this case, its arbitrary nature is not logically relevant. We can draw the line anywhere, and so we can refine our definition of “heap” to anything. Perhaps three straws are a heap, or three-hundred, or three thousand… the point is the fact that we can draw a line anywhere does not mean that the line does not constitute a real distinction.

This type of argument which holds that if specifics are not given then a thing must be false is rarely recognized as fallacious. Generalities are not necessarily vague as this fallacy contends. As in the example above, to require that food be required is not the same as to say that this or that particular kind of food is required. Still, “food” as a generality is required for life despite our apparent inability to specify particularly which food-stuffs. It is all too easy to play with this distinction between the general and the specific. One can accuse any generality of being abstract, metaphysical nonsense. And to make matters worse, sometimes generalities can be just that! A group of strangers could be assembled in any made-up category, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it has any greater significance.

At the same time, one can accuse those who focus narrowly on the specifics of missing the “big picture”. As with the food example. Again, this is not always the case, some times a generality is simply arbitrarily applied. More interesting still are the cases in which something entirely arbitrary, that is a made up category, comes to take the properties of a real distinction. For example, consider human “races”. On the one hand, it seems like “race” is an arbitrary and made-up distinction in which no clear line could be drawn. In this situation, “race” is merely a fantasy of Immanuel Kant’s devising, denoting no real distinctions. On the other hand, that would render “racism” a fictitious action. No one could be racist if “race” itself was not a real thing. And what would it mean to say things like, “sickle-cell anemia affects black populations almost exclusively”? The statement seems to convey some medical information, but if “black populations” is not a real category then it is an empty statement. Based on the heap fallacy, it would seem race is a real thing, but an arbitrary one.

Our only recourse to avoid the heap fallacy is to be aware of the poverty of such rhetoric and guard against its use. We are condemned to constant vigilance. It is all too easy to treat all arbitrary categories as though they were not real, but this is a mistake. Arbitrariness is not an indication of a lack of realness. Some very real things are arbitrary.

Oscar Wilde was a Better Marxist than the Bolsheviks, Part 3

June 3, 2019May 31, 2019 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics

“‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

I have already made the argument that Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde share a particularly libertarian vision of socialism. I have also already speculated what Wilde’s socialism would have to look like. In this final part, I want to explore the view of individualism under socialism that makes it libertarian, particularly in the words of Wilde and Marx. Let’s begin with the question Wilde asks:

But it may be asked how individualism, which is now more or less dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of such private property?

He answers:

Under [socialism], individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now… For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.

Wilde’s answer reveals an existentialist’s view of socialism. For Wilde, individualism is self-making, rather than self-acceptance as is the individualism of Ayn Rand. That left-wing libertarianism is existentialist comes as no shock to anyone familiar with the neo-Marxist work of the nineteen sixties and their near obsession with young Marx. It is young Marx, the humanist, who celebrates the individual to come under socialism. The individual under capitalism is reduced to the base animal functions since the wages of a worker are reduced to subsistence, only these animal functions may be expressed. The norm then for the worker is to be a brute, an animal, for those are the only pleasures allowed for them. Marx writes,

[M]an (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions–eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and in personal adornment–while in his human functions, he is reduced to an animal. (99)

Individuality is not a given, it must be cultivated and requires resources to develop it. The goal of socialism, as we saw in part one, is to provide the resources that will satisfy the animal requirements and allow for the human individuality to emerge. The argument presented against this is that a fully realized individual, e.g. a Lord Byron, must have wealth to be fully realized and there is not enough wealth for everyone to be fully realized. Some people will have to content themselves with pushing the dirt around. Wilde argues against this that socialism is not interested in taking away opportunity as it is in extending it to everybody.

The question then becomes how? Right-wing advocates of capitalism argue that this is simply wishful thinking. It cannot be done. Not everyone can be a poet and philosopher. However, this argument is made on a particular set of unfortunate assumptions about the nature of humankind that amount to an anti-existentialism. The most important of these for our purposes surrounds the confusion between being and having, that is confusing self-realization for the possession of private property. Wilde writes,

[Under capitalism, humankind thinks] that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false.

