On Rights, Part Three: Thinking about Society and Government

Part One: On the Origin of Rights... here. Part Two: Liberty, Society and the Tyranny of the Individual... here.

In my previous post in this series, I asserted that the aggrandizement of the individual and his emplacement outside society was a denial of fundamental truths about being human. I made this claim despite my extreme discomfort with the notion of "human nature," offering as proof the fact that everywhere humans live, they live in communities. Logically, then, the community must be a development in human evolution that has been positively selected as our species endures. Still, we must be careful about how much we infer from nature. The move from is to ought is fraught with peril and we must avoid falling into the naturalistic fallacy. Yet I contend that we can safely infer some things from our deep past and that these offer intuitions into how we should live now. I plan to explore this idea in this post.

If we are to posit that there is something hard-wired in humans about the need for society, we must step back from the human and look at the level of organism. At this level, so it is generally assumed, the struggle for existence occurs, creature competes with creature to survive and reproduce, "survival of the fittest," as Darwin and Herbert Spencer had it. Upon first glance, then, we assume that nature selects the fittest individuals and allows their traits to be passed to subsequent generations.

How, then, are we to account for traits that are detrimental to individuals? One thinks of the bird that warns others of a predator's approach, or the mother sacrificing herself to save her child, or the soldier who risks himself for his comrades. How can the efficient mechanism of selection produce individuals such as these? Are they flukes? Mutants? Darwin never thought so, and the work of modern biologists bears him out.

The answer is that selective processes do not operate solely on individuals. Nor do they operate primarily on genes. The work of biologists like David Sloane Wilson and E. O. Wilson-no relation-suggests that selection operates on both of these levels, and more. Specifically, they argue, selection can operate on groups and on wider conglomerations as well. Indeed, wherever there is adaptation, there is selection. Groups, then, evolve in competition with other groups and, within those groups, individuals compete.

But there is a problem with this theory- the free rider. The free rider cheats; he lives off the largesse of his fellows, essentially stealing their energy and putting the group at a disadvantage. This should make the free rider a more fit specimen than his fellows and, in time, the whole group should dissolve into a mass of cheaters. Yet it does not. Why? Because of group-to-group competition. This level of competition will tend to produce fitter groups, which is to say groups that are composed of what Wilson and Wilson called "solid citizens." In other words, the exigencies of competition between groups will tend to curb the worst impulses of individuals, just as individual adaptations will tend to be disruptive to the group as a whole. Thus, the worst excesses of free riders will tend to be suppressed since they make the group as a whole less fit in competition with other groups. Most members will be genetically predisposed towards at least some degree of cooperation, because the fitness of individuals is contingent upon the fitness of the group.

What is this to do with us? My contention is simple. The same pressures that shaped the groups of animals Wilson and Wilson observed shaped us as organisms. Society has clearly been favored over individual life, compassion over cheating. Social living is in our genes. We have evolved mechanisms for living close to one another, such as morality and religion and, eventually, government, that discourage free-riding and contribute to the overall fitness of our communities. Their advantage is shown in their continuance, though there is always room for improvement.

Morality, I contend, arose as a set of rules for reining in small societies. Darwin suggested that it would be easy to imagine compassion evolving among these groups in order to keep their members from killing one another. Such compassion did not, alas, frequently extend beyond the group. Religion, however, proved to be more scalable. Evolving from tribal belief systems to global belief systems, religions worked because they extended the notion of the "tribe" beyond kin groups related by blood and marriage to, at least in theory with Christianity and Islam, embrace all mankind. Governments are potentially even bigger, since their power can extend over multiple religious groups, a check on competition among them.

The development of religion and government were required as humans began to live in larger and larger agglomerations. Morality can only hold small groups in check, typically groups where everyone knows one another and is aware of what the other is doing, say a village or a hunter-gatherer group. Religion can work as the binding force in a direct theocracy, where the ruler is the god and is perceived to be so, as was likely the case in early cities. Government works when diverse people come together from disparate places and acts as an arbiter among them.

In this respect, government is like money. Money appears in situations where trust is required between persons who do not know each other and want to do business. It is a fiction that is agreed upon by participating parties. Whether is is so-called "fiat money" or specie does not matter. The one has worth because some printing authority says it does and we assent. The other has worth because it is relatively rare and we like shiny things. Either way, our approval is required.

Government is the same. It is an abstraction that is required when communities are too large for face-to-face interaction among all members. An impartial arbiter, ideally, it takes the place of the trust we would have if we lived in a community where we all knew each other. It fails, in as much as it does fail, because it lacks personal connection. It succeeds, inasmuch as it does succeed, because it lacks personal connection. The larger the scale it operates on, the more will be required of it. Those who would have us abandon government and fall back on the safety net of family and friends, want to return to the era when we all knew each other individually. That ship has sailed. Government, to put it bluntly, is our family and friends when we have no others because, at bottom, it is us. It is left to us, then, to determine what the relationship will be.

Let the Wounds Heal

I will not join you as you wallow in the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I will not watch the countless specials, read the retrospectives, nor indulge in any empty, symbolic gestures on the Internet. I will not allow myself to be swept up in the great, emotional current over the hurt done to me and my country. I will not howl my hurt until the noise of my howling joins with the howls of others until the sound of our collective pain drowns out all other human voices. I will not pat myself on the back because "we" liberated Afghanistan. I will not pump my fist because "we" got Osama bin Laden.

I will remember, silently, and mourn. I will mourn for our losses: for the Americans who have died prosecuting the "War on Terror," for the civilians caught in the middle, for the innocence that died on that day, for the fortitude that might have kept us from meekly submitting to the will of our leaders, for the way we are still cowed whenever the event is brandished in support of some new iniquity. I will mourn those killed that day, but not because they died (I did that when it happened). I will mourn them for the world we have created in their names.

It is not a better world, on balance. We are not a better people. Challenged by history to become larger, to extend our vision beyond ourselves, we instead became smaller. We could not see past our own hurt and, blinded by the pain, we lashed out at others and, indeed, set upon ourselves. We paraded our wounds and used them to excuse the inexcusable.

If you want a wound to heal, you bandage it, keep it clean, medicate it. Afterward, if the wound is severe enough, it leaves a scar that fades over time, a reminder of the hurt tougher than the undamaged tissue around it, an emblem of the healing. It will not heal if you constantly rip off the dressing, expose it to air, and poke at it to remind yourself of the pain. Picking at your wounds, and inflicting new ones on yourself, is the very definition of masochism. Yet we will do this tomorrow, and consider it part of the healing process.

Of course it was a horrible day and of course, though it is almost a cliche, the world changed. But as we mourn our losses we should not only consider what was ripped from us but also what, more tragically, we gave away willingly.