The Principle of the Thing
GK Chesterton proposed a famous (at least within certain circles) thought experiment, know known as Chesterton's Fence.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Many reformers of large companies like to cut red tape, running into the problem that bedevils all reformers - unintended consequence. Another famous Chestertonism goes:
Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.
This is incomplete. Some traditions are clearly awful. But as intellectuals, and as ordinary people, how do we approach the fences that keep us treading the paths we find ourselves on? Which do we tear down, leave be, erect or restore? These decisions rely on higher purpose and common identity. When these break down, or become over-determined, chaos, division and tyranny ensue. When they function, memory of the purposes of the fences is passed on, and boundaries are respected even when they are presently inconvenient.
This is not a purely partisan problem, but a general one facing all complex societies an organisations. At its core is memory, identity and purpose - without an understanding of who we are, a common purpose cannot arise, and without a common purpose, norms lose their justification, and become anonymous country fences, waiting for wandering pilgrims to tear them down. The maintenance of the collective purpose, the collective identity, is key for the entire system to function, as much as a sense of self is necessary for an individual to live a stable, meaningful life. When these structures break down, we are not set free so much as made naked, and in the moral vacancy of nihilistic society, zealots and tyrants amass to take the high ground.
Mensch, Ubermensch
One of the most persistent problems we have in navigating social rules is the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law. Law and morality are coextensive phenomena - the law is a special form of moral law, one which is enforced by a massive edifice of armed men. The terrible problem with progressives of any kind, whether liberal or socialist in aspiration, is that they view the law not as the means for defending the members of society and their moral character, but for manipulating them into a shape prefigured by abstract rational ideals, often divorced from reality. This requires a practiced selective skepticism which attempts to debunk or deny any moral principle which puts a brake on their exercise of power to these ends, all in the aim of supposedly liberating humanity from any compulsory feature of their environment, social or material.
To that end, they wield laws which they may morally disagree with to hurt those they fear or resent. People who have found ways to manipulate and subvert the letter of the law in contravention of their intended spirit have been known by a word now forgotten in this darkened post-Christian age - Pharisees. Pharasaism is largely indistinguishable from narcissism - the cynical and instrumental employment of taboos and social rules in ways that do not respect any underlying moral principles or purposes, and do not respect the practical effects on society, serving only to exert control over the immediate social environment - virtue signalling, moralism, lawfare, content flagging.
It would be tempting in the atmosphere of a hypocritical and pharisaic society full of unpleasant and counterproductive laws, to call for the abolition of moral censure, as the French intelligentsia spent the post-war period doing. But those who set about undermining the morals of Western society, generating the extremely dramatic transformation which has occurred, have gone about it by inventing purposes which the norms of our society never worked on. This (selectively) critical stance served, in the grand Romantic tradition, to treat society itself as the enemy of mankind, so that those who saw themselves as outside or above history, morality and culture could imagine themselves lords of all creation, ubermenschen. And when their kind seize power, the behave predictably, sweeping away traditional institutions which might have preserved ways of life, morality, memory, and sacrificing human life to the worship of inhuman ideas.
My task here is to suggest the need for a rational technique which is the opposite of Critical Theory. Of course, there are two ways in which I could be criticised for this; hypocrisy and unoriginality. I consistently and deliberately employ critical assumptions of cynicism myself, but I feel justified, in that I am using it against those who wield critical assumptions. This is the principle of reciprocal reason I hinted at in a previous essay, an exception I employ without guilt. The other, is that the search for charitable interpretations of the underlying purpose and function of morality, law and regulation, which seek to reveal the essential purpose of institutions which may have never stated their meaning in explicit terms because they have arisen organically, is a process which resembles too closely that of evolutionary biology, which contextualises behaviour in terms of vital functions.
That is true. But my purpose is to aim for assumptions of eusociality. Perhaps it is best to call this Complimentary Theory - to find those principles which compliment the rules and norms, and understand how they fit into a functioning eusocial system. Contemporary anthropologists habitually employ this sort of reasoning when dealing with non-white or non-Western social groups, deftly avoiding any too-critical stances toward their subjects. In general, I think it is best to apply this principle more charitably the older and more mysterious the practice, unless its cruelty, destructiveness and pointlessness can be demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt, as in the case of female genital mutilation or human sacrifice. But before we dive in deep with the sharks and piranhas, let us begin at the shallow end of the pool, with etiquette.
