This is a lazy post, in fact a year-old repost from before I started this blog, that I thought readers might find interesting. It’s explictly a moralistic sort of piece, not a political analysis (no war but the class war! etc).

To listen to most endorsements of remembrance day, and to most poppy-related appeals for money, one would be forgiven for thinking that the job of a soldier was to die. It is not: the job of a soldier is to kill people. Those people fall into approximately two categories: firstly, civilians, and secondly, other soldiers. The number of dictators, politicians, generals, etc. who are killed by soldiers is negligible.

It’s true that courage was not uncommon among the armed forces, and that many (though probably well under half) of the last century’s fallen soldiers were fighting for something better than what they were fighting against; it’s also true that most responsibility the blame for the horrors of war lies with high-level decision-makers – and the average soldier is usually in a situation of very limited freedom. But people are always free and people who kill are responsible for deaths, even if others bear equal or greater responsibility. Consequently it seems ridiculous to look on soldiers with an attitude only of praise, and not utter a word of blame or condemnation. That condemnation should be limited by the very limited perspective, the limited power, the limited opportunities, of average soldiers – but it cannot be simply dropped altogether.

Of course there is huge variation among individual soldiers, ranging from the truly discriminate soldier who shoots only those shooting them, and fights only for good causes, down to those who participate in irregular massacres – to deny this variation would remove the whole point of speaking of freedom. What is wrong is to ignore the whole issue, for this imputes to them a uniform purity.

To put it another way, there is a dilemma. One option is to give respect to all war veterans, all war casualties. That includes those who killed our brave soldiers, and those who drove back the other side, gained control of a town, and so enabled the shooting of political enemies, hostages, or racial “enemies”. Yet to give respect and thanks to all these people who sacrificed their lives, and to put a full stop there, would seem to mean ignoring, perhaps even “forgetting” that they participated in, enabled, fought for, crimes against humanity.

The other option would be to select only those who died fighting for “freedom”. The problems with this are, firstly, that all armies kill innocent people, certainly a huge number in both World Wars, and secondly, that it too ignores a legitimate facet of the issue – that the young German, Italian, Japanese, etc. men and women who fought were also brave, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for a higher goal, and also left behind families and friends, whose grief and loss is not annulled by the goals of their nations’ leaders.

Absolutising one aspect – respect and compassion for those who died and their loved ones – and attempting to ignore the dissonant aspect – condemnation of their crimes – forces us, here as always, to draw arbitrary lines between real grief and wrong grief, between wicked armies and saintly armies.

In comments to this piece, some interesting discussions emerged. I was told that

“British soldiers died defending their way of life…Italian and German soldiers, on the other hand, made no such sacrifice for us. That’s why we don’t remember them…Remembrance is a small expression of gratitude to the millions who died specifically defending the culture and way of life that we abuse nowadays.”

To which I had replied

“I’m suspicious of all this talk of defending a ‘way of life’. Were British soldiers fighting for particular types of food or music? Were they fighting for specific constitutional arrangements? Were they fighting for a society that still discriminated against women and criminalised homosexuality? Were they fighting to maintain the empire? Were they fighting for ‘king and country’? It all seems like projecting a nebulous ideal onto people who, primarily, were fighting because the law told them they had to and society told them they should – the same reason the german and italian soldiers fought.”

I was also told that “They were fighting for the survival of the british nation. Had they not fought Germany and instead let the Germans invade, then millions of British civilians would have been killed.”

To which (apart from the fact that I’ve never yet heard a remembrance service say “the generals and politicians responsible for the 1st World War and others should all be hanged, the whole thing was a farce and a waste – it’s specifically WWII that we’re commemorating here.”) I had replied:

“I agree that I explicitly said that yes, soldiers’ sacrifice to defeat Nazism should be remembered. My point was that their “sacrifice” of other people, which helped one nation to dominate another and was part of a national engine of propaganda and censorship should ALSO be remembered, rather than completely ignored.”

Hmm. I felt I should post something but I don’t really have the energy. That’s been true for the last weeks now, which is why my frequency of posting has declined relative to the previous months. This is likely to continue for a while yet, but hopefully posts will turn up every now and again.

I particularly felt like I should have posted for at least one of: Halloween, Guy Fawkes’ day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, and Remembrance Day. Maybe I will. But probably you will just have to decide for yourselves what to think. Actually that said I recall writing something about remembrance day last year at a previous location so I may paste that up.

In the meantime, why don’t I share some of the search terms by which people have found this blog?

In the last month, I’ve been found by fully 30 people searching “take over the world”, for whom I regret having no useful advice.

I’ve also got a dozen or so people searching “octopus skeleton pictures”, for whom I regret that nobody will ever grant them what they desire.

