The Happy Tutor has an excellent post imagining global civil society circa 2015. It’s said that where empires have subjects, states have citizens. Nevertheless, Foucault argues that the state still makes heavy demands on its citizen-subjects. These often unspoken obligations include:
- to live (in as close to full health as possible)
- to work productively (so as to contribute to the GNP)
- to consume (so as to contribute to the GNP)
- to die, if necessary
- to believe, if not in an ideology, then in “our way of life”
- to reproduce (ultimately, so that there will be others available to die on behalf ofthe state)
- to learn
The state then monitors its population along these lines so as to protect its own health. (The health of its population is merely incidental.)
My question: Will global civil society circa 2015 (whichever form it takes) require any of these of its “population” on behalf of the health of the global order? Will any of them fall by the wayside, even for states? What new obligations will arise in the global order of 2015? (Will it require us to blog?)
we are all just animals with high intelligence and sometimes we think things through to absurdity as in this case. obligations? you’re only obligations are to yourself.
and what is this state you speak of. i think it’s funny when people speak of the state as if it’s some divine intangible thing in the sky like some demi-god. the state is run by people just like you and me. now whether they actually run it for you and me and not in their own self interest is entirely another matter.
Your only obligations are to yourself, until the state throws you in jail, freezes your credit, or sends you off to war.
For Alfa: let’s forget the word “obligation,” and instead use the unlovely phrase social and communal behaviors. Would you say then that humans have no social and communal behaviors? You could, but you’d either be mistaken or kidding.
To write as if I hold a vulgar scientistic worldview (which I probably do even though my favorite thinkers inveigh against it), it seems incontrovertable that humans are social animals; it’s also incontrovertable that unlike other social animals, e.g., bees, our social order is highly malleable; another undeniable peculiarity of our social order is that fully developed members of it are self-conscious individuals. The description of the social order that Chance ascribes to Foucault–which seems completely accurate to me–isn’t a particularly enticing one, don’t you think? Oughtn’t we do something about it?
To respond to Chance’s questions above, I can only say what I’d hope the obligations might be, and what I fear they might become.
Hopes:
Fears:
for chutney: your obligations still are to yourself regardless of the circumstances you mention. being thrown in jail is no different really than being caught in a hailstorm. it’s an event that happens and it’s up to you to do something about it. defend yourself as best you can, by convincing your fellows that are confining you you are innocent (presuming you do not wish to be thrown in jail), and seek shelter from the storm (presuming you do not want to risk injury or death).
for leung: i’m not saying humans aren’t social creatures, but we are at our basic level reliant unto ourselves. captains of our own vessels which given the means we are born with take off on a voyage through life within our environments and experiences. plus, you must also remember that all humans are not alike. some require more social interaction than others. if you mean the average human, then yes i agree we tend to social interaction but ultimately it’s for his/her own benefit that one does so.
The “hailstorm” thinks of itself quite differently. And it will try to find you if you hide.
being thrown in jail is still a circumstance. a different circumstance from the hailstorm, but still a circumstance nevertheless.
"we are at our basic level reliant unto ourselves"
Uh huh. And you spontaneously acquired your language and cultural knowledge absent any outside stimuli, right?
Get a fucking job. Better yet, don’t, and put your naive individualism to an empirical test.
OK, that last comment was a cheap and nasty swipe, but my point still stands: humans beings are social creatures not just in the sense that we like to be together but that as a matter of evolutionary and biological fact we cannot survive unless we live in groups. The basic skills an individual human needs to survive are not part of its instinctual repetoire, but imparted through the social unit it is born into, and even then imparted through language, a medium an individual human develops only in the context of a social unit. (NB: I’m not contradicting Chomsky’s inateness of language hypothesis here, which is probably so well established that it shouldn’t be called a hypothesis anymore. But while he’s correct that in developing language children are not imitating behaviors but formulating rules they have the inate capability to develop, that development only happens in response to a social stimulus.) Fully developed humans can live apart from others–and I mean really, Really, REALLY apart from others, like the Unabomber in this cabin, an example that should give you pause–but the skills that enable them to do so are imparted through culture and language. It is an irony of the complexity of our group dynamics and depth of our group knowledge that it can enable a lone human to strike out apart from the group, but there’s no getting around the necessity of the group for the individual human to survive. Biology is destiny.
The notion that groups are wholy dervivative of the free individuals is that compose them is just flat out wrong. Yet since our group knowledge has developed to the point that individual humans have enormous inner autonomy and that our group structures can be altered, we must deal with those facts as well: individuals and the social groups and structures that enabled them to survive stand in a complex reciprocal relationship. Too complex a situation? One that doesn’t leave room for the comforts of a radical individualist worldview? One that blocks easy, drastic solutions? Too bad; that’s the way it is. If you’d like a computer analogy (I see you’re in the same field I’m in), it’s like legacy software and hardware: it’s old, it’s more complex that it would be if you had to design it from scratch, and if you think you can shut it down to do it over, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong, because that would bring things to a crashing halt. You have to deal with all these unlovely interdependencies and less-than-straightforward processes. Meanwhile, the vendor–God?–has pocketed the money and moved on. Welcome to your new career: a maintenance programmer in the Matrix.
whoa hold on.. i’m with you on this remember? i think we are both individualistic and social. i think you, however, put greater stock in us (human beings) being social than i do however. that’s probably the prime differing of opinion i can see.
there are still many questions to be asked. even to the notions you put forth (and mine as well).
so is the nature of our universe…
If that’s the case, you damn well fooled me, and our host. Frankly, I still don’t see it.
I weighed in on these matters of obligation, or social/communal behavior. And you thoughts on them?
The Duties of Consumer Citizenship
“H” Interesting questions by Chutney, drawing on Foucault, and building on Peter Karoff’s Three Scenarios for Civil Society 20015 .
The Duties of Consumer Citizenship
“H” Interesting questions by Chutney, drawing on Foucault, and building on Peter Karoff’s Three Scenarios for Civil Society 20015 .