What kind of future will the 21st Century bring us? Will it be a Utopia of promised riches (conditional on us following the appropriate economic prescription, of course)? Or could we be faced with a more sinister culture presaged by such Dystopian visions as George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”? Or will it be something neither quite saw and about which, therefore, neither of them warned us?
As Neil Postman lucidly explains in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Orwell warns us of a highly controlling Autocratic society where information and truth is ruthlessly restricted. This contrasts with Huxley’s premonition of a technologically advanced society subjugated to compliance through distraction and triviality, where truth is merely irrelevant. Between them they appear to cover the range of ways in which we should recognise and fear the restriction of individual freedom and the suffocation of the human spirit.
But did they get to the bottom of the human condition? Did they teach us all the ways in which the human spirit could be quashed?
Certainly we’ve been primed to repel the very notion of an Orwellian Autocracy. Viewed through this lens, the latter half of the 20th century seems to represent the culmination of a collective resistance against Totalitarianism and its associated restriction of rights and access to information. Jean Paul Sartre’s quest for individuality and freedom of expression was swept up on the crest of the free-spirit movement of the 1960s. It became the very mantra of social progressives and liberals since the onset of the Cold War. The over arching premise is that free will is the means for getting the most out of the human spirit. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the 20th century was herald by the American Liberal Right Wing as the “the end of history”. In other words, the pinnacle of human history was the liberal achievement of Reagan’s America. We can all rest easy at night, as the spectre of state oppression has been laid to rest.
So it seems that we heeded Orwell’s Dystopia, but did we do so, perhaps, at the expense of Huxley’s regrettably less prominent work. In our triumph over Orwell’s dystopia, have we descended blindly into a catatonic state of delirious distraction and compliance, despite Huxley’s warning? From reality TV programmes to a media drowning us with a relentless obsession with pointless frivolity and celebrity culture, we have no doubt become self-absorbed and self-obsessed. Even the Internet, hailed as a bastion against dictatorial control, can be seen as much as a pacifying tool as it is a liberator.
But in other ways we’re not quite acting out the Brave New World either. Huxley’s World State was based firmly on the nightmare vision of human desire shaped and controlled by the then radical new science of behaviourism. In the famous labs of behaviourism’s high priest B. F. Skinner, his rats and pigeons learned to press the right buttons and pull the right levers and in return received food and avoided electric shocks. Skinner argued that we humans are no different to the rats and pigeons in his lab.
But Huxley may have concentrated our gaze too much on the punishment side of behaviourism and overlooked the power of the incentive side of behaviourism; how rewards are just as compelling to modify behaviour.
Alfie Kohn’s “Punished by Rewards” goes into great depth in explaining how modern Anglo-American society uses what amounts to behaviourist reward mechanisms (“if you do this, then you’ll receive this”) to elicit compliant behaviour when raising children, teaching them at school, and even in controlling employees in the work place. Gold stars, bonus and incentive schemes and even praise is shown to be merely the flip side of the punishment coin.
He argues that far from a free culture, we are in fact in the grip of a highly controlling one; it’s just that we don’t recognise its form. It’s form is not what Orwell or Huxley taught us to look out for. We were so busy looking out for their dystopias we didn’t notice the one we were building. We haven’t recognised what we have become.
In the 20th century, both Skinner and Sartre attempted to provide a constructive account of how humanity can rise above embedded flaws in the current make up of society. It was a battle of ideologies; about what truly defines us as humans. In a tragic sort of way, they both won. At the superficial level we were sold on the free spirit ticket. But the modern manifestation of freedom is actually closer to a “freedom to shop”, a “freedom to get in to debt up to our eyeballs”, a “freedom to be manipulated by those dangling carrots before our eyes”. Quite ironic given that the original meaning of liberty was to be free from the bondage of debt and external control.
This rising tide of debt can only be justified if the world can perform great miracles of economic productivity and growth. But we often seem to forget how the real miracle occurred in the time of Huxley and Orwell, thanks to the great bounty of fossil fuels, and so may never be equalled or surpassed. The importance of dwindling energy supplies on our prospects for absolute economic growth is a worthy topic which deserves a thorough explanation in its own right (it’s yet another lens to for us to review the history of the 20th century). Suffice to say, that in the likely circumstances of limited real growth prospects, debt could be little more than the perfect method for annexing what remains of a finite supply of essential economic resources. If the world were really on the cusp of future miracles in growth, then why wouldn’t the power elite take an equity stake in our future, such that they could share in the rewards? No, instead we are seeing the omnipresent spectre of debt, a modern Feudalism enacted through state sponsored loan sharking.