Perhaps more worryingly, several people have come here through searching “octopus sex”. O_O

They were joined by a single individual looking for “cross species sex youtubes”. *sigh*

There have also been half a dozen or so people with search terms such as “black man controls white man’s wife” and “arabs in control of white women”.

But perhaps the oddest fetish that I seem to have attracted attention from is “incomprehensible bdsm stories”. I can understand why someone might want bdsm stories, but incomprehensible ones? It sounds like needlessly putting yourself through tiring, difficult, and even painful ordeals just for the sa- ah.

Search terms less unsettling than just odd include:

“ugly fox”, “suspicious mongoose”, “how does capitalism exploit Znet”, “christmas thoughts”, and “naked complex” (better than naked simple, I imagine).

But probably the most worrying of all is – well, I’ve posted about the star-nosed mole, and some people find me by searching for that. And I’ve also posted about the naked mole rat, and some people find me by searching for that.

But just yesterday I noticed in my blog stats: “star nosed mole rat”.

To whoever is researching this possibility – combining the only eusocial mammal with the fastest-eating mammal – I beg you, reconsider. The possible consequences don’t bear thinking about.

It occurred to me in a recent conversation that although I consider myself an environmentalist (whatever that means), and although I am abidingly fascinated by life and its various forms, and committed to the idea of ‘respecting’ a fairly large class of them, I’m not really comfortable talking about ‘nature’, or putting points in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’.

You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals.

In fact, I don’t think I believe that such an entity exists.

Let me put it like this: the way the word ‘nature’ is often used, it seems to be supposed that visiting a Caribbean coral reef and swimming with dolphins, visiting a Tibetan mountain to photograph eagles, and and camping in a pine forest in Norway, are all ways of having contact with ‘nature’.

This almost suggests, though, that when I get to the eagles, I in some sense am more familiar with them because I met the dolphins, and when I am in the forest I’m closer to it because of being in the mountains. That is, it suggests that there’s something in common between the three.

But there isn’t – the coral reefs are as foreign to the mountains as they are to the heart of London. Dolphins have as little in common with eagles as they do with humans. When I turn up in the forest and disturb some bear, it will not care in the slightest that I am on good terms with the frogs of Indonesia.

All that is common is something negative: they are areas that are not heavily populated with humans. Note, it’s not even that they’re therefore populated with lots of other species – because 1) there’s no definition of ‘populated’ that puts coral reefs in the same league as mountains, and 2) cities, the paradigms of human settlement, probably contain more non-human animals than many remote ‘wild places’.

So the word ‘natural’ means something like ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’: it’s not something that applies to things themselves, but rather characterises our relation to them. Things are different from what I’m familiar with – and this I designate by calling them things like ‘foreign’ (when I’m focusing on nationality) or ‘nature’ (when I’m focusing on species).

And this is perfectly appropriate in definite contexts. For instance, in considering global warming, we need to distinguish between human industry and the rest of the biosphere, because there’s a big causal difference in what role they’re playing.

But we can apply the same concept in other ways. In regard to global warming, any outside observer could quite appropriately regard it as a breakdown, a short-circuit, in ‘earthly nature’. Factories are, ultimately, as natural as domestication, self-cleaning, and care for young. They are something one species of organism produces when its natural tendencies reach a certain point.

Going in the other direction, when a monkey discovers that you can get good food by sticking grass stalks into a termite mound, that represents a ‘triumph over nature’ as much as when humans discover fire or build a bridge – with ‘nature’ including the termites, and the grass, but not the monkey. Perhaps we could even include a shrew surviving one more day of frantically searching for food in a dangerous world. After all, distinguishing oneself from the world as a separate and potentially opposed force confronting it – that’s pretty much what ‘life’ does.

But then you get this idea that speaking of ‘nature’ is speaking of a real thing – a sort of collective identity possessed by all and only those beings and places remote from humans. If they knew we were doing it, I imagine sardines would be very surprised at our lumping them in a group with elephants, whom they can barely imagine, let alone recognise a similar to.

But look here: we have a name for that: outgroup homogenisation. “We” are all individuals, and the differences between us and between our different cultures and groupings are profound, often amounting to essential oppositions – the eternal feminine against the eternal masculine, etc. But “they” are all basically minor variations on a common theme.

After all, “they are animals”. What a sentence! Why not say the same about moles, whales, humans, bacteria, fungi, snakes, plankton, and octopuses – “they are non-fliers”, said in a tone of explaining something fundamental, conveying the basic fact about them. Or rather, about us. For you and I, after all, are indeed non-fliers.

In short, there does not exist an entity called ‘nature’, nor ‘the natural world’. There is only a schema of opposition, of drawing a division between the sentient agent (individual or collective) and the passive forces it confronts. And that schema can be applied in pretty much whatever way we want. There’s no point in us defending ‘nature’ from ‘humanity’; only in seeking to defending each other from assorted megalomaniacs and anti-social narcissists.

