In my latest post on this issue (here)
I identified a thorny problem in the ideal society we should all be striving
for (yep, I’m universalist like that), as there was an inherent difficulty reconciling
the required openness of every small social unit (phratria) so they were
effectively limited in their ability to encroach on the liberty of their
members with their freedom to dictate their own rules according to any
tradition they identified with, many of those traditions being pretty
authoritarian and definitely non-open. To put it in more precise and recognizable
terms, what do I think should happen if a gay couple wants to settle in a
phratry that professes to enact the social teachings of Jesus Christ of the
Latter Days Saints Church (or of the Catholic Church, for that matter)? Such teachings
include the condemnation of homosexuality, the lack of recognition of
homosexual weddings, the prohibition of adoption by homosexual couples, etc. In
effect, the rules of the group would impede the normal flourishing of the gay
couple as long as they wanted to flourish as gays, and saw the free expression
of such feature of their lives as essential to their well being, as (if the
attitude of a vast majority of gays in Western nations towards the public
expression of their sexual preferences is any indication) they are very wont to
do. It doesn’t take great wisdom to understand that what the group wants is to
be able to effectively discriminate against the gay couple’s preferences, as indeed
they may want to discriminate against a much vaster number of preferences that
their belief system considers plain wrong or abhorrent (with a vocabulary of older times
they would describe it as “morally” wrong, something our secular culture has
great difficulty dealing with), so arguing against them that those preferences
are just a matter of personal choice between consenting adults that can cause
no harm to the rest of the community would likely not cause much effect.
I feel the need to insist in a point
I’ve previously made: for liberal, secularly educated readers, this is a hard
argument to follow, as the dominant reason they have been indoctrinated by (and
I know “indoctrination” sounds like a harsh word, and may make some assume I’m
somehow disparaging them for that or calling them dupes for not realizing how
their supposedly enlightened and universal value system is as much a product of
their age and upbringing as any other in the history of humanity… let’s just
say at this point this is not my intention, or not yet at least) makes them
think human beings are infinitely pliable creatures, so whatever values they
decide to adopt can only be arbitrary social constructions, and thus the only sensible
policy is to live and let live (may be with a modicum of extra care for
children and other historically oppressed minorities due to their limited
agency, but anything beyond preventing the most blatant abuse would already be
patronizing and to some extent demeaning). I’ve noticed that kind of person
always reacts with surprise (and lack of understanding) to the fact that some
people may still think that values can have an objective existence, regardless
of how many people consider them valid or true (they, as the other side, tend to
label people that hold beliefs different from theirs, including beliefs about
beliefs, as “bigots”, by the way), and through the belief in such values
stubbornly hold opinions that may be contrary to the majority’s consensus.
The problem is, only by nurturing
communities that can indefinitely avoid such consensus can we hold our hopes of
going beyond the three iron rules of desiderative reason that are the ultimate
cause of our current predicament. What I want my readers to consider is that
you start (innocently enough) thinking that values are complicated stuff, and
that really history teaches us that they can come in any shape, color and
flavor, so most likely they are social constructs through and through and not
to put much stock in them. So from there you necessarily go to the proposition
that, as values are arbitrary, there is only a minimal set that should be
honored (based on our biology, or our understanding of natural selection, or
what positive science has taught us –all circular constructions to boot, but I
won’t dwell in that for now): things like not causing unnecessary pain, fairly
reciprocating and letting people conduct their lives as they see fit as long as
they don’t cause unnecessary pain either (at least to people lacking the
maturity or the lucidity to accept it consensually). But in a social world were
only those things are valuable and meaningful (acting now as a synonym for “important,
worthy of respect”) we end up fairly quickly in “only pleasure is valuable/
meaningful” (because any other pursuit is founded on a social construct/ is
arbitrary/ is finally a lie), which is another way of saying “the only end of
life is to satisfy desires (as we desire that which we think will give us more
pleasure)”… and of course if we think this of ourselves, we will also think
that of everybody else, and we will create a society where only social position
counts, where such position is determined exclusively by how much money we
have. As experience teaches us, such society is low on trust and commitment,
and requires enormous amounts of work to function properly (or as close to
properly as it can get). In such society everybody ends worse off, as that work
is unavoidably taken by flawed human beings that end up sucking more collective
resources than what they enable to be produced, and distributing them according
to their whim (but rarely in ways that benefit the majority of those involved
in their creation).
