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| Image credit. While I was talking about my ideas, she was elsewhere in her thoughts. |
Continued from here.
Here are just a few keywords to remind me of the ideas that I would like to propose in the concluding section of the chapter on politics.
Freedom as Creative Destruction
Overarching the entire argument of the chapter is the notion that freedom is a dynamic equilibrating order supporting a culture of unprecedented dissension whose potential for destructive and even violent discord is kept at bay by commensurate forces of sublimation and pacification. Freedom is an order of "creative destruction", where the anabolic (life/system building) elements are adequate to contain an overload and metastasis of the catabolic (life/system destroying) elements.
The claim may be advanced that freedom is that condition in which the benign potential inherent in human beings is maximised to an extent that is unparalleled in human history. The idea of a maximisation, of course, is overdrawn and somewhat naive; but it points to something important as the possibility of the very criticism of this thesis attests to:
No Option But to Prefer More Options to Less
Thanks to freedom man is presented with more options to organise his life, a significant class of which options enable man to adapt better to the world (of enhanced options). Among these options we find the right and the ability to doubt the benign character and desirability of the option-enhanced world of freedom.
All things considered, the free world resembles a research institute with an unrivalled capacity for experimentation and innovative output (representing genuine material advancement) produced under conditions of peaceful coexistence. A defence of (the results of) liberty will largely hinge on one's ability to argue persuasively that she produces an outcome of substantial net benefits and peace. According to this conception of liberty, she is distinct from partisan ideology in that she represents a procedural order within which almost any type of non-violent dissension, including ideological dissension is embraced. At the same time, liberty cannot be neutral, but she is wedded to a set of procedures and institutions that keep all forms of partisanship exposed to challenge and change.
7. Results and Purpose of Freedom
7.1 Freedom as a Dynamic Equilibrating Order
According to Hilary Putnam,
Democracy is not just one form of social life among other workable forms of social life; it is the precondition for the full application of intelligence to the solution of social problems ... a requirement for experimental inquiry in any area. To reject democracy is to reject the idea of being experimental.
Quoted from, Westbrook, R.B. Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstruction the Logic of John Dewey's Faith, p.129
7.2 Freedom and Democracy
Basic to freedom is the capacity for choice in the human being. However, that capacity is useless when it lies idle, for choice is unattractive unless there is a power to follow it up and sustain it. Freedom extends the human scope from the ability to see choice to the empowerment to make intelligent and personally satisfying choices. If this ability is widely distributed among human beings, they become more adept at adjusting themselves profitably to their environment, including themselves.
7.3 Freedom as Choice, Empowerment, and Improved Adaptation
As against widespread belief, the dichotomy between facts and values is an error. Facts are value-laden. Without reference to values we would not be able to perceive facts, i.e. order our perceptions to present us with what we call facts. The conceit is dangerous that posits value-free scientific objectivity in sharp contrast to the "woolly" thinking that is supposed to be naturally characteristic of political and ethical deliberation. Both scientific and ethical thinking depend on a set of crucial/foundational values underlying them. These values help us to learn from mistakes, coordinate our efforts at solutions, and cope with the uncertainty inherent in the naturally open-ended projects of scientific and ethical inquiry, orienting us toward incremental and comparative improvements.
Values need to be admitted, let out in the open, and be made part of the competition of propositions by which we seek to come to grips with the world around us.
As I have been arguing for a long time, politics is a discovery procedure, no less than science or the workings of economic competition and markets.
7.4 Value-based Facts — The Ubiquity of Values
★★★
The Gliederung (including comments) so far:
1. What Is Politics?
1.1 Politics — Wider Sense
1.2 Politics — Narrower Sense
1.3 Politics in General - Part of the Human Condition
2. Politics under Conditions of Freedom
2.1 Freedom — Adapting to the Individualistic Age
2.2 Rise of Individualism
2.3.1 The New Social Persona - The Autonomous Individual as a State-provided Public Good
3. The Politics of Public Goods
3.1 Political Participation - Organising the Permanent Redrafting of the Social Contract
3.2 Privatising Law and Life — The Individualistic State as Radical Privatiser
3.3 Disencumbering Justice by Auxilliary Forms of Legitimacy
Politics in a free society is a vast, subtle, and multidimensional cultural network that only as a whole gives meaning, effectiveness, and strength to its more visible institutions such as elections, parlamentarianism, and majority rule.