Form over Function
Much like the English, the Japanese are a notoriously indirect people. Their true feelings are difficult to decipher, and social formalities which are performed without a second thought have hidden dimensions and hollow realities. White lies, false smiles, courtesy invitations and empty politeness are the currency of a lot of civil society, not just in Japan, though etiquette holds a firmer grip over them than most people. The native concepts of tatemae and honne are often explained in English articles as the mask one wears in public and the true feelings one feels beneath. But this elementary understanding is only one facet, and obscures a deeper element to this phenomenon.
Having discovered this concept in the context of an anthropological study of the Japanese police by Walter Ames, I saw a different side to the matter which arises out of a legal context. The law itself is considered to have a tatemae and a honne of its own - similar to the letter and spirit of the law, a well-understood Western concept. The formally expressed law has one function, while a deeper true understanding of its function and purpose in context is essential to understanding how to employ it. The precise reason for the conflict of the social mask and one's honest feelings is that etiquette exists precisely to conceal unpleasant or socially frictive emotions. The exhaustion we feel from being forced by self-interest to respect the feelings and beliefs of those whom we have no respect for, or even no opinion of, is universal. The less acquainted we are with people, the more formal our interactions must be, and the greater the tyranny of forms.
The difference between what is really occurring and what is professed to be occurring is aptly expressed in the Japanese dichotomy of tatemae and honne. A tatemae is a ground rule or principle that spells out the way things should be ideally, [...] honne is the real intention, the essence or substance. [...] The two are always linked, "like two sides of a piece of paper". [...] Usually nobody is deceived by the tatemae, because everyone involved understands without making explicit the honne underlies it. The Japanese often distinguish between tatemae and honne by ignoring the facade and adapting to the reality according to the situation. [...] The distinction [...] prevents adaptation from dominating solidarity and loyalty, and and vice versa. [...] Likewise, the tatemae of of a well-adapting police structure masks the honne of a powerful police system that, in many ways, stands apart from the people and is at times even feared by them. - Walter Ames, 1981
Worse is the attempt to conform to laws we do not understand. Consider the frustration experienced navigating French society - millions of rigid yet contradictory rules covering every context, all of which must be broken in just the right context. No wonder the Japanese have such a hard time with it; they much prefer fewer rules, which are inviolable but flexible (the rest of the continent finds them just as frustratingly rebellious). French bureaucracy is among the most densely forested in the world, yet an unspoken understanding exists which allows businessmen and ordinary people to slip in and out of formality like an elaborately choreographed Broadway musical. When I first experienced the practiced indirectness of the English, I felt similarly lost. It is convention to deliberately understate or overstate opinions in a way that conveys a nonliteral interpretation. The aim is to accommodate the emotional tenor of the social situation, and protect the feelings of others. However, it can also form a barrier to direct rebuke for insinuated insults, and can trap one in awkward situations when inefficiently exercised, as Reginald Hunter illustrates here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_R5qJ2mX8M
Function over Form
In several corporate and professional cultures, a certain practice has emerged; each official rule is accompanied by a guiding document. These documents define best practice and the logical justifications for each policy document they accompany. This practice defines ethics and oaths, aims and understandings of duty. An example of this sort of thing is fairly common once you begin to look for it. The aim of these documents serves to guide and channel the reasoning of people following certain rules, so that they know how to apply them when they conflict, and how to interpret them in unforseen circumstances. It also helps press rebellious, knee-jerk skeptics back into line by providing them a clear understanding of what they are up to in the grand scheme of things, and what this or that law is for. The American Association of Civil Engineers provides a rather comprehensive set of deontological and teleological guidelines for interpreting standards and procedures which have collected over the years and formed the basic essential picture of engineering excellence, or "best practice".