If we accept the zero sum nature of economic growth then we can see how the current path of debt expansion is both flawed and pernicious. And, more disturbingly, “free will” may be the petard with which we ourselves could get hoisted. What better justification for the legitimacy of the loan shark than by declaring that the victim entered into the contract “of their own free will”! Not only has the loan shark loaded the dice in their favour (because they are confident of aggregate decline while society is buoyed with enthusiastic visions of unlimited progress), but they can also count on our compliance in permitting them the authority to enforce repayment, no matter how harsh the terms.
See how easy we have been to judge debt laden economies such as Greece, Ireland and Iceland as the gullible conduct of the masses. We have accepted the myth that the guilt lies with those who got in to debt, rather than those who made the foolish loans in the first place. It’s not the done thing these days to renege on one’s debt, no matter the complicity of the lender. We are being conditioned to conclude that the public deserves the austerity, as if it were a mess of their own making. Freedom can be a cruel mistress when she turns on her suitor. So when the loan shark’s knife is turned to our throats, will we submit so obediently?
The 20th century brought stark warnings of what we should be fearful of; Orwell’s state repression and Huxley’s self-conditioned triviality. It also brought two prominent theories of human nature to the fore. To Sartre, the human spirit needs unleashing from the shackles of constraint. To Skinner, the human intellect and contribution to society can be improved by rewarding constructive behaviour and punishing the harmful. Viewed from this standpoint the late 20th century would best be characterised as the overt promotion of individual freedom, mobility and opportunity, yet the covert exertion of behaviourist control methods, which actually constrain liberty, concentrate wealth and obliterate opportunity. The gap between rhetoric and reality is just getting wider and wider. It is in effect little more than “sell freedom, buy control”.
We have been suckered in to a con trick known as “bait and switch”. The bait was being sold an opportunistic expansionary future, meanwhile those with the real foresight and power base are conscious of a harsher and constrained future, and so have bought our compliance through a sedative mass culture and financial debt peonage; a masterful sleight of hand. The current practice of financial gerrymandering is merely a smokescreen for “keeping up appearances”. It is about deluding the man in the street into thinking that all will be rosy in the future, therefore he is justified in getting further into debt. But it’s an asymmetric pay-off matrix. The debtor is taking all the risk with little scope for reward, whereas the creditor takes no risk, yet legal entitlement to all gains.
To conclude then, Orwell foresaw an Autocracy, whereas Huxley a Technocracy. However, both were Dystopian visions of a future which were intrinsically neither two-faced nor intentionally destructive. Instead the greatest risk facing us in the 21st century is the duplicitous trap unfolding every day; the worrying trend of an emboldened Kleptocracy.
For a while now it has been obvious to me, and many of you I think, that this place has become more than just the place where people can find my jottings.
It has clearly become a place where more passions than just mine are at play. I seee people coming here to pose questions, discuss and exchange ideas and offer solutions. I cannot tell you how cheerful that makes me.
I would like this place to become a meeting place and a forum. To this end I am hoping to have regular Guest Posts. I hope people will support those who post as it can feel rather exposed.
The idea is to offer those with something they really want to say, some notion they would really like to offer for consideration, a place to do it and an audience. I hope it will enrich this place rather than dilute its purpose. Thus not every idea may be suitable. I hope we will all take a view on what is valuable to have here and what is not. We all need to have a hand deciding on that.
If people like the Guest posts I hope they will become a regular part of this place.
It's said that in a democracy people get the government they deserve. It's an interesting quote that weighs heavily on the the definition of "democracy". Could the same notion be applied to capitalism, that is, in a capitalist system do the people get the growth and living standards they deserve? Again this rests heavily on the definition of capitalism.
Personally the main failing I see is that for too long we've had crony capitalism. A revolving door between business and government has allowed what you refer to as a kleptocracy to establish. The lubricant and succour for the masses while this was happening was cheap money and distant slave labour. Both appear to have reach their limit yet the "kleptocracy" response has been to just double down – cheaper money, even free money if your "one of us". Will it succeed? I doubt it but either way its the masses that will pay the only question is how much.