This division between possession and essence is best described by the existentialists a half-century later. Using them to understand Wilde, we can conclude that individualism is living an authentic life, where possessions are merely possessions, things to be used in the pursuit of your life’s goals, not necessities that are merely useful. One must have a personality in order to decide what is useful, it cannot be defined for you by an outside agency, capitalist, socialist, or anything else. Individuality is authenticity and socialism is the necessary condition for it.

[Jesus] said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot… And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.

Individualism is the call to be authentic, to author your own life, to care little for the direction others would have over your life. Contra religion, Wilde emphasizes that there is no set path to authenticity, no prescribable way to live your life.

Father Damien was Christlike when he went out to live with the lepers, because in such service he realised fully what was best in him. But he was not more Christlike than Wagner when he realised his soul in music; or than Shelley, when he realised his soul in song. There is no one type for man. There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.

Individualism is what you make of yourself when you no longer have to labor for mere survival. The rich and the middle classes have to think about money all the time, it is how they make it, keep it, and spend it. When you have to think about money all the time you are unable to develop yourself, to become an individual. You are, in effect, reduced to making yourself whatever is easiest, most convenient, and most attractive to those upon whom your happiness depends. And under capitalism, this class includes everybody.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor. What Jesus does say is that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is.

This notion of individualism echos Marx’s idea of freedom from alienated labor. As Erich Fromm said of Marx, “Socialism… was never as such the fulfillment of life, but the condition for such fulfillment… Marx says quite clearly in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, ‘communism as such is not the aim of human development.’ What, then, is the aim? Quite clearly the aim of socialism is man,” (60). Alienated labor is the particularly capitalist organization of labor which isolates rather than individuates human beings. It breaks people up into specializations, but it also breaks them down into parts, making laborers out of people, or, in a few cases, capitalists. No one is free to be who they want, everyone is compelled by a system designed from without. As Marx said, “alienated labor… alienates man from himself, from his own active function and from other men,” (101). Subjected to our alienated needs human beings become “mentally and physically dehumanized… the self-conscious and self-acting commodity.” In other words, we come to see ourselves and each other as things.

What makes capitalism dangerous is precisely the fact that owning capital seems to fully compensate for the loss. Possessions can be lost, but capital, self-replicating possessions, appear to be just as permanent as authentic being itself. Capitalism, like the Christian ideology it came from, emphasizes an asceticism that forbids individuality because this allows you to replace an authentic existence for a treasure trove of self-creating wealth. Of course, this only works if everyone is made, by incentive or force, to bow to their role in the system. Marx writes,

[The political economy of capitalism] is… [also] the science of asceticism. Its true ideal is the ascetic but usurious miser and the ascetic but productive slave…. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc. the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt–your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. (144)

For Marx, the aim of socialism then is liberation from this system. He writes in the manifesto,

All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and allowed to live only so far as the interest to the ruling class requires it.

Under socialism, one must not err into thinking that capital is somehow a substitute for individuality, but at the same time, one must not confuse individualism with selfishness. Long before Ayn Rand extolled the virtues of selfishness, Wilde argued that “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.” Selfishness for Wilde is what altruism is for Ayn Rand. I have already shown that Wilde would have agreed that altruism is bad, but he would have disagreed that selfishness was any different. He condemns egoism, saying,

For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure.

This is because:

Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself.

And therein lies the great difficulty with individualism, for the freedom to be oneself, is all too often accompanied by the desire to restrict the freedom of others. It was in the name of freedom that slave-holders denounced the abolitionists. “What right have they to take away my freedom to own slaves?” Or as Marx put it, “Freedom is so much the essence of man that even it opponents realize it… No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others.” Freedom requires the rights of all to freedom. It is not up to the capitalist to decide what a worker’s needs should be, and yet that is exactly what happens. For the capitalists require workers, as much as possible, to resemble the “self-acting commodities” they need them to be. Wilde writes,

[A] man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live… Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives.