The central argument of Alasdair MacIntyre in his magnum opus After Virtue is that ethics in the modern era has become divorced from the underlying motives which gave direction and intuitive understanding of the norms and morals which have been developed, and advocates a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The poverty of modern ethical philosophy can easily be seen in its tendency to base sweeping abstract absolutes on the outcomes of deracinated thought experiments which impel us to behaviours which, while rational from a decontextualised standpoint, result in chaotic psychopathy when exercised at scale. Take for example Peter Singer's thought experiment about the child in the well. If the kid is drowning and we were a foot away, we would give them aid. Yet because they are on the other side of the world, we do not.
This strikes one as immediately persuasive - we have a moral duty to help all sufferers everywhere all the time to the best of our ability. From there, it is easy to point out that our attachment to our own children is irrational, and that favouring them over others is narcissistic, and therefore we cannot treat our own children with any priority. But anyone who behaved that way would be an actual narcissist, who put the socially conditioned demands of their ideologically defined superego above the human love for their own offspring. Worse, at a collective scale, the results of treating all parties equally requires an extraordinarily moral puritan society completely devoid of any room for compassion or love. Love flows from favour and privilege which we convey to those nearest to us, whose proximity to our hearts follows from entirely irrational principles, and cannot survive the cold razor of naked abstract reason.
The civil engineers of America did not develop their ethical principles by working backwards from abstract thought experiments, but from a recognition of their peculiar, particular and contingent purpose, propriopertinent and specifically tied to the goals of engineers, learned over centuries. In the performance of these goals, certain norms emerge which, when followed, make them better engineers, who execute their purpose with accuracy, reliability and efficiency, with the least collateral risk possible. These norms become duties, and the abstract general principles which coordinate these duties become the ethical guidelines which build towards the constitution and oaths of their order. These are men who live by the ancient Aristotelian code of virtue guided by purpose - eudaimonia. Each profession contributes its own emergent function, and balances the system by providing the best execution of local rules which contribute to greater harmony. This is the manner by which Alasdair MacIntyre wishes all morality in society to work - form flowing from function, guided by an idealised end.
Canadian Engineers have formalised and this function, in a ritual ceremony of oathgiving, where graduates are issued with an iron ring, and made to pledge to standards of excellence and responsibility in the projects they design and undertake. The norms and practices of engineering are today so refined and deep in their character that the managerial culture in engineering often bears resemblance to organic processes, with continuous production running on sensory feedback processes like process control, a system of constant prediction and correction based on imposing rule-like expectations on outcomes, approximated around an understanding of the imperfect match between good-enough models and the essence of physical laws which seldom reveal themselves pure and naked. Striving to use feed-forward predictions and feedback sensation to force conformity from the matter beneath the mechanical fingers of the corporate machine, these systems bear a startling resemblance to the neurological model of Predictive Processing.
Mind over Matter
Andy Clark's interpretation of predictive processing (as reviewed by Scott Alexander) posits that the layers of processing in the brain function by attempting to create conformity between outgoing predictive expectations which model the world and direct action, and sensory inputs which provide the raw materials for experience. As we pick out objects, our brains create expectations/desires, and our motor neurons twitch to move our limbs into conformity with the position desired. At a higher level of abstraction, we work to make reality conform to the expectations our minds create (this sounds really basic, but obviously, the theory itself is much more involved).
Like Kant says, a whole bunch of incomprehensible noise enters our minds, and is processes by outgoing native frameworks which adjust themselves at higher levels of abstraction to match persistent features of the external world.
The top-down stream starts with everything you know about the world, all your best heuristics, all your priors, everything that’s ever happened to you before – everything from “solid objects can’t pass through one another” to “e=mc^2” to “that guy in the blue uniform is probably a policeman”. It uses its knowledge of concepts to make predictions – not in the form of verbal statements, but in the form of expected sense data. It makes some guesses about what you’re going to see, hear, and feel next, and asks “Like this?” These predictions gradually move down all the cognitive layers to generate lower-level predictions. If that uniformed guy was a policeman, how would that affect the various objects in the scene? Given the answer to that question, how would it affect the distribution of edges in the scene? Given the answer to that question, how would it affect the raw-sense data received?