At a rally for cheaper education. A chant starts up:

“The students! united! will never be defeated!”

My first thought: Wait, is that true? No, that’s not remotely true. You could easily get all the students together and have the rest of society crush them with impunity.

My second thought: In fact, doesn’t that drain all significance from the original chant, ‘the workers, united, will never be defeated’? The significance being, that it’s actually true, and that disunity and disorganisation of the working class is a necessary condition for capitalism.

But now apparently any group with a cause to push is happy to declare itself the invincible revolutionary agent. *sigh*…

Missives from Marx has a series of posts up in which he suggests, in essence, that

“There’s something really stupid about the meta-ethical arguments about whether or not legitimations for ethics are absolute or not, and, if not, whether people can still be ethical…most people just don’t give a shit about meta-ethics.”

This is of interest to me, among other things, because I’ve recently been doing a certain amount of work on meta-ethics (i.e. what is ethics? what do words like ‘good’ mean?) and will, with luck, be presenting to a conference in mid-November, arguing that the foundations of ethics (in at least one sense) are absolute (in at least one sense) in what I think is a fairly novel way. If that goes well I will probably post on it. So I don’t think the whole issue is ’stupid’.

Of course Missives has a point, which is that people are not waiting with bated breath for some philosophers to finally announce whether truth is beauty, or whether, in fact, beauty is truth. Most of the actions that we call ‘moral’ (in at least one sense) are motivated by something other than metaphysics – they’re some psychological impulse or other, whether empathy, disgust, fear, etc.

But I think this point can be over-stated. The question to ask, I think, is not so much ‘does philosophy affect people’s behaviour?’, but rather the two questions ‘does philosophy affect ideology?’ and ‘does ideology affect people’s behaviour?’

By ‘ideology’ I’m thinking of the whole layer of things that stand between academic study and everyday life: religion, politics, economics, pop-science, literature, etc. In short, the things that non-intellectuals draw upon in answering the same questions as academic philosophers.

Thus defined, I think it seems very likely that ideology does affect people’s behaviour, often in big ways. And does philosophy (and, more broadly, academia) affect ideology? It seems likely – though I’m not sure how one could prove the matter either way.

But the image of one thing just ‘affecting’ another is perhaps a bit too simple. Ideas can be looked at in at least three ways: politically, psychologically, and theoretically. The only ultimate source of ‘action’ is psychology, since action is what humans do from motives, but people like having ideas by which to act, and their selection of ideas reflects the theoretical features of those ideas.

For instance, it seems perfectly plausible to me that someone might happen to find the picture offered by ‘the scientific worldview’ unbearably bleak and nihilistic, precisely because it reduces ethical questions to the level of unconstrained choices, personal tastes. If the nearest idea that can avoid that is a religious one, they may adopt that religion, they may find that it ‘makes sense to them’, even if they would otherwise have found its reactionary views about sex off-putting. They then feel forced to support said reactionary views out of a desire for consistency.

Or, someone who has only ever encountered communism as a more-or-less nihilistic doctrine, that rejects all talk of ‘principles’ as humbug and puts value only in the acheivement of victory, might find it harder to identify and object to the progressive blows against democracy and freedom taken by their self-proclaimed ‘leaders’ – and if their resistance is delayed by that struggle to make sense of things, that makes it easier for said leaders to entrench their power and strangle a revolutionary moment.

If that sort of thing might happen – and I see no reason to think that they don’t – then the theoretical features of ideas can influence what causes people do or don’t ‘throw their weight behind’. Ideas don’t drive changes, people do, but people need to use ideas to do that and they may find the available ideas more or less useful.

Missives from Marx criticises those who “think we’re having a meta-ethics legitimation crisis. But we’re not—only they are.” Certainly, we’re not in danger of some sort of ‘total collapse’ where people all decide to rush madly into the street for orgies, rap concerts, and snorting crack off the bodies of sacrificial infants. And the suggestion that we are (or that such a thing is already happening) is an authoritarian and reactionary fantasy.

But I do think we’re at a point where the ideological scene looks somewhat washed out, with all the major ideologies seeming somewhat discredited, all the big questions seeming to lack convincing answers. That’s not just a theoretical situation – it’s primarily a political, and a social, situation. But I think it reinforces and is reinforced by a intellectual exhaustian that offers people little of the right kind of ideology.

And I think the ‘crisis of meta-ethical legitimation’ is one component of that. If it was entirely correct, a harsh truth, then that might be unfortunate but unavoidable – but if it’s actually a conceptual confusion then there may be some merit in trying to unravel it.

In observing certain conversations sparked by yesterday’s post, I felt stimulated to add some further thoughts, especially in trying to put religion in a broader context.