Here is an interesting article on the nature of peak energy
"http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/01/energy-costs-and-the-economy/
In Postman's introduction to Amusing ourselves to Death he claims Huxley's view the more likely. Margaret Atwood wrote an interesting essay too, where she reflects on the addition of Fundamentalism – Christian as much as any other – to the utopian/dystopian equation.
Kropotkin's ideas on anarchy – stemming from reciprocal altruism, not chaos – finds new expression in, among others, Mark Vernon's embracing uncertainty and learning the value of doubt.
The uprising in the Arab world, particularly in Cairo reflects the bottom up, needs driven collaboration – on a scale never seen before.
The danger is, and always has been, an elite preoccupation with 'doing good' from the top down. The danger is their certainty; they believe their own propaganda; they are "true believers"; evangelists of contrived ideologies forged to give shallow existances meaning; they are disassociated from community and humanity, insulated from empathy by their excesses.
Teilhard de Chardin predicted the Noosphere, perhaps Jung's collective mind, and here we have some technological tool that seems to mirror that idea.
We can all now be in the know, to the best of respective capabilities. The ecology and economy now depend on it. We must protect ourselves from this lastest onslaught which may nip us in the bud, half way through our evolution under this sun's remaining life.
Thumbs up for the 'Guest article' concept. Thumbs up for the article too.
[i]"So when the loan shark’s knife is turned to our throats, will we submit so obediently?"[/i]-
A perfect example of being "Punished by Rewards" I would have thought. The reward being the facility to keep on borrowing (currently 25% of income and rising for the UK).
Great post Hawkeye. I've read and re-read both books over and over. Interesting to see them placed in the context of our current situation.
I maintain that given time the process of keeping up appearances will become impossible, the fabric of the illusion will tear and the underlying reality will burst through. As products of our own society we have been, and to a greater or lesser degree, remain crammed full of prejudices that feel like laws of nature. These will shatter. What happens when (almost) everyone is bust? Presumably there will be some more or less radical shake up of who owns what and how we create and manage our money supply. There is no reason to assume this will involve war, revolution or anything more radical than the gradual sinking of the financially overexposed or näive and a taming of the financial sector.
In the real world life will go on. Argentina and Iceland are still on the map. I'd like to hope that we start moving slightly towards Huxley's utopia described in 'Island'.
Incidentally, having trained as a chemical engineer and now working as a research electrochemist, my perspective is that the end of fossil fuels is not going to happen because of supply side constraints. There is a vast amount of coal that can readily be utilised to meet our forseeable needs. Other materials will likely peak (or have already peaked) before that. I also have a huge amount of optimism that renewable energy will be made to work, people cannot imagine what possibilities that will bring to reduce our ecological footprint. We are also making remarkable breakthroughs in our understanding of how the mind works and how our experiences as children shape our later personality. This information will gradually reshape how we raise kids. I think it offers a really sound basis for a significantly happier future. We have plenty to be optimistic about.
Oh and regarding bringing down the kleptocracy. How we reconstruct the system in which each of us operates from the top down is the great riddle of the day. I suspect the internet will surely play a role in any reconstruction. It's an outstanding facilitator of freedom, just the fact that we can have this discussion across an unknown time and distance (where are you? when did you post? It doesn't matter!) and others can participate, all at a trivial cost, is a phenomenal feat of engineering. I'm sure something new will come along that will entirely disrupt the existing political and media paradigm.
I actually had some ideas along this line about three years ago. I would like to see the emergence of a new political party that is entirely based around the online experience. A party where no explicit leaders exist and all decisions are made by referenda. On any given issue there will be a dialogue, followed by a summing up phase where people align themselves behind different positions and clarify those positions. Finally there can be a definitive (for a period of time!) vote.
The role of elected representatives would be twofold. Firstly, to either to signal the majority decision or to vote in proportion to the will stated by the members. I'm still sure not about that one 🙂 A well trained monkey could do the job.
The second, more interesting, role of representatives would be to act as information gatherers, to disseminate what now happens behind closed doors as far and wide as possible. Such a system would be more impervious to the graft, groupthink, revolving door politics mentioned by Myopia and lobbying than what we currently have. It would also be scalable, so it could pilot at the council level or even in the governing of a charity, school or hospital.
I know the inevitable response will be 'what you propose is the tyranny of the masses'. Well it's a failure of our education system if people can't think independently and critically. It's a long term project to fix it and it needs to start as soon as possible.
