Comparing yesterday with today
Written by Michael Heller
I will now reinforce the argument I made (against Boehm) in the previous post by suggesting how the imperative of placing society before the individual might work itself out in the modern West when governance becomes overloaded by demands that, in ‘big picture’ terms, are superfluous to or hostile to the preservation of the West.
[Conscious of the daily news barrage and while at this point still focusing analytically on the very distant past I find myself less ‘detached’ and less clear in presenting ideas about the present day. But, on the other hand, you’ll know exactly what I’m getting at.]
Skipping way ahead to my Volume III
Although populations of Europe, North America, or Australasia can hardly be said to exist in structural adversity on the precipice of extinction, their hard-earned privileges of wealth and welfare have generated a pathological by-product which now requires an equivalent modern imperative to make ‘brutal’ decisions for the ‘common good’.
This imperative still goes largely unheeded. A leadership reckoning for the optimal prioritisation of society-over-individual must not be further delayed. As they demand unending ‘compensations’ for leisure and progress, up to 50% of these populations consistently elect to impose new burdens and decisions upon the process of public governance. I dealt with the economic consequences in previous writings. Here I am thinking of sociopolitical consequences, which saturate current political debate.
The organisations of supposedly advanced impersonal governance in the West are perpetually forced to respond to demands made on behalf of sympathies felt ‘outwardly’ towards less fortunate people living in the dysfunctional societies, namely in societies that remain stubbornly unwilling to foster impersonal institutions and markets. The guardians of impersonal governance in historically well functioning societies are at the same time compelled to continually respond to self-sympathies felt ‘inwardly’ by citizens who while closing their minds to the true global comparative causations experience acute particularistic sensations of racial and sexual identity, myriad emotional trigger sensitivities, climatic extinction nightmares, obsessive mental health disorders, elitist ressentiments concerning menial employment and migration controls, and a perception of being deprived of ‘entitlements’ to publicly-subsidised personal lifestyle choices.
These are modern society’s ‘younger frailty’ equivalents of the hunter gatherer’s elder frailty dilemma. Emotion-based frailty arises ‘outwardly’ and ‘inwardly’ in prosperous societies that solved the ‘elder’ conundrum by passing laws and creating institutions that guarantee a generalised default level of safety and care for anyone who can be objectively and biologically defined as genuinely deserving of public protection. The immediate problem for society is that the productive efficiency of worthy institutions of public welfare is now weakened structurally by the uncontrolled ‘younger frailty’ of dysfunctional socialised emotions subsidised by the public purse and the cheap labour of the desperate migrant. These exploitative ‘younger frail’ run amok in the West.
In sum, in Niklas Luhmann’s terminology, today’s younger frail “overload politics”.
The proper ‘brutal’ response to the ‘sympathy frailties’ is to ignore them. Politics and governance must learn how a) to ignore multitudinous personal sympathies, and b) to justify a legitimate ‘public interest’ in the neglect of ‘private’ sensitivities. Hurting a feeling is not such a ‘brutal’ solution when set alongside the plight of the prehistoric elder. Legitimate brutality when putting modern society before the individual is harmlessly and guiltlessly achieved, through governance, by ignoring the unrealistic sympathies.
It is difficult to ignore the pseudo-frailties that oxygenate political discourse in rich countries when education and science are also similarly captured by the sympathies. Social science must be prepared to recognise that throughout history calculations of ‘common good’ resulted in tough tradeoffs that are cognitive, identifiable, calculable, utilitarian, rule-focused, and context-specific. These do not warrant being glossed over as aggrandised and unspecifiable ‘morals’, ‘new emotions’ and ‘culture’, which (our archive shows) currently dominate sociological depictions of human evolution. Glossing over concrete evolutionary decisional realities only plays to the sympathies.
In an important article published yesterday one of Social Science Files’ most eminent subscribers, Charles Murray, argues that advanced societies must be willing to value and prioritise intelligence over specious ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion. Three cheers to that. I would only add that in governance and economics the differentiations of intelligence, personality, age, sex and physique comprise a multi-purpose package.
The organic illustration is:
Limits of Identity by Nalini Malani, 2009