Society from an Indigenous Perspective

Recently a friend of mine, who also happens to be a member of the Aymara community from Bolivia,  introduced me to her culture's way of thinking of life. I think what she said would be very useful to share here.

The indigenous people conceive of four communities: (1) the community of humans, (2) the community of the spirits, (3) the community of nature, and (4) the community of the ancestors. These four communities should exist in balance. But when we use any one of them as an object, when we use them as an instrument for our own end, then we produce imbalance, and societal problems.

She gave monoculture as an example of this imbalance. When we don't respect the natural plant diversity found in nature, then we cause problems by exhausting the soil too quickly. Europeans, using over-exploitative farming techniques, rendered their land fallow by the 1800s, so much so that they had to import guano from South America in order to replenish the soil. The Europeans' dependence on guano led to desperation and conflict: both Bolivia and Peru fought and lost wars, orchestrated by European powers, over control of the guano trade.

I see in this four communities idea a powerful framework for synthesizing the contributions of different schools of social thought. Some thinkers have emphasized the objective—that is, the role of economic and the political structures. Others have emphasized the subtle and the subjective, questions of identity, and belonging, and spiritual fulfillment. Others still have emphasized the need to ground social organization in philosophical terms, in terms of justice and the rights of humanity. The four communities framework can embrace all these approaches. It has room for both the overt wrong in slavery (using humans as objects, and disrespecting the first community) and the wrong in appropriating history for selfish gain (which would be, I think, an example of using the community of the ancestors as objects).

This framework also provided me with another takeway. In it I see how dependent we are on the nourishment and sustenance from all the four communities. We rely on our human community to raise us and support us; we rely on the  spirit community to anchor us in a sense of purpose, to give our life meaning; we we rely on nature to provide us with a hospitable habitat, resources for our use, food to eat; and we rely on the ancestors to provide us with wisdom. We like to think of ourselves as independent and self-sufficient, but we're not.

Learning about this perspective has been a salubrious breath of fresh air to my thinking, just because it's so different.

Experimental Political Philosophy

For centuries, political philosophers have been on a quest to figure out the best way of organizing society; and, needing no resources to further their research other than their own brains, they have come up with a plethora of theories.

Most of the time philosophy deals with the "ought to." But in political philosophy we also find some testable hypotheses. Marxist communism is, for example, a testable hypothesis, as well as the idea that property rights will encourage owners to be more productive. From Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I got the idea that anarchy is inherently unstable, that governments naturally emerge out of it; that too is a testable idea.

Of course, political philosopher don't usually go around testing their theories because they consider it immoral to play with the lives of other people like that.

But I think political philosophers have overlooked an obvious place where experimental political philosophy is already taking place: nation building!


An experiment in democracy in Afghanistan

With the war dragging on, and American support waning, I'm sure the Pentagon is eager and open to suggestions about how to finally make stable, legitimate governments in Afghanistan and Iraq as quick as possible. They've already spent so much time and money—I'm sure they won't mind trying something unconventional if there's a possibility it could work.

Political philosophers, this is your chance! Time to see your theories come to life!

Social Obligations, Or How You Can Back Into Paternalism Without Trying

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick argues an anti-paternalist position. That is, he says we cannot prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection. But he also says that we have the right to prohibit other people from engaging in activities which impose an undue risk on ourselves. I believe these two positions are inconsistent. [As reviewers have pointed out, I'm not showing there's an inconsistency; and there isn't one. Rather, I'm concerned whether there's an aspect of social life that Nozick didn't seem to consider which could undermine the analysis.]

Nozick's argument assumes that the individual is the basic unit of social life. However, as I have argued elsewhere, I think it's more useful to take the household as the basic unit instead. We are born into families, and we tend to grow up, live, and die in them. Even when we reject our families and all family ties, we still naturally form "households" in our new homes. College roommates, gay couples, touring rock bands—these are all examples of how even when we don't live in traditional family structure, we still have a penchant for community living (the anthropologist is always quick to point out that "the household" is socially defined). It's an essential part of being a social human being.

Whether we like it or not, this communal living creates obligations on us. Parents obviously have duties to their children. We believe roommates should take care of each other. Figuring out the exact nature of these "family/community living" duties is difficult, but we can't deny there are duties.

Now imagine we see a father drinking too much. The anti-paternalist would say we do not have the right to interfere if he is fully aware of the risks of his actions: not drinking may be in the father's own best interest, but we have no right to stop him. However, because the father has a child, and because that child is so dependent on him, the drinking affects the child too. A drunkard father may raise his kids well, but he will probably not. In Nozick's language, that's an "undue risk," which the child has the right to prohibit. The child, not being at the age of reason, has the right to have other family members intervene on his behalf.

