Sordid Divinity
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- Posted: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 07:01:46 +0000
It's a fair given that society is plagued by all manner of problems. One of them is that society is also plagued with solutions. For every problem, real or imagined, there seems an infinite number of people or ideological factions who believe they have the perfect solution. The paradox is not only that most of the solutions actually would solve the problem, but some of those working solutions are mutually contradictory. How is this possible?
When you're dealing with any problem, the first question to ask is "what is meant by the word 'solve'?" If you answer the question broadly enough, almost every problem facing the human race has an amazingly simple answer. Want to stop crime? Declare martial law by creating a police state. Want to end world hunger? Cull the population and feed the dead to the living. Want to protect children? Isolate them, and risk their intellectual and emotional growth. There are almost always easy answers to every question, and they all fix the central issue. But what happens if they aren't the best answer, when all the consequences aren't considered and weighed? In the worst case, you end up in a situation where the cure is worse than the disease. Like the act of trying to kill a mosquito with a jackhammer. Although policy makers are usually smart enough to avoid this kind of tragic reasoning, it is often the case that solutions only attack the surface of a problem and don't strive to find and eliminate it's underlying cause.
It's like the entire ideology behind the so-called "war on drugs". The problem in that scenario is that people are using drugs. Well, why are people using drugs? Because they want to. The endless volumes of self-help books along with the advent of alternative religions is testament to the fact that something is not ideal, and because most of us are made a least a little uneasy by a sudden shift in consciousness, drugs give us the opportunity to explore alternative waking states with the reassurance that if we don't like whatever happens, it'll wear off soon. People have been using mind-altering substances for a long, long time, and the way to stop that is to make certain drugs illegal? Notice the emphasis here is on the symptom, not the cause. If a person wants a certain drug, little notions like whether it came from the pharmacy or the projects quickly become irrelevant.
So how are the solutions to be sorted then? The first and most vital step is to ensure that the worst case scenario does not happen. In order to do this, society must lay down fundamental philosophical principles that will be applied consistently to all future actions. These principles must not be marginalized as suggestions, guidelines, or "good ideas". They must form the bedrock of a society. They must be what a society stands for, the things it's designed to protect, the very reason it exists. If you start to compromise these principles then that society has failed in its purpose. These principles are things like respect for life, individually, and individual rights. It is for this reason that the forced abdication of civil rights to fight terrorism or for any other purpose is so abhorrent. If we must abdicate our most basic principles in defense of our society, what are we fighting to defend? If solving a problem requires us to undermine our society's basic principles, then perhaps a better solution is necessary.
The weakening of fundamental social institutions through problem solving is somewhat rare because most of the time, the people and policymakers alike are too acutely aware of those basic foundations to assault them. Far more common are solutions that appear to solve a problem, but in reality only manage to obscure the problem further. While these are not worse than the original problem per se, they do create a false sense of accomplishment and security, which can be just as debilitating to social growth as a band-aid to an infected burn. The only way to create a permanent solution to a problem is to probe it to the deepest level (yes, that's what she said), to the point where there are no longer symptoms, but root causes.
Sometimes, though, the less elegant, duct-tape-like solutions are necessary to quickly solve an urgent problem. No problem with that. The error I'm talking about comes from treating the temporary aid as a permanent solution. For instance, at the cusp of the civil rights movement, affirmative action was almost certainly needed to bridge racial gaps in the workplace. Now it's just a relic that intensifies feelings of racial separation. Of course I'm not suggesting that we've achieved any sort of degree of racial harmony that makes affirmative action obsolete. I am, however, suggesting that we do away with the band-aids and work to repair the underlying social, economic, and educational gaps that continue to perpetuate the break. I would really like to think that the civil rights movement elevated racial equality to a point at which it no longer requires legal sanction.
There are some who would argue that the human race is inherently flawed and thus it makes no sense to try and change these underlying faults. They're right, the race is entirely flawed... if only because no one will ever agree on what it means to be non-flawed, and end up with no goal to strive for. So should we just throw our hands into the air and scream "abandon all hope, ye who enter here"? Altering human sensibilities is a slow and tedious process which literally takes generations. But if we remain addicted to these quick fixes that only serve to target emergent properties, then how can we even see that these changes need to be made? Even if a solution seems to correct the problem entirely, most aspects of human society are too intricately woven around each other for it to serve as a working substitute. Affirmative action might solve employment discrimination, but it does nothing to protect those victimized by hate crimes or the all too prevalent and subtle self-fulfilling racial prophecy of ignorance and poverty.
What we need in this situation is self-directed evolution: a systematic elimination of our underlying flaws as a species. I'm not suggesting this will be easy, because as we know, evolution is often anything but easy. But if we had not been willing to tackle difficult problems in our early stages of development, we never would have come out of the oceans, down from the trees, around the world, and out to the stars. That's what organic species do: they evolve or they fail to adapt and die. They only difference is that in this scenario, we don't have to wait millions of years to evolve genetically; we can choose to evolve intellectually in a matter of generations, not eons. The only question that remains is whether we are willing to make that choice or whether we should just return to the trees.
Discuss:
1) Are there facets of human evolution that can be self-organized?
2) Is there a rubric by which the concept of the "greatest society" or "best country in the world" can be judged?