As I presented it yesterday, the essential process of reasoning that led to “all human beings deserve to be tortured and killed” is something like this:

1) Overall, everything is good.

2) But in cases x, y, z, etc… things are bad.

Therefore, 3) The specific people involved in x, y, z, etc… are bad and have themselves produced what happens to them.

We could put it in more visual terms by saying that because evil has been excluded on principle from the grand over-arching structure of the world, it has to be ‘localised’ as an intrinsic feature of those affected.

But the thing is, this isn’t at all unique to theism. Of course theism has the most extreme possible version of ‘overall, everything is good’. But other less metaphysically extravagant versions are also possible.

One example, I think, is that vague tradition of ideas that has held that modern knowledge and reason is in the ascendant, that across the world enlightenment is being shone, that history is over and the new age of rational, modern, progressively progressing prosperity is at hand. This was strong I think in the 19th century heyday of empire, got somewhat worried during the wars, and triumphantly resumed in the 90s.

This generates exactly the same kind of pressure towards projecting problems onto the worst-off as either their choice, or an intrinsic flaw. If ‘the natives’ are unhappy, restless, or even violent, then either it’s their fault for breeding too much, for refusing to ‘modernise’, for ungratefully fighting against our benevolent overseers – or else it is an inherent defect, a backwardness, a racial stupidity or aggressiveness. Either way: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

Of course it would be remiss of me not to admit that revolutionary ideology lends itself well to this. If we have assured ourselves that now, now that we are in charge and things are largely sorted out, everything should be improving and everybody should be inspired, we have set ourselves up to interpret any suggestion to the contrary as indicating, not that we were partly wrong, but that the people who raise the complaints are selfish, spiteful, counter-revolutionaries who must be purged.

And the ironic thing is that these latter two forms of modern ‘optmism’ will often use religion itself as their favoured scapegoat – the fanaticism and irrationality of the superstitious explains problems and justifies harsh measures against them.

The simplest form of this dynamic, of course, isn’t even at the level of ideology: if I need to believe that my partner/parent/owner/master is good and benign, then whenever they beat me up,  or frustrate or abuse me some other way – I must have deserved it. And whenever they do so to the other subordinates, those subordinates deserved it.

This kind of grand optimism – that the whole world is basically in good hands – is always latently authoritarian.

Why start with that optmistic premise though? Presumably, because it’s more comforting, gives more sense of meaning and security. That’s right – it can be comforting to believe that you or others deserve to suffer, and probably will in the future. That’s because, to quote Nietzsche (whose views on religion I find more and more compelling every week): “humanity’s problem is not that it suffers, but that it does not know why it suffers.”

So people respond to the weaknesses and insecurities and authoritarian nonsenses of their lives by ‘adapting’ themselves to authoritarian habits of thought.

So what I wrote yesterday is not an attack on religion as something special and distinctive and unique, but quite the opposite: an attack on religion as one distinct form of a far broader phenomenon. I find defenses to the argument from evil ‘hard to stomach’ precisely because of what they remind me of: victim-blaming in a hundred other contexts.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently listening to people talk about, and talking about, the ‘argument from evil’. To put it in its simplest possible form, it goes like this:

1) If the creator of the world is good and omnipotent, then the world should contain only good things, and a minimum of evil necessary for greater goods.

2) Have you looked at the world recently?

Therefore 3) There is probably no good, omnipotent, creator, i.e. no God.

This initial atheistic part of the argument is pretty simple (everybody accepts that P implies Q, not-Q, therefore not-P is a logically valid structure), so the bulk of the discussion then becomes a matter of theists arguing that actually, the world’s pretty great, the evil things in it are perfectly justified and necessary, and everything is for the best, and atheists trying to resist that.

I could rehearse the arguments here, and why I think the atheistic side is correct. But I suspect they’d be fairly old. Maybe some other time if people are interested. But there’s something else I get in these sorts of discussions sometimes that’s a bit less intellectual. I think I’ve reached the point where ‘defenses of God’ are not just unpersuasive, but hard to stomach.

That is, I feel not so much like I’m in the presence of a position I disagree with, but a mindset which is hostile to humanity as such. And today this reached a sort of beautiful conclusion, when one of my theistic interlocutors summed up the principle underlying it all. But that principle can be seen as growing out of pretty much every theistic strategy employed here.

The worst in some ways are the fiddly arguments, the whole papers devoted to proving ‘that it may be the case, given certain major assumptions, that the best possible universe would have to include at least a little bit of evil.’ As if that’s relevant. As if the impulses behind this sort of atheism is just the tepid observation that ‘hmm, sometimes things aren’t perfect’. If this sort of thing isn’t a joke, it’s evidence of a colossal sort of self-blindfolding, a resolute refusal to consider the scale of the relevant facts.

