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| Image credit. It is a bright April morning. On my walks along the nearby lakes, I often pass by swans, including a pair of black swans, the male being characteristically aggressive and the female cautious. The male black swan is not afraid to rush out of the water to chase and bite even humans. I worry he might get badly bitten by one of the dogs he keeps going after. I used to have gander-friend who would attack dogs without reserve, until he got his beak crushed by an irritated Labrador. The injury must have been very painful, the gander kept to himself for weeks on end without any signs of his usual aggressiveness. Eventually his brainless valour would make a comeback, and Petunius would take up the old business of assailing dogs with as much furore as ever. |
Continued from here.
Rearranging and expanding on some of the ideas from Prelude to Politics (3), let me offer the following thread of arguments:
A Basic Human Need: Politics - Influencing your Social Environment
Being a social animal, man inevitably needs to adapt to his community. His adaptations are not only of the passive sort. Endowed with an urge for anthropogenic freedom - a spontaneous disposition to engage in acts of his own volition -, man seeks to influence his social environment. His inclination to purposively effect an impact on his fellows is the source motive of all political behaviour.
Regularities and Coercion, Politics and Coercion
In pursuing politics man will either impose regularities on others or be made subject to regularities imposed upon him. Rules may be instituted by persuasion, but for them to be binding they must be as firm as an unshakable imposition. It is the inescapable need for enforcement of rules to create a stable and predictable social environment that establishes the pronounced affinity between and concomitance of politics and coercion.
Coercion as Productive Force
This is important to note, especially against a tendency to associate politics with repressive, unnecessary, and unjustified coercion. Coercion serves as a productive force that cannot be eliminated from society. Admittedly, coercion may have malign consequences, but it is not per se evil. Whatever kind of society we condone, we cannot have it without those forms of coercion that give it functionality, order, and stability.
Freedom Is Coercive
Defining admissible acts of coercion and delimitating them from illegitimate forms of social coercion is the key function of politics. Therefore, a free society cannot do without politics. Being highly political, a free society is therefore necessarily highly coercive.
The Quality Not The Extent of Coercion Matters
Being a social animal, man inevitably needs to adapt to his community. His adaptations are not only of the passive sort. Endowed with an urge for anthropogenic freedom - a spontaneous disposition to engage in acts of his own volition -, man seeks to influence his social environment. His inclination to purposively effect an impact on his fellows is the source motive of all political behaviour.
Regularities and Coercion, Politics and Coercion
In pursuing politics man will either impose regularities on others or be made subject to regularities imposed upon him. Rules may be instituted by persuasion, but for them to be binding they must be as firm as an unshakable imposition. It is the inescapable need for enforcement of rules to create a stable and predictable social environment that establishes the pronounced affinity between and concomitance of politics and coercion.
Coercion as Productive Force
This is important to note, especially against a tendency to associate politics with repressive, unnecessary, and unjustified coercion. Coercion serves as a productive force that cannot be eliminated from society. Admittedly, coercion may have malign consequences, but it is not per se evil. Whatever kind of society we condone, we cannot have it without those forms of coercion that give it functionality, order, and stability.
Freedom Is Coercive
Defining admissible acts of coercion and delimitating them from illegitimate forms of social coercion is the key function of politics. Therefore, a free society cannot do without politics. Being highly political, a free society is therefore necessarily highly coercive.
The Quality Not The Extent of Coercion Matters
When comparing a free society to alternative societal forms, it is more fruitful to think of the purposes and functions of coercion peculiar to a free society than of the larger or lesser extent to which coercion prevails in it.
A stretch of road may have been far less regulated and thus less subject to coercion 200 years ago than today. But the very stretch of road may be yielding far more and far better services than it used to in the past - thanks to entirely new features that depend on coercive regulation such as protected property rights, the coordination of a larger number of adjacent residents, a wider range of hitherto unprecedented public utility services (water, gas, electricity, sewage, telephone lines and other cables), technologically advanced high frequency traffic (50 mph and more rather than 5 mph representing top speed and 500 trucks passing by per hour rather than a donkey cart a day) etc.
A stretch of road may have been far less regulated and thus less subject to coercion 200 years ago than today. But the very stretch of road may be yielding far more and far better services than it used to in the past - thanks to entirely new features that depend on coercive regulation such as protected property rights, the coordination of a larger number of adjacent residents, a wider range of hitherto unprecedented public utility services (water, gas, electricity, sewage, telephone lines and other cables), technologically advanced high frequency traffic (50 mph and more rather than 5 mph representing top speed and 500 trucks passing by per hour rather than a donkey cart a day) etc.
So, politics is (in significant measure) about regulating the conditions, contents, and quality of coercion (used to enforce social regularities).
Foundational Nature of Rules and Regularities
Regularities - rules, norms or laws - are absolutely foundational to human interaction. They determine the kind of behaviour that will be tolerated in a community. Norms are ubiquitous. They have to be, to fulfil their function - which is to ensure for all of us reliable orientation in almost all situations that may crop up in human interaction. A system of norms is deficient if it leaves me and my fellow citizens uninstructed as to what they may or may not do, say, with respect to access to and dealing with property.