In the mean time perhaps we need to find a way to also manage the changes we enact in society in a more humble fashion. To identify problems, develop and carefully test a number of solutions in parallel and then stick with what works. The approach now of occasionally choosing between three political hues and then enacting large scale social change over a wide area is total madness. It's baffling that people have any faith in such a system, it doesn't scale with size or complexity.
Thank you Hawkeye and Golem. I really enjoyed reading this post. I need to stick all of that into my little thought model of "how the world works" and let it stew for a while. I'm worried that I might be better too close to a good understanding – perhaps the men in black will knock on my door and take me away – "sorry sir, you know too much…"
The reward culture in the UK is something that my wife and I have only recently become aware of. We recently had the chance of moving from France to the UK for a year, mainly so that our children could improve their english language skills and knowledge of the british way of life. The children are all attending a local primary school. After the first few days they each had several certificates, stickers and badges. They loved it. The schools in France are not like that – there is hardly ever any praise, in fact mostly the opposite – not many carrots, lots of sticks. The kids don't want to go back to France now.
When I think about it, working in a french company is similar – bonuses are generally collective and respect really has to be earned the hard way. I'm not sure that continual rewards are good for kids – it really is just buying their good behaviour. (Having said that, We do find the primary schools in general to be better run and the teachers 'much' more enthuiastic)
I'm wondering, is there an author who has described this scary vision of the future? This could be chance – if only I could write.
Thanks to the net, I have found places, especially this blog, where I feel I am being educated by well meaning, experts in their own field. It is a country where the veil has been lifted from my eyes & I am managing to get some sort of a grasp of how things really are. I even now have some understanding of how the banksters go about their business, a subject I couldn't have cared less about, until they shat on us from a great height. Thank you & keep up the good work.
Am I right in thinking that 1984 is more of a reflection of stalinism & fascism than Huxley's Brave New World, which from what I remember ( 30 odd years ago ) seems to reflect more of what we have in the West today. i have it somewhere must revisit.
As Orwell had the Soviet Union foremost in his mind when writing 1984 (and Animal Farm,) it's ironic that the dissolution of the Soviet Union has in part led us to the free will/free market dystopia we enjoy today.
With no credible threat to rapacious capitalism, the kleptocracy is indeed emboldened, their ideology trumpeted as the one & only way to organize society.
Tying into Huxley's vision of "catatonic state of delirious distraction and compliance" is the fact that the major western powers + Russia have not engaged in all-out war with each other since 1945.
Since Vietnam our conflicts have been fought with professional soldiers, so that our political "leaders" and regular people alike have no real skin in the game of war. We've had several generations now of people with no experience of rationing, of countless bodybags coming home, of a real (or imagined) existential threat.
These facts help enable the frivolous nature of our culture, as people born from the mid-60s & on have never known real fear, unless you count what I consider to be the manufactured fear of Mutually Assured Destruction. Today, things we really should fear are glossed over by our information providers, the better to keep many of us believing in a bountiful future.
Thanks for giving us this guest post, Golem. The comments provoked are evidence enough of Hawkeye's excellent contribution. More please.
What happens when (almost) everyone is bust? Presumably there will be some more or less radical shake up…There is no reason to assume this will involve war, revolution or anything more radical…
David Lloyd, you are admirably optimistic. Everyone being bust sounds like a good start toward neo-serfdom, via debt peonage. We'd struggle to find an example in history where a radical shake-up of a civilized society happens w/o war and/or revolution. Tyrants don't give up power willingly, and people don't starve voluntarily.
What's happening in Egypt right now is, I believe, a direct consequence of the rising price of food, which worldwide is at an all-time high. More than a precipitous rise in the price of oil, a continued increase in the price of food will lead to more social upheaval.
You don't get any more basic than food & water. People can be in debt up to their ears, unemployed, & one step from homelessness (if they're not already there,) but if food isn't somehow available to feed their families for any appreciable length of time, that way disaster lies.
I don't know exactly how worldwide economic crisis/recession/depression indirectly causes food prices to rise, but I have to believe it's a cause, not a correlation. I would love to see an analysis of this, and not from a neoliberal!
"But it’s an asymmetric pay-off matrix. The debtor is taking all the risk with little scope for reward, whereas the creditor takes no risk, yet legal entitlement to all gains."