We cannot, then, cleanly separate the father's best interest from the son's interest. The child's best interest is having his father in the best shape as possible, since the child is dependent. This dependency means that our actions no longer concern just ourselves. We are obligated and liable to our family members, and the dangerous actions of one family member (even if they're only directed at themselves in a narrow sense) end up imposing risks on all other members. This means, generally speaking, we may prohibit others from actions against their self-interest because their self-interest is itself vital to our self-interest.

When we embed the individual in a social context, we see that he is trapped in a web of social obligations (at the very least familial obligations) and that these provide the grounds for interference by other family/community members. These social obligations may be unasked for, but they are still binding nonetheless. The only one who can be free from paternalistic pressures of any kind is the lone wolf, who does not live in any mutually supportive/dependent community. But those people are very rare.

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Endnote: I see how the risk-prohibition line of reasoning can get out of hand quickly. If we are to stop all people who impose risks on us, then are we to prohibit driving? Nozick's principle of prohibition does not resolve the core issue, which is determining which kinds of risk are acceptable and which are not. Still, I think there's merit to the idea of prohibiting actions that impose undue risk to ourselves. Even if there weren't, Nozick still argues an inconsistent position, for having a family member impose risks on us is just as bad as having indepedent agents impose the risk of unreliable justice procedures.

Update (Feb. 15, 2011): I've made small changes to make sure I more accurately convey my positions.

The Limits to Meritocracy

In the wake of the financial crisis, income inequality has become a sexy topic again among economists. Following a host of notable commentators on the subject (including economists like Raghuram Rajan and Daron Acemoglu and a host of politicians), The Economist has chipped into the discussion with its own article.

The Economist article calls into question the perniciousness of income inequality in itself. It argues that policymakers would do better to focus on eliminating barriers that allow the "most pernicious, unfair sorts of income disparity" instead of focusing on redistribution. Their recommendation? Allow for increased competition and social mobility. "Governments need to keep their focus on pushing up the bottom and middle rather than dragging down the top." That means reducing trade barriers, investing in access to good education for everyone, and, at heart, promoting more competition and meritocracy.

I think they have the right idea in mind. There are definitely more fair and unfair types of inequality. But I have reservations about The Economist's embrace of meritocracy. If we follow the principles of meritocracy all the way to their logical conclusion, then we end up with a grim picture.

Pure meritocracy means, for example, that parents have no way of ensuring that their children will be as well off as they are. To properly judge who deserves to get better positions and opportunities, kids grow up constantly being evaluated and competing with each other. Tensions amongst parents and kids rise to a boiling point when success, or getting ahead, becomes a zero-sum game, where the success of my friend only implies one less opportunity for myself.

Competition is not only a benefit, as The Economist sees it, but also a cost. For some people, competition is a healthy motivator for them to develop their natural abilities. But for most people, it is a form of coercion to work harder than they wouldn't want to, for the sake of positions they otherwise wouldn't aspire to.

High social mobility (in itself a desirable thing) has the cost of intense competition. We already see an example of what that kind of intense competition would like in primary schools in New York City, where some parents are spending thousands of dollars on test prep sessions for their 4 year-olds in order to ensure that they make it into the city's gifted kindergarten program. When I saw an article about this in the New York Times, I was prompted to write a post about the paradoxical nature of a middle class that lives amongst plenty, but which acts as it were fighting for its very survival.

There are limits to how much meritocracy we're willing to tolerate. At some point, the burden of competition weighs down on the benefits of increased/equal opportunity. A world where people are heavily advantaged by their intellectual endowments is not really fairer than a world where people are heavily advantaged by their wealth endowments.

In the end, though, my point against The Economist is pretty weak: I agree with their main thrust, that we should remove people that systematically deny people opportunities. I just want to make sure that we're careful not to rush headstrong into meritocracy either.

Update (March 14, 2011):
John Rawls gives a much stronger argument against meritocracy in A Theory of Justice:

"[In meritocracy] there exists a marked disparity between the upper and lower classes in both means of life and the rights and privileges of organizational authority. The culture of the poorer strata is impoverished while that of the governing technocratic elite is securely based on the service of the national ends of power and wealth. Equality of opportunity means an equal chance to leave the less fortunate behind in the personal quest for influence and social position." (106-107, my emphasis)

So the complaint is not so much that meritocracy makes people work too hard, but that it punishes people for not being bright. This is why the competition that I stressed in the post is a problem: given the severe disparities in life chances that a pure meritocracy produces, one can't afford not to make it.