In short, this isn’t so much an argument, or a position, as a symptom, a socially-acceptable flaunting of a morally deformed mindset.

The same is true of other claims. Sometimes the claim is that evil and suffering exists to help ‘develop us’ morally, to help make us better people. By struggling through adversity and displaying heroic self-sacrifice, we justify both the atrocities and the general hum-drum grinding crappiness of life.

If this were true it would be a strikingly inefficient method for a omnipotent being to employ. Sometimes suffering and injustice improve us; but just as often they worsen us. Arguably, in fact, the real origin of most of the more spectacular forms of human evil we observe is previous frustration and suffering. People repeat the abuse they’ve been taught.

Accepting this argument, in fact, implies something like the following: if we want people to develop personally, we should throw them unprepared into a traumatic environment, somewhere filled with dangers and with only difficult and often illusory goals to pursue, where they don’t know what they’re doing and where the easiest way to get ahead is to turn on the others there with them and build up multiple levels of psychological self-defense to block out all the shit.

It’s not just that I think that’s false. It’s that I think it has some very frightening implications about how to raise children.

Or, half the time, the claim is that every form of human evil is an unavoidable consequence of ‘free will’. This has two implications: firstly, in general, that the situation in which people are placed has a negligible effect on how they will act, and whatever they do is an indication of their own inner nature – in psychology, this recognised and recognisably false cognitive bias is called the ‘fundamental attribution error‘.

Secondly, in particular, it implies that the sort of horrors that are routinely committed around the world are simply expressions of what people really want. If someone chooses to plot the extermination of a whole race, it must because they’re the sort of person who just loves extermination – not because of some pressure, some insufficiency, some confusion, but because their innermost soul just spits forth as its truest desire the utter negation of humanity.

So on the one hand we have a pervasive psychological bias being not just endorsed but turned up to the absolute max., and on the other we have ’some people just want to be monsters, on a whim’ – or else that’s their innate, fixed-at-birth nature. After all, it can’t be some external cause deforming them, because then it would be God’s responsibility. So the constant pressure is towards: people are evil, fear them, hate them.

Or of course it may just be ‘moves in mysterious ways’ (nowadays apparently this gets called skeptical theism). Supposedly our ability to understand what’s good and bad is just so limited that it makes no sense for us to try and evaluate whether the evil in the world is justified or unjustified.

Or to put it another way: just put aside everything that hurts you. All your grief and desperation and despair, put it aside. It’s not a good guide to reality. Let’s be objective about this: your personal tragedies tell us literally nothing about the world. Nor do the millions of others who can share their personal tragedies.

Of course, one of the consequences of this is then that we are also too cognitively limited to understand what’s right and wrong (not to mention that we are, as said above, evil). No matter: we have holy books, and holy men (that is not the neuter masculine, note) and so forth to tell us what’s right and wrong. No matter that those sources tell us appalling lies (burn pigeons as an atonement for menstruating!). No matter that we need to apply interpretation anyway, which always throws us back onto those darned cognitive faculties of ours.

But then there’s the point where all these somewhat-disguised versions of the underlying principle come out into the open. This is the doctrine that no suffering is unjustified: humans have no right to object to the misery which may characterise their lives, because as creatures of original sin, it is their just punishment.

When this was stated to me today explicitly by a friend, I was at first incredulous. I asked, half-ironically:

“So all human beings deserve to be tortured and killed?”

And the response was: “yes.” An unhesitant, confident, “yes”.

Let’s just lay that out again: “All human beings deserve to be tortured and killed.”

This is not a wacko newfangled idea, this is an idea with plenty of Christian history behind it, plenty of explicit statement in Grand and Respected theologians. But what about babies?

Yep, babies too. And 3 -year-olds, 6-year-olds, and 10-year-olds. Animals, of course, are free of ‘original sin’, but also have no rights whatsoever – their suffering and death is merely unimportant, not actually a positive instance of justice.

But wait, why aren’t you out with your righteousknife? Ah, because human beings don’t have the right to inflict the suffering and death. It would be cool if it came about, of course, but we must restrain ourselves and let God do it.

Of course at this point it all falls into place. The idea that the best way to morally improve people is by psychologically destroying them, the idea that we can’t ever confidently declare any tragedy or atrocity to be genuinely bad (it might work out ok according to the Divine Plan, after all). The idea that people just produce their evil behaviour out of themselves independently of their environment. They’re all just versions, disguised in one way or another, of the basic principle, which is a sort of cosmic victim-blaming and Stockholm syndrome.

And this is hardly surprising. Boiled down, the theistic response to the simple argument I started with is also very simple:

1) Life’s a bitch, and then you die;

2) Whatever happens is God’s will, and is good;

Therefore 3) All human beings deserve to be tortured and killed.

