Hierarchies

While I think or at least hope I can have profound thoughts on my own, there is no question that I have been sparked into thinking about some things at a higher level by reading the Isaiah Berlin essays.  They have sort of crystallized a few things that have been on my mind lately.

One key theme is that many people, particularly intellectuals, do want some sort of unifying theory that justifies their actions.  (While this is a fairly common thread, I think it is best expressed in "The Pursuit of the Ideal" in The Crooked Timber.)  Religion, with all its various contradictions, operated this way for many of them hundreds of years ago, though the most clever tied themselves in knots attempting to smooth out the contradictions.  However, post-Enlightenment, most serious thinkers and certainly the ones Berlin is interested in have been atheists or at best agnostics who are looking for some kind of a moral code that is not grounded in religion.  But the seeming paradox, even for these free-thinkers, is that they desire "true"or grounded principles.  Berlin seems to allude to this as a remnant of monism (a type of universal philosophy), or really the hangover left around after thousands of years of monotheism, though he doesn't put it that way.

The downside of monism is that it really attempts to drive out all other ways of thinking, just as Jesus drove out the money changers.  It is the antithesis of live and let live.  It's a fairly narrow approach to life that indicates one is perhaps a bit insecure about one's way of living and the best way to eliminate those doubts is by eliminating the competition.  This can be seen everywhere, including among militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins.  Generally, it would be better if people could accept that there perfectly reasonable people with different views than oneself and, as long as they don't try to impose their views on you (however amorphously that is defined) one should let them get on with their lives.  How much less conflict there would be in the world...  This used to be called believing in cultural relativism, but that term may have gone out of fashion.  Now, no question there are limits to tolerating or accepting other cultures, particularly when it appears (at least to outsiders) that some people have not fully accepted and/or internalized their roles, such as women under very extreme interpretations of Islam or any society that engages in forced labour.  As a general aside, which I may expand on some day, there is a huge problem in my mind with inter-generational legitimacy in the sense that most people inherit a political and legal system that they had no part in creating or endorsing and the rules to change the system can be so cumbersome that there is no meaningful path to change.  Some specific details of the US federal government fall into this category, such as 2 Senators per state.  Or in Canada where certain types of Constitutional reform requires the sign off of every province.

A corollary of believing in one path forward is that, even if it seems that society falls short, it is moving in the right direction.  So in many ways, Karl Marx was a utopian thinker who insisted that eventually the proletariat would rise and that the state would fall away.  Berlin and many others have made short shrift of how juvenile this outlook really is for any number of reasons, but ultimately it comes down to replacing religious faith with faith in a better world "down here" that is just as out of reach as the fairy tales that religious folks tell each other.  Even the often quoted saying by Martin Luther King, Jr. that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." is a kind of fable.  We can find some examples of it, particularly in Western culture, but also many places where "justice" or any kind of political liberty is so long delayed that it is meaningless.  We might be looking at another hundred or two hundred years of terrible conditions for women in the Middle East, India and Pakistan.  Even what I have written holds out the hope that it will someday change, but I just don't think there are those guarantees.  In many ways if the worst fears of the environmentalists are realized, human societies will be much worse and even more aggressive in another hundred years.

As is obvious by even a cursory glances through these posts, I am a pessimist, much more in tune with Freud and even Thomas Hobbes, in the sense I believe that conflict is built into human nature and that any kind of ideal society, such as the one Marx asserted would emerge after the revolution or even the more amelioratory State promoted by Progressives, is a fantasy.  That said, I still wish it were true and vote accordingly.  Perhaps someday I will post on the huge discrepancy in Democrats condemning the actions of Republican state officials and their belief that the State in the abstract will make life better for all.

Anyway, one small but important way that some of these issues play themselves out is that there really seems to be a measurable difference in people's adherence to and allegiance to the social system in general and hierarchies specifically.  In other words, some people are much more comfortable and accepting of hierarchies -- and have scorn and general mistrust of people who don't share this view.  And the reverse is also true.  This has actual real world implications when people try to communicate across this bridge.  It doesn't take very long before both sides break it off and think the other side is misinformed, stupid, wrong or downright evil.

There is pretty significant evidence that social conservatives tend to be far more accepting of hierarchy and one's place in it.  This page points to a bunch of academic articles on the subject, though I suspect most are behind a paywall.  The Republicans or Canadian Tories naturally will have far more party discipline simply because they believe more in hierarchies to begin with.  It was not surprising to see a number of negative comments when Justin Trudeau tried to enforce the party line on abortion rights for example.  Now the Democrats have attempted to make a positive out of this (being the Big Tent and all) but it is harder for them to enforce discipline, given that Democrats believe in personal autonomy apart from hierarchy more than Republicans.  (Again, this is a matter of degree.  I am not arguing that Republicans are robotic minions -- at least not most of them.)

Outside the political realm, conservatives tend to feel that one has an obligation to one's employers to keep schtum, and that if you violate this and tells tales or even become a whistle-blower, then you should expect the worst to happen.  (Aside from some crude tribalism, these people generally think it is acceptable for government scientists to be muzzled and to toe the government line.)  Most liberals do not feel this way and feel that if one's intentions are good and they benefit "society," then it is morally right to break silence.  (And generally, liberals are more in line with scientists who think that "science" should never be silenced.)  Even today, there are certainly a lot of people that feel that the Pentagon Papers should never have been published.  Others on the other side of the spectrum feel that Daniel Elsberg and, much more recently, Edward Snowden and even Glenn Greenwald are heroes.

This is basically an unbridgeable gap and two very different ways of looking at the world.  It is one of many reasons why people can't just get along when they differ so fundamentally.  I think acknowledging it is an important first step.  However, I suppose in truth it is also worth realizing that for most people, these things are pretty abstract and they may fall on different sides of the line depending on the specifics of the situation.  People who believe extremely strongly that economic secrets must be kept may be equally insistent that certain types of criminality must be exposed.  Also, humans are remarkably inconsistent when anything impacts them personally.  And yet, as Berlin and others have pointed out, they want to believe they are in the right and thus others must naturally be in the wrong.

I am generally not a strong believer in hierarchies, and I've always tried to justify my actions on the basis of what makes sense for the greater good (of the company, of the city, of "society") but certainly there are times I am upset about a specific interaction and then later on I realize it is because I wasn't granted the social standing and respect I thought I deserved.  That's really all I think I should say about that.