Previous articles in this series:
Assaying Entropy II: Dying During Covid
Assaying Entropy III: Thinking about Covid
Assaying Entropy IV: Covid and America
Assaying Entropy VI: Democracy in America
Assaying Entropy VII: American democracy
Assaying Entropy VIII: Education in America
Assaying Entropy IX: Reading, writing, and arithmetic
Assaying Entropy X: Science, non-writing, expertise, discussion
Assaying Entropy XI: Language and Covid
Societies come into being willy-nilly on their own, but the American War of Independence and then the Constitution demonstrated, probably for the first time in the world, that people could create a polity. The society that grew from that polity surely should be influenced by both the polity’s principles and the structures. Yet, the germ of an idea of democracy espoused in the Declaration failed to grow to fullness in the Constitution and in the polity it created due to the continued dominance of the previous modes of inequality, the corporate/capital economy and the militaristic/frontier experience. Thus, we failed to become a democratic society. This inherent, inherited tension has exhibited itself in every conflict in American history from the Civil War (one side calling itself the Union to underline its affiliation with the Constitution and the other side, the Confederacy to reference the prior time of the Declaration) to the divide today between the Republicans and the Democrats to the arguments over Covid which pit rights of individuals against hierarchies of power.
Given this history, it seems to me that a democratic polity is still to be imagined and formed. But the ethos of hierarchy is deeply embedded in us all individually. Not only do we all live all our lives, day after day, acting out the values of these hierarchies but we are schooled in them, and recently schooled for several generations to doubt the possibility of a shared reality. Still, in the abstract world of intellectual reasoning away from the presses of livelihood, pleasure and self, we might at least think about what is required in a democratic polity where people indeed rule.
Individualism and democracy
The first thing to realize is that individual rights cannot be the primary basis of democracy because their individuality by definition divides the people. In contrast, the Declaration of Independence presents a vision of democratic freedom by starting with the equality of individuals with each other from which derive common rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being not individual and based on choice but shared and held in common). Common rights follow, Jefferson thought, out of the principle of equality, and this means that they are not asserted as belonging to individuals but endowed by the respect of equity.
Your right to live is not God-given and created but given by all other people respecting your life, just as your property is protected not by property rights as a legal matter but by the shared responsibility of everyone else not to trespass on it. So while an equity based freedom must necessarily include the concept of common rights that every individual enjoys, the idea that freedom comes from individual rights cannot generate a democratic polity. Freedom has to be conceived collectively not privately, like Spartan soldiers who held their shields to protect their neighbor while they themselves were shielded by their other neighbor.
The polity that corresponds to the assertion of individual rights is not democratic but autocratic (the rule of an individual) because individual rights are an empowerment. When one person’s rights conflict with another’s, power decides the issue. The history of individual rights dates back to feudal times, when rights were, indeed, individual and, indeed, granted by someone with greater power, a suzerain. We are reminded of this medieval context by one of the terms of today’s rights movement, the “sovereign citizen,” every individual a king. In contrast, in our 18th-century idea of democracy, people are equal and form a whole, not unequal and fragmented by unequal power.
With our American sense of individual freedom, however, freedom circles the self, so we undemocratically equate freedom (independence) with the individual’s freedom to choose. Perhaps, we should look more closely as what choice is, how it is conducted, and what its limits are.
Paralysis of choice
Choice is almost never simple. Take this example: if you are asked to choose the reddest apple in a basket, you have no difficulty, and everyone will agree with you. But if you are asked to pick the biggest, reddest apple, you will have a problem and likely no one will agree with you. When more than one value is involved, we make a judgment call, and the result is always disputable and is never either right or wrong. You can see that when a lot of facts are sorted through and judged with lots of values, choice rushes towards indecision and paralysis.
We see this logical end to choice as consumers. Corporations teach us to choose by a kind of mimic rationality in the huge amount of advertisement that form most of our daily intake of words and images. While advertisements rehearse all the components of rational choice – quality, cost, convenience, design, etc. – they secretly encourage us to short-circuit that process and leap to a liberatingly irrational, emotional decision.
We buy into advertisement’s suggestion – bolstered by our education in identity – that choice is self-realization. As we clothe and feed ourselves and surround ourselves with the material image of our identity, we manifest our identities in our choices. That investment makes choice a lot easier. We have favorite styles, brands, colors, etc. that guide our choices once they are established, which happens so easily because we are schooled in self-definition. And because we make the “choices” so many times a day, we get the impression that they are life itself.