And I can’t think of a more evil principle than that.

A few recent posts have discussed the idea of retribution – the conviction that regardless of what benefit it might secure, for them or others, those who have done something wrong should suffer for it (or should be punished for it – is there a difference?)

The discussion so far has been largely ahistorical, abstracted from any particular social realities. In this post I want to change that by asking: what is the class significance of retribution as an idea? Does it characterise the attitude of any particular social groups more than others? And how might this have changed over time?

I also have in mind, when asking this, some recent posts about Foucault and his account of the ‘genealogy’ of punishment – and, behind that, the earlier ‘Genealogy of Morals‘ by Nietzsche.

How I want to proceed is by laying out some postulates, which you need not think are true, and then drawing out what they would predict, and observing that it (I think) seems to match up with a lot of what we do observe.

In the last post on this topic, I suggested some factors that might influence people’s disposition to retributive impulses. Based on these I want to make two postulates:

1) That insecurity of identity, any lack of confidence in one’s own worth or in the view of the world which allows one to remain ‘at home in it’, increase the disposition to retributive impulses.

2) The degree to which people value power and regard power as a crucial component of identity, also increases this disposition.

I’m not here arguing for the truth of any of these claims, though hopefully my presentation so far and here makes them at least plausible. I just want to lay them out, and compare what they would imply with what we can observe.

These are certainly not the whole story  – a lot of other postulates would be needed for a systematic account of the politics of punishment. One very prominent issue would be who actually benefits from different policies relating to crime and punishment. But interests can’t be looked at in isolation from psychology – we can’t define what people’s ‘interests’ are from the outside and then expect their behaviour to reflect that. So I wanted to think about how much explanatory work could be done using the two postulates above.

To them, though, I want to add some more postulates:

3) The greater the salience of a power dynamic in someone’s life, the more emphasis they will place on power in their view of the world and particular people.

That’s hopefully fairly obvious – when something is important in what happens to you, the mind responds by treating it as more important full stop (other things being equal). By ‘power dynamic’, I mean something like ‘a relationship where one person can control another’s actions without needing to persuade them’.

4) Being on either end of a power dynamic will tend to increase insecurity of identity.

That is, both the dominator and the dominated will be made less secure. If you’re wondering why I believe this, I’ve put it in a footnote*.

5) The increasing technology, organisation, and in general ’strength’ of a society will make people feel more secure, but will do so more strongly the more control they have over society’s resources.

6) As the division of labour increases, the number of people in an authoritarian society who are able to remain relatively remote from the actual exercise of power, increases – those who neither directly dominate nor are directly dominated become more numerous.

And if we finally suppose (as I think is fairly clearly true) that in general, over time, most Western societies have seen a growth in such ’strength’, we can make some predictions.

In pre-modern societies, with a generally insecure relationship to natural disasters, food supplies, each other, etc. we might expect to see retributive practises that are 1) widespread and 2) shock us in their viciousness: public disembowelling, crushings and flayings, crucifixion, burning alive, and so forth. This appears to be borne out, as far as my scant knowledge goes.

But at the emergence of the modern period, the power that society can deploy increases enormously. This makes the need for punishment and violent retribution less. At the same time, the number of people who aren’t conscious of themselves as either directly dominating or directly dominated (e.g. intellectuals, skilled workers, merchants) increases, and this group, relative to the others, is less committed to retribution and the satisfactions associated with it.

As a result, there would then be a systematic pressure to make punishments less openly ‘aggressive’, less viciously destructive. The rhetoric of blind harsh justice wanes, and discourses of proportionality, humaneness, rehabilitation, etc. grow to replace them. That doesn’t mean that retribution is now gone – clearly its not, and clearly this varies from place to place. But it seems that overall there is a much stronger sense of the potential primacy of other considerations.

Unless I am mistaken, this is precisely the process described by Foucault in ‘Discipline and Punishment’ – the birth of ‘humanitarian discipline’, and the replacement of the politics of death and sovereignty with that of life and its regulation. Though as I said, this congruence need not rule out other factors.

But there’s something else, that’s even more interesting. I talked about the greater sense of security and confidence produced by a more powerful society – but as remarked in postulate 5, this should have more of an effect for those people who have more control of society’s resources. That is, this reduction in retributive feeling is likely to actually be strongest in the ruling classes, in those for whom society and its strength is ‘theirs’.

But even stronger, perhaps, would be this phenomenon in the aforementioned newly-growing group who are removed from the direct exercise of power, and the anxieties it might throw up. This group, broadly speaking, we might call ‘the middle classes’, choosing that term not despite but because of its ambiguities.