Both streams are probabilistic in nature. The bottom-up sensory stream has to deal with fog, static, darkness, and neural noise; it knows that whatever forms it tries to extract from this signal might or might not be real. For its part, the top-down predictive stream knows that predicting the future is inherently difficult and its models are often flawed. So both streams contain not only data but estimates of the precision of that data. A bottom-up percept of an elephant right in front of you on a clear day might be labelled “very high precision”; one of a a vague form in a swirling mist far away might be labelled “very low precision”. A top-down prediction that water will be wet might be labelled “very high precision”; one that the stock market will go up might be labelled “very low precision”.
The most basic necessary assumptions, like those related to solid objects, gravity and those which enable recognition of hostile conditions, are necessary preconditions of every other conceptual model we deal with, and are seldom thought about. As Douglas Adams once said, we only notice things that don't work. We notice computers. We don't notice coins. Likewise with other phenomena - we are drawn to uncertainty, and find ourselves far more addicted to gambling situations precisely because they are uncertain. Monkeys in test conditions get bored with bananas on demand, but never tire of pulling the "maybe banana" lever.
This is because unexpected phenomena - failure of sensation to conform to modelled expectations - produce surprise, a burst of stimulating chemicals, which can produce pleasant sensations if they eventually resolve. And we are programmed to forcibly resolve discrepancies: our naked visual fields are broken up by veins which criss-cross our retina, and occlude portions of our sight. But the modelling by our visual cortex smooths over these discrepancies in order to construct a cohesive visual image.
Like monkeys pulling the lever until the banana comes, desperation or excitement to perceive confirmation or closure of our predictive models of reality can result in spontaneous behaviours which aim to force sense to conform to expectation or desire (which are indistinguishable under the predictive processing model). This results in superstitious behaviour, sophistry and tyrannical biases which hijack our senses. Yet these can remain in tolerable limits when they do not entirely destroy our capacity to perceive threats and opportunities.
This smoothing of predictive models can manifest in some rather extreme distortions when when desperation to perceive epistemic closure is severe enough, as experienced by this account of those who end up swimming in the ocean for thirteen hours after falling from a boat. The stranded swimmer hallucinates coming boats, whispering words of encouragement - "don't give up", "hang on a little longer". He sees what his mind predicts is necessary for his survival. Likewise do we fantasise about the things we wish to see arising in our lives, predictable and pleasant outcomes which reinforce the regularity of our minds and preserve our belief systems and our hope for vindication.
Amos and Tversky have a two-system theory of mind which has become rather well-known. System 1 is gut-level, quick to judgement, and instinctive, emotionally calibrated, fluid and efficient, image-oriented. System 2 is slow and deliberate, rational and conceptual, and evaluates more reliably. S2 attempts to analyse the world with a static map of reality, composed of concrete objects, properties and relations, rules and forms, while S1 draws from feeling and spontaneous imagery, the engine of creativity and seamless habit - where new ideas arrive, eureka, from the ineffable depths of our intuition, giving inspiration which can be rationalised into an explanation after the fact, and turned into rational, regular, explicit rules.
In reverse, for teaching: conscious products of S2, habitualised, become instinctive operations of S1. A musician who spend the first years of his journey deliberately placing his fingers in specific spots with conscious effort, matching the notes on the page to the finger positions on the instrument, calculating the relation between notes and chords and key signatures, becomes a practiced professional who improvises his way across a complex landscape of sound, and in a virtuosic musician, will know when to break the rules of the musical conventions learned before, to produce a new tonal landscape with each performance.
The most practices and boringly predictable assumptions become buried in habit, and are seldom the source of excitement or surprise, because their prediction-smoothing mechanisms are seldom interrupted by contradictory information. But in confrontation with conflicting information or exceptional phenomena, we attempt to rectify the situation. Our brains constantly predict "having enough calories/water/reproductive opportunities" and compensate by intervening down the neurological hierarchy to satisfy and correct contradictory sensory information.