4.1 Epistemological Functions of Freedom and Politics - Politics as a Discovery Process
4.2 Science and Freedom — "Moral Images" à la Putnam - Open-ended, Incomplete and Changing
4.3 Culture-Questioning and Culture-Shaping in Civil Society
4.4 Politics as Part of the Division of Labour in a Free Society
4.5 Politics and Poppers World 3
4.6 The Long Road from Anthropocentric Freedom to Sociogenic Freedom
4.7 The System of Sociogenic Freedom — Politics - Improving State Technologies
We may look at freedom as the extension of man's tendency to diminish natural risks by increasing and adequately controlling social risks — freedom creates more open conflict but attenuates the level of aggression by sublimating it commensurably.
5. Dynamic Conditions of Politics in a Free Society
5.2 The SO of Rationally Adapting to SO - The Evolution of Skills of Interference
The ability of man to adapt to evolutionary order (= SO = spontaneous order) is itself subject to evolutionary advancement. It is not at all "unnatural" for man to interfere with the natural evolutionary order, in fact, he has evolved to be able to interfere with it successfully. He is even cultivating an evolutionary tool of his own making: cultural evolution, which is far more "rapid-acting" than genetic evolution is.
5.3 Politics a Means of Economising on Vice and Detriment (especially Predation)
5.4 Politics — Leveraging 'The Ultimate Resource'
5.5 'The Political Habitus' — It Is Natural for Modular Man to Act Politically
The Subtle Ubiquity of Political Participation
It is a common, yet arbitrary, unwarranted, and certainly one-sided habit to conceive of political participation in a free society chiefly in terms of acts of centralised, categorical, and ultimate (as opposed to incremental, cumulative, and dispersed) public decision-making — voting a government into power, a decision by government or the electorate to leave the EU e.g.
Important as such highlight events of public politics are, they form only the tip of the iceberg, and, like an iceberg, may be thought of as being supported by a larger bulk less readily taken note of. Not only are the attention-catching rites of public politics undergirded by much pedestrian plodding that — while not seen in the limelight glare — does involve considerable political participation by the citizenry; civil society is riddled with subtle and subliminal forms of political participation taking place below the threshold of (broad and generally shared) public visibility. Testing the mood of the party base or unexpectedly facing its backlash are among the innumerable instances of building a workable political atmosphere by increment and gradual accumulation. Organising (special interest) into a form fit to be acted upon by the ultimate decision makers is another case in point. However, these are examples that still belong rather distinctly within what I like to call the political infrastructure.There is still more invisible political participation going on outside of the designated stages of public politics.
Important as such highlight events of public politics are, they form only the tip of the iceberg, and, like an iceberg, may be thought of as being supported by a larger bulk less readily taken note of. Not only are the attention-catching rites of public politics undergirded by much pedestrian plodding that — while not seen in the limelight glare — does involve considerable political participation by the citizenry; civil society is riddled with subtle and subliminal forms of political participation taking place below the threshold of (broad and generally shared) public visibility. Testing the mood of the party base or unexpectedly facing its backlash are among the innumerable instances of building a workable political atmosphere by increment and gradual accumulation. Organising (special interest) into a form fit to be acted upon by the ultimate decision makers is another case in point. However, these are examples that still belong rather distinctly within what I like to call the political infrastructure.There is still more invisible political participation going on outside of the designated stages of public politics.
A lot of what we do in those segments of civil society that do not belong to the political infrastructure is nevertheless political in nature, i.e. it is designed to preserve or change the order of human interaction — to wit, in ways that used to be controlled by political elites. In fact, it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between political elites and impersonal traditional and cultural forces that the former may more or less instrumental in enforcing. At any rate, the effect of the rule of these elites and cultural background forces was to close off large areas of the social universe for activities involving personal discretion by the common people.