So, speaking here in vast generalisation, the replacement of retributive approaches with ‘humanitarianism’, is mainly a phenomenon of the middle classes and upper classes. The lower classes, who are most excluded from society’s growing wealth, and who continue to be dominated and bossed about in their everyday lives, will ‘lag behind’.

The predicted result would be that retributive feelings, resentment, a desire to be ‘tough’ on criminals and ‘not let them get away with it’, would actually be most widespread among the ‘lower’ classes – where, note, those are defined in a non-Marxist way (i.e. a scientist who has a lot of control over their own work and a good income would here count as ‘middle-class’, whereas by Marxist lights they are proletarian).

This would then interact in important ways with the patterns of ‘material interests’. In many respects poorer people and communities suffer more from many sorts of crime – but in many other respects, increasing the severity with which crime is punished, and the harshness of the methods of its enforcement, will be to the disadvantage of the poor and the advantage of the powerful.

But if the psychology of retribution follows the pattern here predicted, then there would be a reservoir of anger and support for Law’n'Order, which would allow authoritarian fragments of the ruling class to draw heavily on the support of precisely the worst-off sections of the working class.

Those opposed forces which, both for good reasons and for bad selfish reasons, support more ‘tolerant’, ‘understanding’, and ‘rehabilitative’ approaches, ostensibly for the good of the poor themselves, would be lambasted as ‘bleeding-hearts’ and ‘elitists’, ‘on the side of the criminals’.

So that’s a few postulates, drawing on some of my earlier posts around this topic. And after looking at what they predict, it seems to me that those predictions are very often confirmed, suggesting that the postulates themselves contain at least a bit of truth.

Now I want to make a final comment. What would we expect to happen in a hypothetical society characterised by an extreme degree of equality and freedom? From the postulates laid out earlier, we would predict that retributive impulses would be hugely reduced relative to current societies, perhaps to the point of being absent from political discourse entirely.

To put it another way, in a maximally humanising, inclusive society, a society dedicated to supporting and reinforcing all of its member physically and psychologically, we would expect that ‘forgiveness’ would become much easier and so much more common.

But this has a certain consequence – if currently the most ‘anti-retributive’ group are the idealistic middle classes, perhaps most of all those damn students with their long hair and their gap years and their incense sticks, then this would appear to be a case where ‘communist consciousness’ (the mentality characteristic of future communist societies) is more similar to ‘middle class consciousness’ (given of course that there are more than one of those), than to ‘proletarian consciousness’.

*1. For the dominated, this is because being controlled means being treated like a tool or object, and not specifically as a person. It reinforces a sense of non-personhood. On the other hand, they are a person, and they have to recognise this at every moment when they act, think, choose, value, etc. This sets up a tension.

For the dominator, on the other hand, something similar happens. To resolve the tension between regarding the dominated as a person (which they obviously are),  and regarding them as a tool or object (which the dynamic presents them as), they have to suppose that they the dominator are such that it makes sense for them to dominate other persons. After all, it makes sense for anyone to ‘dominate’ objects, i.e. treat objects like objects – but it can’t make sense for everyone to dominate other people, for then nobody would ever obey. So the dominator must be ’special’ in some way. But in reality, they’re not profoundly different, and the need to maintain this inflated view of themselves makes them less secure.

I just came out of an extended conversation with a group of philosophers that centred around ‘the problem of evil’ in philosophy of religion (most of them were theists). A few interesting observations struck me.

One observation was observing, in quick succession, someone being willing to explain away and justify all the evils in the world in order to retain the idea that ‘God is perfectly good’, and then say that they considered humans (the crowning pinnacle of God’s creation, remember) were naturally bad in quite a strong sense – which, though I didn’t press them, would probably involve explaining away and debunking all the apparently good traits of humans. Coincidence?

Another was that one person, to support the idea that different sorts of moral standards apply to us as apply to God, tried to say that it’s commonplace for different people to be held to different sorts of morality. When asked for examples, they gave parents punishing children and governments governing their subjects – two relationships of authority.

And a third was perhaps less striking, but perhaps still worth mentioning. One of them (a theist), in explaining away various forms of suffering, said that the suffering of animals seemed fairly irrelevant to them; and when I said, by way of contrast, that ‘it is bad that animals suffer needlessly’ was so obvious to me as to be axiomatic, this seemed to provoke more surprise in the other participants than their dismissal.

Of course maybe they were right and I was wrong. Just making observations.

Also, those who are waiting for replies to comments (who are principally: Quentin, Quentin, and Quentin), I will reply tomorrow. After sleep. And a sufficently long time without doing work. Hopefully.

In a recent post I argued that the retributive conception of punishment, though it can make sense in particular cases, from certain perspectives, is overall incoherent and confused, and we should aim for a situation where it has no hold on people. But this will remain a meaninglessly abstract piece of moralism unless it is translated into political and historical terms. So let’s do that.

