Results tagged “philosophy” from Uncivil Society

Recent news articles about Obama's post-ideological pragmatism got me thinking back to the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, when pragmatic philosophy rose as an alternative to philosophical idealism. John Dewey is probably the most familiar pragmatic thought leader in the public realm, but he was far from alone. You can see the semantic traces of this movement throughout political and philanthropic writing from that era.

For example, check out this 1915 book on civic ritual by poet, playwright and social theorist Percy MacKaye. It may seem quaint now, but back in the day it was quite radical, both theoretically and in practice. A number of its core themes--inclusive equality, social design, a shift from consumption to participation, --are values now seen as cutting-edge. MacKaye's argument, down to his explanation of the role of "symbolic dance," reflects his pragmatic perspective. It's especially evident in passages such as this--note the references to crafts, form and plasticity:

Of the businesses that evince an attachment to personal identity, the art of marking the existence of someone who has passed is one of the most profound. Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama offered a powerful reminder of this when he recalled the impact of seeing a photo of a symbol carved on a fallen soldier's grave:

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards—Purple Heart, Bronze Star—showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could go serve his country, and he gave his life.

Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

Of the many things I've read on the interplay of symbol, community and personal identity, the work of Josiah Royce is particularly relevant to Powell's core point. However much loyalty to distinguishing values may divide groups, it also has the potential to bring groups together through mutual respect. Not because the people shed their differences for the least common denominator, but rather, because their loyalty toward their own values can lead to respect the loyalty evident in those with whom they disagree. This loyalty to loyalty has tremendous unifying potential within a democratic system, as it provides a practical ideal through which the many can become one without having to jettison their personal allegiances.

Earlier we noted that the rhetoric of social movements is turbulent.  This semantic turbulence, like that in financial markets or the generation of hybrid ventures, exhibits fractal properties—its swings and spikes are self-similar, flowing from the expression of a common value.  The impulse to hybridize is the root of all forms, and not merely  coincidence or some vague mystery of the world.  Rather, it is the defining property of corporate form.

The phrase “social enterprise” provides a clue as to the how this came to be.  The term is actually not new; it’s just the latest variation of a long series of constructs that attempt to integrate reductionistic and emergent values.  The most influential of those constructs is “civil society,” a term that in its recent heyday proved to be susceptible to interpretation as social enterprise.  Contrary to what today’s so-called experts claim, however, civil society does not refer narrowly to such things as NGOs, nonprofits or a voluntary sector between state and market.  Rather, civil society is a programmatic legal metaphor designed to model emergence—as is the corporation itself.

That civil society is a metaphor for emergence becomes apparent when we look past its present use among NGO advocates.   Aristotle coined the phrase in the treatise commonly known as The Politics, although this too obscures the true significance of the work.  The word translated “politics”—in Greek, politike—literally refers to the “city,” or polis, a phenomenon that Aristotle is struggling to understand.
 
Aristotle’s fascination with the city lies in what he perceives to be its metaphysical distinctiveness (I). Apart from the city, people enter into cooperative arrangements that are at base reductionistic aggregates akin to a koinonia, or legal partnership.  In a business partnership, two or more individuals enter into a contract to share the profits from commerce—unlike the modern corporation, the partnership was not a discrete entity but an aggregate of individuals whose rights and responsibilities were set by the agreement.  A family, for Aristotle, is merely a koinonia in which two individuals unite to produce offspring and to manage household assets.  A village is a koinonia connecting several households; like other partnerships, the village is nothing more than a simple aggregate, with no distinct properties or values beyond its constituent parts.

The city is different.  It consists of businesses, families and villages, yet it is “self-sufficient, so to speak, emerging for the sake of life but existing for the sake of the good life”  (I:8). This root of this higher ethical purpose is the city’s distinct metaphysical character; the koinonia politike—the partnership of the city—is not merely the sum of it parts, but it is a “whole” that is “prior by nature” to its constituent elements (I:11).  This, Aristotle observes, makes the city the interpersonal extension of human identity.  Just as the human is a self-sufficient unity with its own distinct—and ethical—existence beyond the mere components of its body, the koinonia politike emerges out of the routine interactions of connected elements to create a higher meaning for them all.

Two thousand years later the city’s defining paradox—a discrete whole irreducible to the mere sum of its parts—is routinely described today with far less metaphysical baggage.  The city, with its order and identity spontaneously appearing from the discrete interactions among its constituent parts, has a become a familiar example of the natural phenomenon now known as emergence, in which “the behavior of large and complex aggregates . . . is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few” separate parts (222).

We now know enough about the emergence of collective properties that we do not feel the need to ground them in a distinct prior essence, and we are able to recognize the phenomenon in a wide array of contexts, from families and small towns to animals, plants and inanimate natural forces.   Rather than making the city an object of philosophical speculation, we can sing of a city that never sleeps without feeling the urge to meditate on the paradox of a city that never sleeps even though all its denizens do. 