3) Is "human nature" a flimsy excuse for abdicating our own responsibility in affecting change?
4) If Ronald McDonald makes a bowl of cheese soup, and nobody but the tallest tree in the woods heard about it, does it still look around?
When you're dealing with any problem, the first question to ask is "what is meant by the word 'solve'?" If you answer the question broadly enough, almost every problem facing the human race has an amazingly simple answer. Want to stop crime? Declare martial law by creating a police state. Want to end world hunger? Cull the population and feed the dead to the living. Want to protect children? Isolate them, and risk their intellectual and emotional growth. There are almost always easy answers to every question, and they all fix the central issue. But what happens if they aren't the best answer, when all the consequences aren't considered and weighed? In the worst case, you end up in a situation where the cure is worse than the disease. Like the act of trying to kill a mosquito with a jackhammer. Although policy makers are usually smart enough to avoid this kind of tragic reasoning, it is often the case that solutions only attack the surface of a problem and don't strive to find and eliminate it's underlying cause.
It's like the entire ideology behind the so-called "war on drugs". The problem in that scenario is that people are using drugs. Well, why are people using drugs? Because they want to. The endless volumes of self-help books along with the advent of alternative religions is testament to the fact that something is not ideal, and because most of us are made a least a little uneasy by a sudden shift in consciousness, drugs give us the opportunity to explore alternative waking states with the reassurance that if we don't like whatever happens, it'll wear off soon. People have been using mind-altering substances for a long, long time, and the way to stop that is to make certain drugs illegal? Notice the emphasis here is on the symptom, not the cause. If a person wants a certain drug, little notions like whether it came from the pharmacy or the projects quickly become irrelevant.
So how are the solutions to be sorted then? The first and most vital step is to ensure that the worst case scenario does not happen. In order to do this, society must lay down fundamental philosophical principles that will be applied consistently to all future actions. These principles must not be marginalized as suggestions, guidelines, or "good ideas". They must form the bedrock of a society. They must be what a society stands for, the things it's designed to protect, the very reason it exists. If you start to compromise these principles then that society has failed in its purpose. These principles are things like respect for life, individually, and individual rights. It is for this reason that the forced abdication of civil rights to fight terrorism or for any other purpose is so abhorrent. If we must abdicate our most basic principles in defense of our society, what are we fighting to defend? If solving a problem requires us to undermine our society's basic principles, then perhaps a better solution is necessary.
The weakening of fundamental social institutions through problem solving is somewhat rare because most of the time, the people and policymakers alike are too acutely aware of those basic foundations to assault them. Far more common are solutions that appear to solve a problem, but in reality only manage to obscure the problem further. While these are not worse than the original problem per se, they do create a false sense of accomplishment and security, which can be just as debilitating to social growth as a band-aid to an infected burn. The only way to create a permanent solution to a problem is to probe it to the deepest level (yes, that's what she said), to the point where there are no longer symptoms, but root causes.
Sometimes, though, the less elegant, duct-tape-like solutions are necessary to quickly solve an urgent problem. No problem with that. The error I'm talking about comes from treating the temporary aid as a permanent solution. For instance, at the cusp of the civil rights movement, affirmative action was almost certainly needed to bridge racial gaps in the workplace. Now it's just a relic that intensifies feelings of racial separation. Of course I'm not suggesting that we've achieved any sort of degree of racial harmony that makes affirmative action obsolete. I am, however, suggesting that we do away with the band-aids and work to repair the underlying social, economic, and educational gaps that continue to perpetuate the break. I would really like to think that the civil rights movement elevated racial equality to a point at which it no longer requires legal sanction.
There are some who would argue that the human race is inherently flawed and thus it makes no sense to try and change these underlying faults. They're right, the race is entirely flawed... if only because no one will ever agree on what it means to be non-flawed, and end up with no goal to strive for. So should we just throw our hands into the air and scream "abandon all hope, ye who enter here"? Altering human sensibilities is a slow and tedious process which literally takes generations. But if we remain addicted to these quick fixes that only serve to target emergent properties, then how can we even see that these changes need to be made? Even if a solution seems to correct the problem entirely, most aspects of human society are too intricately woven around each other for it to serve as a working substitute. Affirmative action might solve employment discrimination, but it does nothing to protect those victimized by hate crimes or the all too prevalent and subtle self-fulfilling racial prophecy of ignorance and poverty.
What we need in this situation is self-directed evolution: a systematic elimination of our underlying flaws as a species. I'm not suggesting this will be easy, because as we know, evolution is often anything but easy. But if we had not been willing to tackle difficult problems in our early stages of development, we never would have come out of the oceans, down from the trees, around the world, and out to the stars. That's what organic species do: they evolve or they fail to adapt and die. They only difference is that in this scenario, we don't have to wait millions of years to evolve genetically; we can choose to evolve intellectually in a matter of generations, not eons. The only question that remains is whether we are willing to make that choice or whether we should just return to the trees.
Discuss:
1) Are there facets of human evolution that can be self-organized?
2) Is there a rubric by which the concept of the "greatest society" or "best country in the world" can be judged?
3) Is "human nature" a flimsy excuse for abdicating our own responsibility in affecting change?
4) If Ronald McDonald makes a bowl of cheese soup, and nobody but the tallest tree in the woods heard about it, does it still look around?