I think this will require a psychological treatment – though this doesn’t in itself make what we speak of ’subjective’, any more than a psychology of what factors affect people’s understanding of mathematics makes maths subjective. EDIT: so the psychological remarks ended up taking the whole post. That’s ok. Political stuff coming next post then. Stay tuned!

What factors will influence people’s tendency towards retributive feelings?

1) Most fundamentally, the confidence of the victim in their own worth (or whatever exactly the ‘crime’ has denied) makes retribution seem less necessary. Why do I need to ‘teach them a lesson’ if I’m really sure of the content of that lesson? At that point the ‘teaching’ simply becomes rehabilitation. To put it another way, inner strength makes forgiveness proportionately more possible.

2) In relation to particular actions, the extent to which someone’s identity is invested in what is denied and ignored by that action – what strikes at our heart makes more of an impact than what, though it might harm us, leaves our sense of ourselves and the world untouched. But this will tend to average out across people, I think.

3) The more the ‘dignity’ and ‘moral authority’, that must be defended and vindicated, is bound up with actual power, real or desired, the more sense retribution will make – because though beatings and cagings are crude instruments for demonstrating moral truths to be, they are very good at demonstrating power.

Those are the hypotheses I’ll be working with. I tried to explain number 3. in the last post in this series, and 2. pretty much follows from 1., so I’ll just say a bit about point 1.

What I have in mind here is a picture sort of like this. In any person’s psyche there are various competing beliefs about themselves and the world. In some cases, where they are very ‘insecure’ there are two or more contradictory such beliefs, both of which have a lot of strength, but of which the person is committed to holding onto one (because the rest of the psyche is, so to speak, ‘built on it’).

For example, someone insecure about their masculinity has two simultaneous beliefs, one in which they are a Real Man, and one in which they are a fag of whatever sort. They ‘believe’ the former, in that they permit it to enter explicit consciousness, they base their overt actions and statements on it, etc. – it has a somewhat foundational place in a ’structure’ of psychic organisation.

But because the other belief is there, hiding in the shadows, certain stimuli can have a disproportionate effect. When something happens that suggests that this person is a fag, an ‘inadequate’ ‘man’, it’s not like something suggests that they are a cat. Something that suggests that they are a cat is very very odd, bizarre, but for precisely this reason, almost certainly false or misunderstood. It poses no threat. But the suggestion of inadequate masculinity ’stimulates’ the latent belief and brings it into consciousness, strengthens it.

Suddenly turmoil! If this belief is accepted, it will push aside the established belief (that he’s a Real Man), or at least turn it from a certainty to a mere possibility. And then the whole structure based on that foundation shudders and seems to be about to fall; the experience is of confusion, chaos, terror, and helplessness. Something must be done – and often what is done is to create, as rapidly as possible, a stimulus that strengthens the ‘Real Man’ belief – like punching someone or thrashing an animal. Or eating a beef-and-guns sundwich served in a beer bottle. Or whatever.

So my suggestion is that retribution works like this as well. In the example of, for example, having a child murdered, the ’suggestion’ of that action is maybe something like this: “it’s no big deal for this kid to die; they’re a triviality, and you, the family members, your feelings and love are also inconsequential” (though the motives and circumstances will obviously make a difference).

Do people ’secretly believe’ this about themselves? Is there an insecurity lurking in people’s minds that they don’t really matter at all, that they’re nothing? It seems sadly likely to me. But the degree of strength of such a belief will obviously depend on a lot of factors, some genetic and some environmental. Some of the things that might strengthen such a belief might include:

-denial: a life of seeing things that are not for you;

-erasure: seeing the (legitimate) social sphere as filled with people different from you;

-silencing: having one’s statements and opinions ignored;

-abuse: a history of being treated in ways that only make sense on this assumption;

-isolation: lack of opportunities to get reinforcement and validation from others;

-objectification: being overwhelmingly led to relate to oneself as the object of other’s desires or actions, not as yourself a subject;

-rejection: having one’s offer of oneself refused;

-manipulation: being treated like a tool to be utilised, not a person to be engaged with;

…

Etc. Hopefully you get the idea.

If someone doesn’t have this strong ‘belief in their own worthlessness’ hiding in their heads, if they know that they are valuable, indeed priceless, then I believe that forgiveness would be relatively easy even in the face of serious crime.

But if they have this nagging doubt alive and kicking, then actions (crimes or insults or betrayals) that send this message will make their very psychic survival depend on ‘fighting back’, on finding a way to affirm the opposite. And punishment is one method of this – sometimes the only one available.

This is why I propose hypothesis 1. I had meant for this post to be the last one in this series, but obviously it’s not because the psychology here has only laid the groundwork for the political and historical discussion that I said was necessary.