Nonetheless that should not obscure the historic significance of Aristotle’s description.   His use of a programmatic legal metaphor is a classical analogue to contemporary scientific approaches to analyzing emergent properties in complex systems—it is, in its way, a direct predecessor of current research in understanding cities through cellular automata, agent-based modeling and fractals. 

Previously the metaphors for a self-sufficient higher order tended to be religious in nature, most notably the Hebrew “divine contract” that linked separate family tribes into a sacred unity.  The “partnership of the city,” on the other hand, provided a replicable model for emergent identity that transcended cultic loyalties.  It did so by describing key elements of the process of emergence in accessible non-mystical terms—by connecting and constraining agents in a certain context, such as large-scale population bounded by its physical geography and common name, a city could function as a supervenient order that shaped the very people and relationships from which it emerged.

Contemporary communitarian versus liberal public policy debates should also not distract us of the fundamental insight embedded in Aristotle’s rhetoric of the good, which foreshadowed contemporary notions of public norms that are ideally irreducible to private interests, particularly those defined by wealth, family or personal influence.  The analog between civic good and individual values reflects how each derives from the ratio of difference implicit in emergent identity—just as personal ideals reflect the impulse, grounded in our very consciousness, to rise above the deterministic drives and limits of our material being, the koinonia politike aspires to something more than the parochial narrowness of subsistence living.

The adaptive capacity of Aristotle’s model of emergent civic form made it well suited as a programmatic construct for cosmopolitan Rome.  The Latin translation, societas civilis, was equally a legal metaphor reflecting a partnership framed by urban citizenship. The full history of the evolution of this concept is beyond the scope of this article—its influence on adaptive Christian networks framed by koinonia, city metaphors and a higher unity “where two or three are gathered in my name” is worthy of its own book; for our purposes suffice it to say that the model of a social order unifying contractual routines with a transformative identity connections took shape in a diverse array of forms.

Arguably the most significant development in the evolution of civil society as an organizational metaphor was the conceptual separation of emergent identity from city, church and empire.  We can trace the direct roots of the modern form to a series of events that now seem unrelated.  One signal moment in this history was the formation of the Cluniac monastic network, which used a common charter, rituals, clothing and structured multi-tiered governance to create what we would now recognize as a multinational corporation with its own distinct brand, autonomous from the jurisdiction of feudal lords, bishops and the Pope (28-9). 

An equally revolutionary moment followed in the twelfth century, when law students in Bologna co-opted the classical Roman law concept of a universitas to create a unified common identity distinct from themselves as residents of their home cities.  These corporate archetypes provided a real-world model of the phenomena discussed in the Aristotelian writings that, not coincidentally, enjoyed a twelfth-century revival of their own.

As Brian Tierney documents in his history of corporate divisions leading up to the Reformation and the rise of fractious nationalism, the notion of a self-sustaining identity transformed out of its constituent elements grew considerably less esoteric with its embodiment in a replicable legal form.  Hybrids and metamorphosis became a recurring theme in scholarly writing; the Church formalized status as a distinct collective entity while churches and secular powers declared themselves distinct from the Church; even cutting-edge artistic theory analogized  the depth created by three-point perspective to the collective will emerging out of interactions in city government.   

By the time Thomas Hobbes wrote his classic analysis of social theory in the mid-seventeenth century, Aristotle’s narrow focus on the city as the archetype of emergent form was no longer viable.  Instead Hobbes describes a nation as made up of private “systemes” of “fictitious” and “artificial” “bodies,” each of which mimics the relation between whole and parts evident in the human sense of self as a well as the collective political order (155-65).  Writing in a time of both global joint-stock trading companies and violent sectarian conflict, Hobbes adapts Aristotle’s metaphor of the koinonia politike to model an ethical identity that keeps the constituent parts in check, as individuals and groups negate their own self-interest to connect within a higher unity.  

In explaining this model Hobbes did not, as is commonly assume, coin a unique new image of a “social contract” the explain the origins of the political order.  To the contrary, he was merely translating the Latin societas civilis into an English phrase that captured the same image of a legal contract and a higher collective identity—an image that the frontispiece to Leviathan illustrates by depicting citizens united literally within the person of the king.

What is most revealing about Hobbes’ reference to a social contract is not the metaphor itself, which would not at all have seemed new to peers literate in Latin, but the way it evinces a subtle yet significant shift in the meaning of “social” itself.  Years earlier the societas—Aristotle’s koinonia—was a mere composite, a partnership that was nothing more than a contractual aggregate of individuals.   By the seventeeth century, however, society bespoke the greater whole, which itself emerged out of self-sufficient legal entities emerging from connections among individuals—each of whom was envisioned as a higher self distinct from its bodily organs and natural drives.  A complex array of self-similar identities patterned on emergence, society, in short, was fractal.
  