But when we relax our attachment to S1 assumptions, whether through a conscious override of S1 by S2, or by a weakening or confusion caused by absence of sensory input or confusion of the pathways through psychoactive substances, we break down the model, and destroy its capacity to order the world and generate reliable behaviour, cascading disorder throughout the whole system. In the right conditions, we can force ourselves to see the occlusions in our eyes, or by removing feedback, hallucinate as in dreams or sensory deprivation tanks. We can break down conceptual boundaries between socially constructed objects - what is the real difference between a bowl and a plate? A little flattening? Then these objects "do not exist" - deconstruction.
Most adults are aware that concepts are slippery and can be manipulated. But the aim of the game is to keep up with reality, and foster coordination, not to play with madness and fry our brains. Unhealthy mental habits and violent disruptions of brain chemistry can be lethal, for the subject and his surroundings. When all these boundaries become violated, memory becomes distorted, and past mistakes can be repeated, or good habits relinquished in a fit of abandon. In the case of mania, the conscious, absolute logical patterned forms supervene and override the sensory inputs, spiralling into a cascade of ritualised insanity.
Ubermensch, uber Alles
Morality functions similarly - a set of formal rules to which people are expected to conform. When others fail to conform to the model of society constituted by the moral system, we move to force conformity to the model by means of incentives and punishments. The West's constant assumption that other societies are, deep down, just like theirs, results in two forms of political insanity - neoconservatism and "multiculturalism". The former assumes that if only tyrants are removed, all people will become secular atheist liberal democrats. The latter assumes that if only foreigners are given enough material comfort and tolerance, they will harmonise with the life of the democratic West. Both are false, and destructive in their own ways.
If we don't know why we are doing things, and notice the obstacles they are to immediate gratification, they simply become troublesome specks in our eye. Border controls? Sexual morality? Drug prohibition? Most intellectuals call these tyranny, largely because they do not have to live with the consequences of removing fences. Understanding the role these moral retinal veins play requires adherence to higher-order assumptions and fundamental coordinating prior beliefs about the world - prime criteria. For the Japanese, the highest-order belief is "we are Japanese". For devout Christians, it is "we are Christians", which is to say that Christ is risen and is the saviour of man, the miracle of His life, death and resurrection as told in the Bible, the way to eternal life - we ought to believe in Him and follow the example and commandments given.
When the nations were forged, and the evangel spread, new members of these communities had to practice the formal elements which made them members. The forms were strong, and justification was fiery, sharpened to withstand ridicule, persecution, defection and doubt, until whole societies were homogeneously pacified under a continuous moral system. As time passed, these became habit and ritual, invisible structures of society. As these became unthinking formalities, they lost the defensive definitions which were designed as an offense on those who challenged their beliefs, becoming atrophied assumptions requiring no examination. As they are little exercised, recognition of their reality stops being practiced. Sometimes, they are forgotten.
For cultures with a well-developed system of institutions and institutional memory, as is the case with the Japanese, or with Orthodox Christians, having well-centralised and hierarchical cultural institutions, many of the unspoken substance of the rules are thoroughly understood. But as Alisdair MacIntyre illustrates by way of the reforms of King Kamehameha, when institutional memory is lost, the honne of the law is forgotten, and the taboos which prevail, having lost their justification, melt away without resistance when an authority declares their obsolescence.
Loss of belief in the coordinating highest principle of authority, the element of belief that justifies the meta-ethic which structures the collection of social norms, will inevitably result in a loss of justification for the system of morality which holds them together. MacIntyre suggests that the approach of Nietzsche was analogous to King Kamehameha - rather than seeking to recover the spirit of the social norms by pushing for a return to faith, he decided it was time to topple the entire edifice and start from scratch. What happens when Nietzsche is taken seriously? The weakening of the struts in this great edifice is done by simple skepticism - why do we need a traditional continuity between the disciples and the contemporary church? We're Catholic, the throne of St Peter dictates interpretation. Why do we need the authority of Rome? We can read the Bible ourselves. Why do we need the Pastor's help interpreting? Why do I need to recognise this verse, that verse, this article of faith, that rule? They don't suit me. Now I think about it, what really is God, if anything? By whose authority did those "God-fearing men" send us to the Somme?