Oscar Wilde was a Better Marxist than the Bolsheviks, Part 2

May 29, 2019May 26, 2019 by Charles M Rupert, posted in Charles Matthew Rupert, Ethics, Philosophy, Political Economy, Politics

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

In the first part of this series, I showed that both Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx respected individual freedom so much that they saw it as the essence of socialism. Each man envisioned a future that enabled the fullest expression of individuality. Far from the authoritarian socialism of the Bolshevik model; Wilde had libertarian socialism in mind. Neither man was particularly explicit about what socialism would look like, each preferring to paint in broad strokes his vision of the future. In all likelihood, neither probably knew what socialism would look like so much as they knew what was wrong with capitalism. There is thus no way to compare blueprints. We may, however, see socialism in a negative, that is by knowing what they said socialism is not, and how each believed we get from capitalism to socialism.

It may seem surprising that not even Marx advanced a state-ownership of private property model; one that placed society above individuality and authoritarianism over liberty. State-ownership of the means of production was capitalism for Marx, who thought of the state as the keeper of bourgeois interests. Neither did he think that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be anything other than universal, democratic, and brief. A democratic dictatorship is an anarchic phase that all revolutions necessarily go through. Think of the American Revolution before the constitution, when the Contential Congress claimed self-sovereignty and began issuing dubious laws. The dictatorship of the proletariat under the Bolsheviks came to mean “the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors…”, as Lenin put it. No longer would the people rule themselves, they would be ruled by the vanguard of intellectual elites acting as saviors for a whole class of people who revolted quite sufficiently without them. This was socialism in name more than in substance.

Real socialism is supposed to differ from capitalism. Capitalism cultivates economic dependence, suppresses actual political decision-making for indirect democracy, and through these methods stifles individuality. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of poverty under capitalism. From the perspective of capitalism, poor people are “superfluous”, to use Thomas Malthus’ term, or “redundant”, to use Margret Thatcher’s. They are not needed by the economic system and therefore the system is unable (or more accurately, unwilling) to support their continued existence. Capitalist logic dictates that it is the duty of the poor to die, even in the midst of great plenty, if their labor is unnecessary to capitalists. This ruthlessness of capitalism has been defended by Malthus et. al. but generally it is deplored by mainstream society, including a great many wealthy capitalists themselves. Poverty for most people is a social problem that requires a social solution. Wilde writes,

Misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering. They have to be told of it by other people, and they often entirely disbelieve them.

Poverty is so destructive that those who are in it fail to recognize the social mechanisms that produce their deplorable state; rather like how a drowning person loses sight of everything but keeping their head above water, the poverty-afflicted can only struggle desperately from moment to moment. Disobedience and rebellion, those mechanisms of human progress, require the intervention of others who can help them discover their plight. Wilde writes,

What is said by [capitalists] against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.

This is the role Marx set for himself. Just as the chains of slavery were not, and could not be taken off by the slaves themselves, abolitionists became necessary. Socialist agitators awaken the proletariat–who at that time, may well have been fully employed and yet completely destitute–from false consciousness, or the conviction that this was the best that they could hope for in life or all they were worth or that the iron law of wages meant there just wasn’t enough for them even if they doubled production.

But it is not only the poor who suffer under capitalism. Another problem is the threat of poverty, which leaves even the richest insecure. Wilde again,

An enormously wealthy merchant may be—often is—at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control. If the wind blows an extra point or so, or the weather suddenly changes, or some trivial thing happens, his ship may go down, his speculations may go wrong, and he finds himself a poor man, with his social position quite gone. Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all.

The threat of poverty drives the rich the way a jockey drives a horse. No one, no matter how wealthy, is immune to the threat. Poverty must be done away with, must it not?