Surely this is only true where the debt is secured against tangible assets of real value? It may be true that debtors can generally "count on our compliance in permitting them the authority to enforce repayment, no matter how harsh the terms" – at least, to an extent – but a bad loan is still a bad loan.
I recall watching a show about the credit binge in which the producer interviewed a single mother on benefits who had somehow managed to accumulate over £80,000 in unsecured debts. There is literally no way in which that money could ever be recovered – and indeed, it wasn't. She paid a nominal sum and was declared bankrupt.
Whilst it might be sad to see people reduced to such measures – unless of course, you take the view that it was all spent on rubbish anyway – it was the bank (credit card company, whatever) that took the £80,000 hit.
You might say that the rule applies in aggregate – but I also note that in the US, large numbers of households are 'strategically defaulting' on mortgages where the property is thousands of pounds (or rather, dollars) into negative equity. Whilst the individuals concerned might lose their house, the bank is left to foreclose on a property which is unlikely to recover anything like the book value of the 'asset' in the next ten years.
Nearly 600,000 households strategically defaulted on their properties in 2008 alone.
In this instance the bank has taken a massive hit, whilst the debtor walks away and rents a place on the same street at half the monthly cost – one reason why most US banks are insolvent, despite the best efforts of the Fed.
I should say however that I agree with much of your post. I still think it's possible for people to react against the demon of debt – but I very much doubt that they will. It is, sadly, far easier to believe that you are actually entitled to all these shiny things, than accept that the future is a nightmare of austerity and decline.
Plus the system is set up in such a way as to 'encourage' (coerce) complicity in such a process, as you highlight.
This is great stuff… however, I've got to go watch 'Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.'
Thanks to everyone for reading the post and giving your feedback.
David – I admire your optimism about about future energy resources. My view is that current energy stocks should be used prudently to establish "whether" and "where" new energy supplies can realistically come from. I don't believe that putting faith in "markets" will solve this. I recommend Richard Heinberg's "The party's over" for a good prognosis on alternative energy supplies, plus the excellent link by myopia above.
J x x – the ability to default (i.e. debt forgiveness) is a right which we currently enjoy at a personal and corporate level. Beware if it should ever be withdrawn (I've seen various posts on Max Keiser's site about the US is clamping down on people's ability to default). I wouldn't rule out modification of the law by the Kleptocracy. Plus, private debts can just get shifted to the Gvt (as was the actions of the bailouts) and now the taxpayer is getting squeezed. Only Iceland stood up and defaulted internationally, see:
http://forensicstatistician.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/are-we-all-in-this-together/
Uncle – I too would love to know if there are any authors who have portayed it like this. I am minded of Venusville in the film "Total Recall" where the citizens are held to ransom by the control of oxygen. I've not read them, but perhaps Frank Herbert's Dune, or Kunstler's Witch of Hebron?
"… the ability to default (i.e. debt forgiveness) is a right which we currently enjoy at a personal and corporate level. Beware if it should ever be withdrawn…"
You are, of course, correct. It's not enough that the system has conspired for hundreds of years to associate failure to repay debts with 'shame' or 'disgrace' – whilst the real crooks are the moneylenders themselves… I imagine you are also right to suggest that the 'Kleptocracy' will attempt to legislate to prevent 'strategic default'.
Indeed, in the US, the law varies by state – walk away in Florida and the bank (or creditor) is legally entitled to pursue the debtor for "the difference" (between amount recovered in foreclosure and amount owed) for years after the default.
The key point is that private debts can (and do) get shifted to the government, which somewhat invalidates my argument – apart from Iceland, which is why I bothered mentioning it at all!
Legally (morally?), even in our corrupt system, a bad debt is still a bad debt – it requires theft (the Kleptocracy?) for it to become otherwise. If people stand up to such underhand tactics and defeat the ludicrous idea that certain institutions are "too big to fail" then we stand a chance.
Or am I too optimistic?
Loved the post Hawkeye.
What resonated with me was 'the gap between rhetoric and reality'. Someone else posted a link to an Orwell article the other day on the English language and politics which I've been thinking about ever since.
Does anybody, other than mainstream media pundits, actually listen to what our politicians and central bankers say anymore? Their words are so empty in and of themselves, their phrases so meaningless it takes a lot of analysis to divine the true meaning and the true intention behind them. And that's if you're aware enough to be able to work them out. For the majority I imagine that they're like a Radox bath – just soothing and calming enough to put you in a nice receptive state. Perfect time to drop in the odd emotionally loaded phrase. See Cameron's recent speech on 'confronting extremism' to see what I mean. A pointed and calculated call for division surrounded by talk of sharing a national identity. Sickening.