Now where does the new morality come from? Let us look at the three main streams of post-Christian morality in the West - nationalism, egalitarianism and liberalism. Each, taken to its logical conclusion as a supreme arbiter of moral values, results in real evil, the pathological hallucination of a whole society attempting to conform with a deranged religious architecture. Nationalism begets fascism and war, Socialism begets communism and starvation, and liberalism begets relativism, nihilism and chaos. The last one is best seen in the works of Michel Foucault, whose Nietzschean philosophy saw a project to destroy every single norm, and prohibition in society, and replace it with the spontaneous exercise of power and desire.
While he was a Maoist for a while, ultimately, Foucault is an anarchist of the ultimate kind - a moral nihilist. In practice, the effects of this sort of liberation from prohibitive normative enforcement is most visible in certain American cities, and most poignantly in South Africa, where almost every social norm is rapidly dissolving into an orgy of mutual violation, exploitation and murder, while the cosseted elites look on, wringing their hands and intellectualising the catastrophe away. To judge others for their choices or preferences is deemed tyrannical in Foucault's eyes, as is any judgment which distinguishes human beings' moral character or powers of cognition - madness and sanity, right and wrong, true and false are all false distinctions imposed on reality by those in power. Under this scheme, anybody who cynically imposes a moral system for instrumental gain is an ubermensch, creating their own system of morality.
In digging up the bureaucratic history of the Third Reich, it was discovered that no direct orders to extermination were given by Hitler himself. In Rwanda, no direct orders to kill Tutsis were given (at least not frequently). Instead, the members of these movements had a thoroughgoing understanding of what to do which flowed from their understanding of their function as a social unit. These assumptions had become so ingrained that they needed no explicit enunciation from the executive for lower links in the system to carry them out. Ian Kershaw's theory about the holocaust is a process he called "working towards the Führer" - each Nazi understood what was expected of him from a decade of being drenched in rabid racist ideology and the rhetoric and aims and perceived threats of Adolf Hitler himself. The frontier extermination efforts proceeded from organisational decisions taken amidst the bureaucracy with no need for intervention by the big man himself.
The genius of Xi Jinping is that he has no need to define every single law and bylaw in the land to achieve conformity from lower-down members. By drafting a comprehensive guiding document, Document 9, and supplementing the aims of that document with an officially sanctioned body of political theory (Xi Jinping Thought), he has created a system where everybody can work towards the chairman, work towards the Party. This has created the greatest tyranny in the history of humanity, and completely crushed what freedom and creativity was left in China, the past five years being a stunning slowdown in Chinese economic performance, humaneness and governing transparency. But every party functionary understand their function with absolute clarity. Did Xi have to design the social credit system himself? No, he already wrote the guiding document.
Over and Out
Systems of compulsory rules are inevitable, but need not be evil or destructive. What is required of us is to return and rediscover what rules were good for society, and to pursue the subtler understanding which gave rise to them. The leftist maxim, that it is forbidden to forbid, cannot be sustained. We know that drug abuse and infinite sexual variety cannot be tolerated, if only for the sake of children, animals, and funeral directors. Compassion cannot be effectively exercised by formal expressions of equity or by extravagant redistribution. To restore order to broken societies, the meaning behind the law must be restored, and as things stand now, the vast majority may be hungry for the security the law provides, but unwilling to accept the cost of conformity.
Society, particularly South African society, needs a wakeup call, and to be directed toward the spirit of the law, and offered the reassurance of its stern and consistent enforcement. For this to work, people must feel at home in this spirit, and believe in the purpose for which the law exists, and the letter of the law must fit the spirit, as much as the spirit of the ignorant may need to adapt to the letter. This requires faith in a higher notion or principle of the country as a community, which leads to greater and more harmonious development.
In order for any belief system to function, you must believe in it, or the proper modelling of the expectations does not function. A failure to comprehend and project an understanding of an object renders one incapable of interacting with it until comprehension is achieved. Likewise, any theory or argument falls apart without its foundational assumptions, and any community whose coordinating systems of morality see their prime criterion of authority destroyed in the eyes of its members, fall apart, like a Christian who loses belief in God.