Socialism obviously offers a solution, but capitalism provides its own. Charity and altruism are the bulwarks of capitalism. Wilde saw this as a fraud. Like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilde realized that the exercise of mercy is just another form of power and control, a way to make others live for you. Altruism is anti-socialist! Charity hurts the poor. It strings them along without the hope of liberation. Wilde writes,

[People] try to solve the problem of poverty… by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing [them]… The proper aim [of socialism] is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible… Charity degrades and demoralises.

For Wilde, this was cruel self-aggrandizement on the part of the wealthy. Charity makes the rich feel better and that is all it does. The Malthusians among us will no doubt object that it is by the generosity of the capitalist that any poor exist at all. The neoliberal will add that, actually, it is by the self-interest of the capitalist that the working poor, those paupers, have even the meager means to survive. But for Wilde, as for Marx, this is telling the slaves, those who sow the seeds, raise the crops, harvest the food, and prepare and serve the meals, that they should be grateful for the master’s benevolence in providing them sustenance. Wilde writes,

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so… Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.

The poverty-ridden people unable to recognize who or what is making them poor, have but two options for survival: to steal or submit to capitalism’s picture of humanity. Wilde suggests the choice is between living as a human being and as a pet, writing,

It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg… As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage.

To the Randian libertarian, who locates the fatal flaw in the idea of altruism itself, a break with capitalism is not necessitated. To these anti-socialist libertarians, one must boot-strap oneself out of poverty, either by accepting their worth as whatever crumbs fall from the rich man’s table or by asceticism. Against this position, Wilde writes,

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.

The problem for this libertine brand of capitalism is the loss of human dignity that it entails. One may not need to be “grateful” because one lives by one’s own lights but without socialism, that life must be debased. What is the point of living by one’s own labors if one cannot earn a respectable living with nearly super-human effort? What is the point of individualism when it reduces individuality to mere animal subsistence? Indeed, it is not finer to take than to beg?

Rejecting capitalism’s cold comforts and Bolshevik authoritarianism, we are left only with a particularly libertarian form of socialism. The socialism of Wilde approaches something like the minimal state of Robert Nozick, but unlike Nozick’s, a state incompatible with exploitation.

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result, the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures.

Wilde was very nearly an anarchist, however, the state remains as a

…voluntary association that will organise labour, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.

How exactly the state and individual efforts are to be arranged, Wilde leaves us to speculate. Which to his credit he acknowledges:

Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Still glimmers of what Wilde envisions come through. Wilde, like Marx, sees the unlimited potential of mechanization to free human beings, but only under socialism where its benefits are shared by all. Mechanization eliminates manual labor and frees human beings from toil.

There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities…. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine… Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

How close is Wilde to Marx’s vision of socialism? In the third volume of Capital, near the end, Marx argues that “the realm of freedom” his ideal society of free individuals, cannot begin until freedom from want and thus compulsion is achieved.

Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order to satisfy his wants… so civilized man has to do it, and he must do it in all the forms of society and under all possible modes of production. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. (Fromm, 60)

Marx paints a picture of socialism where humans produce rationally rather than in an alienated way. That is, they produce for themselves what they want, not necessarily what the capitalist would profit by the most. They produce associatively, which may or may not be competitive, but without the ruthless competition of capitalism. This clearly rules out the possibility of a state-run, bureaucratic socialism. The individual must be the central agent and the goal of socialism. Socialism then is merely meant to alleviate human beings from the struggle with nature, and so allow us to create ourselves for ourselves. Socialism will be known when economics serves the needs of society the same way it serves the needs of capitalists under capitalism. For Marx and Wilde, socialism is a machine for serving the basest of human needs, our animal needs. It is not here to tell us how to satisfy them, only to ensure that they get satisfied.

Introduction

The Deductive Arguments

The Inductive Arguments

Gender

Anatomy

Physiognomy

Genetics

Anomalies

History

Socially Constructed Sex

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The Jurisdiction Problem

The Representation Problem

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Introduction

Deliberative Democracy

The Scaling Problem

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“‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

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“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

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