On the economy of course it's all talk of growth and maintaining a competitive economy and reviving a spirit of entrepreneurism and can-do attitudes with only the odd reference to belt-tightening or paying off the national credit card bill (Yes! I know! Heard that one yesterday!) with the hidden meaning clearly along the lines of 'you screwed up all that lovely properity we gave you, now you have to make it right'.
Language is a weapon. It shapes our thoughts and it can be used to control them. Unfortunately, all the heavy artillery, the newspapers and television channels are in the hands of the elites.
So I thank heavens for this blog and the comments here.
A little cache of small arms it may be, but it's a start.
PS Has anyone read Transition by Iain Banks? I'm 2/3 of the way through and loving it. It brings together a whole load of the themes covered on these comment sections recently – I'd highly recommend it.
Great piece. Thanks for all the contributors to this article. In particular to David Lloyd, who, unusually for most blog commentators, actually has created an alternative to our present dysfunctional political and financial system.
This is the kind of thoughts I particularly enjoy because they add real critical thoughts to the scaffolding of my understanding of how the world works.
Thanks to everyone.
I don't think Huxley's and Orwell's visions are mutually exclusive. In any case 1984 is a stylised analysis of the present (or the present in 1948) not an attempt at prophecy, as can be confirmed by a reading of his essays. Brave New World is arguably also stylised commentary rather than dystopian prediction, again supported by looking at Huxley's other writings. If this were not so these works could never have so much captured our interest. Quite simply, neither is fiction.
Some thoughts on freedom:
I get the sense in discussion on 'freedom', be it of political, economic or some other hue, that it connotes individual or societal ‘rights’. The emphasis is invariably on the benefits, rewards and protections that freedom entitles. To my mind these discussions are curiously half-bodied, for where is the mention of the concomitant responsibilities that freedom demands. Why do I so seldom see responsibilities mentioned in the same discussions on the much feted merits and wonders of democratic rights and freedoms?
It seems to me that freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. In the question of ‘free will’, the greater the freedom enjoyed then the more responsibility assumed and vice versa. So if we live in an Orwellian/Huxlian world of illusory or limited freedoms, might it really be because we don’t want the responsibility of genuine freedom?
I hope I am not merely engaging in semantics but in discussions on freedom I would like to see a greater emphasis placed on responsibilities and duties. Recent events in Egypt and indeed in the economies of more democratic nations of the west call into question the role of the citizenry as much as they do the role of governors. We are all familiar with our wish lists of expectations and demands of what society should be like and how it should be governed, but how many have an associated list of responsibilities and duties for themselves to the same effect? What are the duties of a citizen of a democratic state, surely it is not only to vote once in a while?
Perhaps freedom is not something which once won, allows a people to rest on its laurels, but rather a continual dynamic process that demands of us as much as it rewards. The challenge of our times is to actively assume the responsibilities of people claiming freedom.
I'd like to hear others' ideas on this.
to rephrase an excerpt from Hawkeye:
…the late 20th century would best be characterised as the overt demotion of individual responsibility, connection to land, and co-operation, and the covert exertion of behaviourist control methods, which actually celebrate selfishness, promote poverty and disenfranchise communities…
…It is in effect little more than “sell responsibility, buy passivity”.
ahimsa,
This is a line of thinking I share. I have written before about recasting the familiar Bill of Rights with one that expresses the same ideals but in terms of a Bill of Responsibilities.
Everyone wants their rights but no one seems to think it might be their responsibility to help privde them. It is always left to someone else, or the government or some service to do the work.
People who avoid taxes still think it's their 'right' to the services that taxes pay for/ People who think it is their right to be treated by a doctir when they need one don't think twice about abusing one if they mood takes them.
In short we have fallen in to a mind set where the rights are mine but the responsibility to provede them is yours or someone elses.
I dislike the culture of 'rights'. I don't think anyone haas the right to anything at all. Instead I think we all have responsibilities to make sure others receive those things we would like to receive ourselves. Like a clean environemtn or safe streets or a tollerant public debate, or honesty in public life.
You have no right to freedom of speech. But you and I both have the responsibility to uphold an environment where free speech is protected. The result is the same – free speech. The difference is thay it is clearly up to us both to make it happen rather than each of us thinking it is someone elses job.
ahimsa,
You make an interesting point.