Corporations have made our choice even easier. Grocery stores size apples, so we only need to choose the reddest apple. In fact, corporate agronomists have invented apples that not only are the same size but the same uniform color. Now we can pick up a bag of identical apples and still feel we’ve make a choice to buy apples rather than oranges.
However, we who have tried shopping seriously have found that the more rational we are, the more we become mired in possibilities and a flood of information and considerations. Things were a bit easier in the downtown store days, but with the internet, we get seriously lost in a morass of possibilities. As we have seen, the same dilemma faces us in choices about Covid. Too much information and too many conflicting values paralyze us.
Corporatism and individualism:
Even as corporations perpetuate hierarchical organizational efficiencies and produce a hierarchy of wealth, they encourage the individualism of choice because that fuels the worker/consumer cycle that runs the great sucking machine.
In addition, corporate ethos encourages individualism because the efficiency of its upside-down funnel depends on the dynamism of the hierarchy, that is, individual corporate excellence drives promotion. Thus capitalism, in spite of its autocracy, depends on selling individualism and promoting distinction rather than equality. And how better to advertise individualism in this conflicted society than clothing it in the myth of democracy?
Military individualism
Earlier, I suggested that there was a similar counter-intuitive joining of individualism and hierarchy in the military/frontiersman ethos when I spoke about the anti-war movement within the military during the Vietnam War. The apparent implication there that individualism was a democratic (egalitarian) reaction to the military hierarchy was suspicious to me because it acted out aspects the military ethos itself. I can now better elaborate how the military hierarchy deliberately, like the corporate hierarchy, instills the value of individualism as a necessary component of its authoritarian structure.
In spite of the military hierarchy, its ranking of command and power, its insistence on uniformity and ranked duty, the military is also knowingly dependent for success on what psychologists call “martial heroism,” the aggressive, instantaneous (fast think), courageous, risky, and altruistic individual acts that count in the small, detailed actions of fighting that can win engagements and save lives. The military, therefore, trains physical and mental “toughness,” fosters immediate (automatic) and aggressive responses, promotes an ethos of bravery, and teaches duty as altruism.
Furthermore, apart and parallel to the hierarchical ranks, the military honors heroism: the Distinguished Service Cross is award to a person who “distinguishes himself [now ungendered] by extraordinary heroism not justifying the award of a medal of honor” [10 U.S.C. §3742]: “distinguish” meaning rising above those equal others. And for exceptional heroism the Medal of Honor is given to the person who “distinguishes himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty.” [§3741.] These citations all praise and describe a kind of individualism the military promotes in the rank and file and which is prevented from being disruptive by its system of uniformity and hierarchy but seen as necessary in transforming citizens into soldiers and necessary in achieving its aims.
Like corporate hierarchy, military hierarchy wants individual heroism up the hierarchy to incentivize action away from its essential use in combat. For this purpose, we have the Distinguished Service Medal, awarded for “exceptional meritorious service to the United States in a duty of great responsibility.” [§3743.]
Considering that no American has live through a whole life of peace, I find it hard to understand why American historians have not been steadily documenting the effect of militarism in our civic discussion. During World War II over 11% of the population (and obviously a higher proportion of men) served and were indoctrinated into this system of essentially contradictory values during the formative years of their maturation. Surely, we should expect that in the decades since, these values have been ubiquitous in American society and have molded our recent history. We have seen in the national disputes on Covid that the heroic complex remains prominent in public discussion by its aggressiveness, its emotiveness, its turn away from thought and contemplation, its tenacity, its ideological stances, its assumption that criticism is attack and discussion is combat, its treatment of the opposition as the enemy, its preference for an oral style of language, and preeminently in its ego-assertion of individual rights as the definition of nationalism and patriotism and by extension, of democracy.
We, the people.
Both hierarchical institutions in American culture have invested heavily in individualism. As I said above, their impact works on all of us, big and little. Though some people think that they can choose to drop out of the system, we cannot. It’s not we, the people, against the system of power. It’s we the people splintered into individuals that create the inequality of our democracy. I don’t know if we can have a conversation about equality, but to begin that conversation requires that all of us practice the ability to stand back from ourselves to see how we are implicated in inequality, implicated not by our espoused opinions but implicated in the very marrow of our thoughts and language.