Picture me walking over to my neighbour and starting to coat her flowers with paint. This is an unheard of situation — I have never done this before, my neighbour surely does not expect me to act in this way, and, besides, in reality I have no intention to behave in this manner. Yet every normal person will be able to assess the unusual scene and find sufficient normative orientation to respond to it on rationally defensible grounds, as if the awkward event was part of a daily routine: assuming no special circumstances, such as my having received permission for the bizarre act, everyone recognises at once, I am violating the norms of society — I am damaging somebody's property, and I am deviating intolerably from our standards of propriety and perhaps even sanity. This is because the network of norms valid in our society has evolved to be spun wide and finely enough to cover even rather unexpected cases. In fact, by telling us, mostly by implication, what we are allowed to do, at the same time, our social norms imply any number of contraventions.
Politics - Taking Care of Foundational Rules and Regularties
Regularities - rules, norms or laws - are absolutely foundational to human interaction. They determine the kind of behaviour that will be tolerated in a community. Norms are ubiquitous. They have to be, to fulfil their function - which is to ensure for all of us reliable orientation in almost all situations that may crop up in human interaction. A system of norms is deficient if it leaves me and my fellow citizens uninstructed as to what they may or may not do, say, with respect to access to and dealing with property.
Picture me walking over to my neighbour and starting to coat her flowers with paint. This is an unheard of situation — I have never done this before, my neighbour surely does not expect me to act in this way, and, besides, in reality I have no intention to behave in this manner. Yet every normal person will be able to assess the unusual scene and find sufficient normative orientation to respond to it on rationally defensible grounds, as if the awkward event was part of a daily routine: assuming no special circumstances, such as my having received permission for the bizarre act, everyone recognises at once, I am violating the norms of society — I am damaging somebody's property, and I am deviating intolerably from our standards of propriety and perhaps even sanity. This is because the network of norms valid in our society has evolved to be spun wide and finely enough to cover even rather unexpected cases. In fact, by telling us, mostly by implication, what we are allowed to do, at the same time, our social norms imply any number of contraventions.
Politics - Taking Care of Foundational Rules and Regularties
Regularities are indispensable for orderly human interaction to take place —so they must be sought for, tested, improved etc. All this is an important part of politics.
In designing, modifying and testing social regularities by our political efforts, we keep coming up against anthropogenic freedom—that is: we inevitably challenge human self-will, the human disposition to elicit self-interest and pursue wilfulness. So, politics seeks a more or less skewed balance between the need of generally enforceable social regularities and anthropocentric freedom. The basic pattern of our political endeavours is to either enforce the anthropocentric demands of a person or to suppress such demands in favour of similar demands made by other persons.
The Making and Construal of Rules Is a Form of Political Activity
The rules that structure human society and the interaction taking place in it may be simple—at least some of them, and perhaps—in theory—all of them, but they entail complex implications.
They are clearly a part of Popper's World Three of embodied and unembodied entities with an objective content. Notably, in creating them or discovering and handling them, we are likely to chance upon aspects that we have not put into them, to begin with, or are unaware of at first. They require a gradual working out of their consequences and implications, like scientific theories do.
They may be incomplete, ill-chosen and in need of interpretation and their construal may require arbitrated compromise, all of this relative to partial views and interests. In this way, deducing right and wrong is essentially a political activity, a struggle to establish which outcomes are to be considered socially valid and therefore command the right to be enforced.
The Making and Construal of Rules Is a Form of Political Activity
The rules that structure human society and the interaction taking place in it may be simple—at least some of them, and perhaps—in theory—all of them, but they entail complex implications.
They are clearly a part of Popper's World Three of embodied and unembodied entities with an objective content. Notably, in creating them or discovering and handling them, we are likely to chance upon aspects that we have not put into them, to begin with, or are unaware of at first. They require a gradual working out of their consequences and implications, like scientific theories do.
They may be incomplete, ill-chosen and in need of interpretation and their construal may require arbitrated compromise, all of this relative to partial views and interests. In this way, deducing right and wrong is essentially a political activity, a struggle to establish which outcomes are to be considered socially valid and therefore command the right to be enforced.
Summary of Prelude to Politics (3):
Politics is the spectrum of options that are available to give preference to one decision in the face of mutually exclusive decisions.
Political scarcity is the lack of unanimity (among sufficiently momentous parties) in deciding (important) issues affecting the community. The high incidence and grave consequences of political scarcity require man to organise coerced cooperation.
Apart from relying on coerced enforcement, politics shapes the world of socially valid acts, including employment of persuasion and transrational strategies (transforming high cost short-tern conflicts into higher benefit long-term games of mutual accommodation).
In shaping the world of socially valid acts, politics is a major contributor to our sense of reality, it feeds our readiness and ability to perceive what we accept as the real world. Politics is a creative force that accommodates the human urge to live in a world that makes sense and where things accord with our idea of order.
Continued here.
Politics is the spectrum of options that are available to give preference to one decision in the face of mutually exclusive decisions.
Political scarcity is the lack of unanimity (among sufficiently momentous parties) in deciding (important) issues affecting the community. The high incidence and grave consequences of political scarcity require man to organise coerced cooperation.
Apart from relying on coerced enforcement, politics shapes the world of socially valid acts, including employment of persuasion and transrational strategies (transforming high cost short-tern conflicts into higher benefit long-term games of mutual accommodation).
In shaping the world of socially valid acts, politics is a major contributor to our sense of reality, it feeds our readiness and ability to perceive what we accept as the real world. Politics is a creative force that accommodates the human urge to live in a world that makes sense and where things accord with our idea of order.
Continued here.
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