If we want then to avoid such
slippery slope, we need to respect not only the liberty of individuals to pursue
their lives’ interests as they see fit, including their liberty to discard
every value except the minimal set agreed upon by liberals, but also the
liberty of groups to embrace more restrictive sets, and to enforce them in
public life, at least within certain boundaries. What boundaries are those? Well,
the universal rights we defined as non negotiable (here) are a good starting
point again, so our religiously inspired community not only can not, obviously
enough, burn the gay couple (that seems quite a low bar to set, doesn’t it?), but
it can not use any kind of force or physical coercion against them, it can not
deny them the same means of subsistence they provide any other citizen (my
cherished UBI), they can not bar them from running for office if they choose
public officers through elections (although experience shows that religious
people of those persuasions are not very inclined to vote for openly gay
candidates). But on the other hand, the community can not be coerced in “accepting”
them, can not be coerced in giving them a status similar to heterosexuals in
their teaching, can not be coerced in giving them the same standing and legal benefits
they choose to bestow in heterosexual couples beyond the basic means of
subsistence, can not be coerced to create quotas for them if they have
representative institutions… Because trying to force the community (any
community) into accepting the universal set of values we happen to cherish results
in getting us back into the anomic, dysfunctional set of values we defined at
the beginning of our manifesto as the core cause of all modern maladies.
So the best we can hope for is to
keep a necessarily unstable balance between individual rights and what we may
call “groupal” rights (rights of the group, which in modern liberal theory are
not that different from “tribal” rights that may be bestowed in non-majority
communities within a given polity in recognition of the noxious influence that
their assimilation willy-nilly in the greater community may have, even
recognizing that those tribal rights may in some cases imply than the
individuals within the tribe may have less freedom than their peers outside it).
The extent to which groups (in our case, the phratria) can impinge in their members’
choices about how to live is however limited by the always existing possibility
of such members leaving for greener pastures if the imposed rules (that in
theory should have been freely accepted) become too rigid. Some groups credo
will be, no doubt, downright obnoxious and beyond distasteful for the majority
of humankind (like the white supremacist example we offered in our previous
post), but accepting the existence of such islands of bigotry still seems like
a small price to pay for an overall freer existence for all (freer, that is,
from the invisible fetters of bending all of one’s will and one’s time to the
three uncompromising commandments of current rationality). Of course, that is
under the assumption that not all the phratria will be formed by self-segregated
bigots, differing only in their persuasion and the identity of the features
they shun and despise, and that there will be enough liberal, democratic
phratria for everybody to find their place under the sun in a welcoming, accommodating
group of fellow humans. If that is not the case, the ideal AT society we are
proposing may end up being a varied menu of equally unappealing choices where
some people just may not find any group willing to accommodate them where they
could truly fit and prosper. Being myself quite the special snowflake (as I
mentioned in a previous post, a Marxist –from Groucho, not Karl- who could
never belong to a club that accepted people like himself) I don’t think I’m
blindly asking my fellow citizens to accept a compact that would go better for
me than for them (rather the opposite, it is the odd ones like myself who are
at a greater risk of ending out of any major compact, ill-fitted and unwelcome
in any polity), and so feel legitimately entitled to forge ahead with my
proposals.
As an afterthought, an interesting
and dystopian possibility is that the groups with the most fanatical, most
retrograde views prosper (in the sense that their members find their lives so
much more fulfilling that it still pays for them to transmit such gift, and
keep reproducing at or above replacement rates) while the freer, more
enlightened ones dwindle and finally wither away. As long as they are allowed
to do so of their own accord, without any neighboring group attacking,
conquering or imposing their will on them and taking advantage of their latest
days frailty (something that would be a historical novelty, by the way, as a
growing polity has always found it irresistibly attractive to plunder and
submit any neighboring state or tribe that grew significantly weaker than
itself), let it be so.
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