I was always led to believe that the law recognised the symmetrical balance between “Rights” and “Duties”:
"The fulfillment of duty by each individual is a prerequisite to the rights of all. Rights and duties are interrelated in every social and political activity of man. While rights exalt individual liberty, duties express the dignity of that liberty."
American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man
Any imbalance is a breaking of this social contract. I have raised this before on a few BBC blogs:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/09/how_phoenix_four_extracted_40m.html?postId=85591251#comment_85591251
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/09/can_governments_squeeze_banker.html?postId=85438040#comment_85438040
It seems that not only are we financially bankrupt these days, but we are also morally, socially and legally bankrupt too!
David and Hawkeye
Thank you both for your responses.
David, refreshing to hear someone else embrace the suggestion that discussion leans too heavily toward rights. It seems in our globalised western world we have now taken to even outsourcing our responsibilities! Had to smile at your suggestion of a Bill of Responsibilities, I have tried before to put forward the idea of a Charter of Citizen’s Responsibilities but it doesn’t seem to get much traction. For some reason it has become onerous or anachronistic to talk about responsibilities, duties and honour. I guess it doesn’t sell. (oh ‘usury’ is another term which has fallen out of fashion, though I have a feeling that it may already making a comeback)
Hawkeye, your quotation from the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man(of which I had not heard before) fascinates and delights, the first line of which really gets at what I was trying to say,
“The fulfilment of duty by each individual is a prerequisite to the rights of all.“
It points much more to the idea of a rights derived through a social contract and contrasts with the ‘inalienable’ or ‘natural’ rights as proposed in the more ubiquitous UN Declaration of Human Rights or the US Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Assuming that responsibilities are implicitly understood in all discussions on freedom and rights is a bit like taking it for granted that bankers will regulate themselves in the interests of the society. As Orwell observed or as contemporary NLP(neurolinguistic programming) describes, the language we use makes quite a difference. If we only explicitly reference rights and freedoms, then the importance of the fulfilment of duties as a prerequisite can be lost.
In this day and age it is considered politically incorrect to argue against the notion of universal human rights(which seems to stem from the Age of Reason) and I should be tarred as a racist or bigot or what not. After all the underlying concept of equality has fuelled movements such as abolitionism, republicanism, women’s rights, children’s rights etc, etc. Of course I feel these rights are ideals towards which we should aspire(and actively work to bring about!) yet I feel we sell ourselves short somehow with talk of immutable creator endowed rights that we must uphold. In contrast to the concept of natural rights or inalienable rights which are often perceived as god-given I am suggesting rights are man-given.
Keeping in line with your reference to Skinner & Kohn’s ideas around rewards, to suggest rights are something which an individual or society earns, through particular behaviours in fulfilling responsibilities or duties, I consider equally unhelpful. Rights are neither guaranteed nor something which are accorded to others because they deserve them or not, rights are something which we accord to others because we choose to do so. That is the ultimate freedom. It’s a curiously unselfish dynamic, for we cannot control whether or not we receive rights and freedoms, we can only choose to give them to others (or not).
This poem springs to mind:
I slept and dreamed that life was joy,
I awoke and saw that life was duty,
I acted and beheld that duty was joy.
-Rabdrinath Tagore
P.S. I had another observation on the Orwell-Huxley discussion. It occurs to me that the primary human emotion harnessed in the Orwellian version of control it is FEAR and in the Huxlian case, it is DESIRE.
Thanks for the Tagore quote. He is a wonderful writer.
Hawkeye
I see what you mean.Just thinking about Huxley, although English he spent a lot of time in the states. One of my favourite books of his ” After many a summer” is to my mind a tale of cultures clashing, a kind of 19th century English academic being thrust into a loud American world that has since taken over the planet. I think he experienced in Calafornia a taste of what was to come, which I think influenced ” Brave new world “, whereas Orwell was stuck in a grey rationed Europe, on the frontline of the battle between the isms. They were both right in their own way & we owe them a lot.
A touch of nostalgia, I think it was about this time last year when I stumbled onto this blog, this place & others explored because of it have changed my life. I hope that some of the posters listed above are still tuned in.
On a musical note one of my favourite albums from the nineties, Roger Waters ” Amused to death ” seems to sum up things for me more & more, I’m sure it must be Huxley influenced.