The ancient Greeks had a democracy much like our own: steeped in distinctions of wealth and property, economically dependent on slavery, proud of their independence as the foundation of a sense of superiority (they invented the notion of civilization and the concept and word “barbarian’), and they established economic and military bases throughout the known world. They admired heroes who embodied those ideals. But the stories they told about their heroes show a strain of introspection lacking in our stories. In epics and myths and particularly in tragedies on stage (all intended to be political discussions about civic issues) they showed the failure and catastrophe of heroism. The very qualities that made a hero admirable led inevitably to what they called hamartia.
In teaching Greek tragedies, we talk about hamartia as a tragic flaw, but this is a Christianized interpretation of the word because in the Bible (the original Greek text) the word is moralized. Greek introspection was more moral-neutral. It meant an error from misjudgment or misinformation or simply not knowing; though it can involve over-reach or pride (hubris). Oedipus, for example, suffered his fall simply because he did not know who his parents were (lack of introspection), but the step by step actions he took to his downfall were taken because of his belief in his own problem solving intellect. “Flaw” is the wrong word for Oedipus’s problem because it implies that he could have been a perfect hero without this flaw. Instead, his story shows us that heroes simply fall because the qualities that define a hero, his very heroism, contain the seeds of his tragedy: his necessarily limited knowledge (the individuality which makes him human) and his necessary self-confidence as a leader of men create error.
Think of our heroic stories, from characters portrayed by John Wayne through Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc. They have happy endings. Unlike Greek heroes, ours always win because we, the people, don’t appreciate self-examination as much as we appreciate winning.
[A Clarification
My critique of individualism does not mean that equality denies individuality. In a collective of equals, every person is distinct. The collective society is, however, based on people’s commonality and not on their differences; that is, commonality is prior to difference rather than the other way around.]
Wow, you nailed it. I think we forget the implication of the Latin “E Pluribus Unum”, One out of Many. The ‘many’ is the prime component; ‘many’ defines us – ‘many’ ideas, ‘many’ colors, ‘many’ talents, ‘many’ preferences, ‘many’ sizes, shapes, genders – INDIVIDUALS who must, first and foremost, ALLOW each other to BE individuals. We are NOT a bunch of SAMES making a UNIT. We are many and that is our strength! If we lump together only on the basis of sameness we are split into a million different parts and have many reasons NOT to be ONE and that makes us weak.
We seem to presently be governed by the concept of “MOST” i.e., a ‘majority’. We act in the direction of a majority – MOST of us. But a simple majority, most of us, means that we then engaged AGAINST the “not quite half” of us. That does not make us strong; that makes us only as strong as a few more than half – we are dependent on those few more than half while most of the rest of us are busy battling the ‘almost half of us’ who disagree.
That seems to me to be a very weird way to go into battle. If we allow a wide range of “us-ness” then we can face problems with a MUCH larger percentage of who ‘WE’ are! I don’t understand why this ‘sense’ isn’t more ‘common’!
Your interesting comment on the majority rule problem reminds me that we have an unjustified faith that the mechanism of people power is elections. Historians, I think I mentioned, have shown that American history teaches us that money, not the people, win elections. That is why people with money pour it into elections. And they, of course, have a stake in making us feel that democracy is all in choice (elections) and the majority rule premise of elections in a two party system.
I think we need another mechanism for the people to exercise public decision making not only because elections don’t work but because there are so many obvious harms it causes. Not only does it create the rule of a very few, as you point out, but it reduces all discussion to opposition. Whatever one side (party) says the other opposes, often for no reason than to maintain their own identity, even while we all know that the two parties switch sides. The Republicans now argue for states’ rights even though they originally fought a war against states’ rights, and, of course, the Democrats, in binary opposition, made the opposite switch. And, perhaps worst of all, elections and winning elections have created a whole profession, or many professions, of career politicians working in government and in parties who are supported by all kinds of career election experts who study and practice their arts on our thinking.
Elections are a fundamental way people with the power to control elections bribe us into thinking that individual choice means democracy, but that cannot be the meaning of democratic freedom because nothing prevents the election of a dictator for life. Just winning a few elections would do the trick of ending elections permanently. The idea of individual choice has self-destruction built into it. Only a democracy based on equality rather than on individual choice can withstand the self-destructive potential of majority rule.
The ancient Greek democracy practiced a method of selecting public servants by chance rather than by choice. It’s called “election by sortilege,” and some people are discussing it as a possibility to replacing our voting system. It is the kind of thing that can be tried out among small groups such as local elections in Sierra County where we still have not quite created career politicians, though we have created influential networks. We can have representation by lots here.