Privatised Politics
Roughly speaking, life was pre-organised for the common man, rather than him organising life of his own accord. This changes fundamentally in a free society, where the individual is making an impact on social affairs by virtue of seeking influence and taking decisions in ways that reflect the new social setting in which she is her own centre of strategic positioning in the games of human interaction. She makes the choice of her profession. She decides on the portfolio of knowledge and education she wishes to avail herself of. She decides herself which among the varieties of convictions (political religious etc.) to favour. She determines the political etc. allegiances she will commit herself to. She is the origin of initiative independent of governmental approval — founding her own firm, political party, circle of friends, choosing her own way of life, being free to build, expand, compose and rearrange a material base that will sustain her. And so on. These used to be decisions reserved to indefeasible authorities. By shifting responsibility to the individual not only do we witness a significant privatisation of political decisions that used to be heteronomously decided on — which shifting does not remove the political character of the issues at hand and hence only extends the area of politics into the private sphere — the scope of possible choices is widened massively introducing options never extant or considered before. Religious freedom — the freedom to personally choose one's religious affiliation — is perhaps the first significant example of relocating political decisions into the "sub-jurisdiction" of the individual.
Privatised politics is politics by virtue of being a mode capable of solving the quintessential problem of politics: the management of political scarcity. Privatised politics is politics also by virtue of shaping the political atmosphere and the legitimate options that we may choose from in order to be regarded as behaving in ways that are socially acceptable. Just think of the changes that familial status has undergone in the past 60 years: practices at risk of social ostracism such as divorce, giving birth and raising children out of wedlock etc. have advanced from negative to positive taboos, from being repulsed via social proscription to being hailed as worthy of social protection.
In pursuing strategies that fall entirely in the realm of private action we often bring about political effects, both in terms of micro-politics and macro-politics. In a highly stylised manner, let me sketch a time-lapse scenario to show what I mean: private action leads to scientific advancement, which revolutionises agriculture; new private forms of agricultural production change rural communities, depleting them (by a combination of agricultural mechanisation and urban industrialisation) and later on rebuilding them as attractive suburban environments — altering the perception of the world in which one lives, thus giving rise to politico-legal changes. Such trends are driven by personal decisions, by private initiative, but nonetheless they change the frame of what counts as socially permissive. Of course, these developments will enclose strategies involving use of the political infrastructure; which only goes to show that private initiative begets public needs, while public responses will tend to accommodate and foster new private initiatives that then produce novel public implications and so on. Litigation in the private sphere, personal and commercial, is a prime example of the privatisation of politics or, if you will, the pursuit of politics by private means. Huge chunks of political scarcity are allotted to private parties to sort out. In turning to courts, private parties seek to influence each other, each hoping to secure social dominance for their interests by having the full force of the law support their concerns.
The Taboo against Corruption
The modern conception of corruption does not oppose the idea of taking influence so as to further one's particularistic goals; on the contrary, it is based on the idea that everyone is entitled to try to bring the public under the influence of their favoured perspectives. What the modern idea of corruption does object to is that anyone should be precluded from exercising the right of taking influence, and the signal aspect of the taboo against corruption that at once occurs to everyone on hearing the term — taking influence on terms that are generally prohibited — ineluctably follows from the precept that every citizen may act as a (special) interest and has a right to compete in the political arena for the recognition of his viewpoint. In other words, corruption is considered to consist in such activities as effectively turn influence-taking from a general right into a privilege of the few or indeed the lone crafty individual, as the case may be. Corruption is viewed as a travesty, threat and mockery of the proper ways — open to all — of impacting the public.
It is tempting to characterise modern politics as the democratisation of corruption; however, for all its rhetorical effectiveness, the phrasing could not be more misleading. The point is that we have rules that constrain and let loose into the open those energies in us that seek to make an impact on the fellow citizen and the community at large. We can partake in such action only because all of us are equally equipped and equally frustrated in exercising our right to make a difference by persuasion.
6. Forms of Political Participation in a Free Society
6.1 The Presumption of Democratic Participation - the Taboo against Corruption
6.3 Subtler Forms of Participation within the Political Infrastructure
6.4 Participation outside the Political Infrastructure
Continued here.
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