Within a relatively short period of time, this acclimation to systems of artificial entities defined by connection and constraint generated a shift in the meaning of civil society itself.  Cultural observers stopped limiting the scope of civil society to the state; instead, it became the corporate “realm of solidarity” that “set men over the animals and the basic life of material existence”  (33-34)—Aristotle’s koinonia politike as the market norm. By the time of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, civil society has become the realm of corporate market relations, through which the atomistic individual makes connections outside the family and in so doing mediates the ethical norms that reach their highest expression in the public good.

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In this morning's Wall Street Journal, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins rhapsodizes on the common root of poetry, cartoons and human identity. Inspired:

I think what these animations offered me besides some very speedy, colorful entertainment was an alternative to the static reality around me that dutifully followed the laws of the physical world. The brothers Warner presented a flexible, malleable world that defied Newton, a world of such plasticity that anything imaginable was possible. . . . This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry.

Bugs

There he leans:

cracking wise,

biting his bright orange carrot

bugging the world

speed demon

ventriloquist

and master of disguise

he is everywhere at once

buck-toothed

and spectacularly eared

he is armed with dynamite

he is the only one

who really knows what's up.

Elmer

The mailbox in front of the neat cottage

spells out the unfortunate name.

This morning the homebody

is singing in his sunny kitchen

dum-dee-dum, waiting

for the tea water to boil.

Later he will have his nap,

the enormous pink head

rolling on the pillow

dreaming again of the wabbit,

the private carrot patch.

Waiting by his bed

is the shotgun and the ridiculous hat

for he is the human.

 

And yet it does, according to this roundup from Europe:

[S]ocial businesses “that according to the media, academia, the government and the wider public don’t exist, are today at the front line when it comes to dealing with social emergencies”. But unacknowledged social enterprises exist in Denmark too, where there are more than 9 thousand non profit organisations involved in the provision of public services. And Poland, where entrepreneurial projects with a high social impact have to operate under the juridical terms “foundation” or “association”.

As a method of proving the real impact of social enterprise despite the lack of a law acknowledging their existence, the article's approach reminds me of this classic passage from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

Not our organized charity, but caritas more generally. He's wrong in a way and right in a way, but then again, aren't we all?

Every accident is inferior to substance if we consider its being, since substance has being in itself, while an accident has its being in another: but considered as to its species, an accident which results from the principles of its subject is inferior to its subject, even as an effect is inferior to its cause; whereas an accident that results from a participation of some higher nature is superior to its subject, in so far as it is a likeness of that higher nature, even as light is superior to the diaphanous body. On this way charity is superior to the soul, in as much as it is a participation of the Holy Ghost.

When I was in college I couldn't stand stuff like this, but now it's kind of charming, like watching a goofy baby video on Youtube.

From a New York Times blog post on "Manhattan Noon," a new exhibit of street photography:

In our media-saturated culture, everyone is a picture-taker and image-maker, adding a new wrinkle to the work of those who practice the time-honored tradition of street photography.

“It’s harder and harder to take a picture without somebody in the picture who’s also taking a picture,” the Brooklyn-based photographer Gus Powell said on Tuesday evening, explaining that the mere act of taking a photo hardly makes him stand out in a crowd. “We all take pictures — that’s what we do. It’s more that your camera doesn’t look like a phone — that’s the bigger issue.”

Yesterday on the way up to my office I overheard two students talking about the assigned reading for their class--a philosopher who kept talking about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, though the students weren't exactly sure about the difference between the two.

Ah, memories . . .

Nonprofits embody the dueling cultures that sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described as gemeinschaft (“community”) and gesellschaft (“society”). From one angle, nonprofits represent the emotional, spiritual, and even familial values of a communal realm outside state and market: the Metropolitan Opera is art, but Les Miserables is commercial pop; a museum Lichtenstein is superior to a Batman comic; church transcends group therapy; NPR offers “intelligent talk” while Rush Limbaugh is a pitchman. And yet in direct contrast, the nonprofit as gesellschaft embodies the impersonal world of contract and commodity. Vague talk of transcendent values must give way to a crisp, quantifiable metric, and the role of the nonprofit expert is to educate the public in what the term “nonprofit” truly means.

Now I'm actually glad that my early morning post evaporated.  I wrote about how Givewell stands on a precipice where many charities have stood before.  It could fall into nothingness, like the PTL Club; linger as a tragic phantom of being and nonbeing, like Jimmy Swaggart Ministries; or luck out with a huge boost in support and meaningful accountability reform, like what seems to be happening with Oral Roberts University.

Over at Non-Profit Tech Blog, though, Allan Benamer has provided a more analytical meditation on GiveWell's future, with a chart and hard stats and no Heidegger or televangelists!  If you aren't a reader of NPTB or a habitue of socialmarkets.org, you should be--Allan and Jeff are cool cats doing interesting work.

Didja ever have one of those moments where you sum up a day's reflection in a single post, only to have your blogging platform gobble the #@#! thing up?

I just did.

And the irony is, the theme concerned teetering on the edge of the existential abyss.

Looks like the score is Nonbeing 1, Being 0.