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Mar. 21st, 2005 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionTeacher's convinced Burgess argues freedom is more important than happiness; I maintain A Clockwork Orange deliberately dodges this argument, perhaps because it doesn't know how to make it, perhaps because it's busy with another (integrity as a precondition of happiness). Teacher usefully hypothesizes an unwritten novel where instead of the "Ludovico technique"--the nightmarish Skinnerian eye stuff from the movie--society reforms the criminal via entirely successful brainwashing, changing his will, giving him new sources of happiness. Don't we still recoil? Yes but can we defend why? Totalitarian systems are hated because they make people unhappy. They're indifferent to all values but social values, and uncaringly byproduce confusion and pain while promoting these. But if one wasn't? Suppose a system knew us well enough and gave enough of a damn about us (if only because it saw our happiness as essential for its own perpetuation) to ensure our private happiness, while still corralling us down its own channels for its own purposes: something like the Grand Inquisitor or Brave New World situations. Maximum apparent happiness, minimal suffering. What's the case against?
Case 1 is that if people are sheep the system must somehow self-correct, and systems don't do that so well: see Kafka's Penal Colony.
But suppose this system somehow knew its business, run by wily Inquisitors or Alpha-plusses who genuinely gave a damn about the flock.
Case 2 is our alleged existential outcry. We're free and must stay free! I.e. freedom is a categorically greater good than happiness, perhaps so much greater that happiness without freedom simply doesn't count. Free, we choose ways to be and goals at the ends of those ways, goals that make us more free rather than merely more happy.
Freedom as force is as problematical as love as force, morality as force, evil as force etc. We don't fully understand the causes and consequences of some set of similarly-behaving phenomena, so we categorize them as intruders into the large set of things we have a hang of, as supernatural. But they of course aren't supernatural, they're groupings of incomplete information. Cutting them off from their source in the world gives up on them, programmatically neglects new information.
So if what we call freedom is just a shadowy corner of the pool, don't its waters interflow with our others? Can't it be subsumed under "happiness", defined as an experienced state worth retaining?
And if it can, is such a state somehow allergic to external definition in principle?
I don't see why. I think the tendency to see freedom as preconditional of true happiness is a recent development; people at large have had enough dealings with "unenlightened" tyrannies, the kind that couldn't care less if they're happy, to know they'd better hang onto all possible freedoms. Practically, as states and religions and ideologies grow large and mad, unfreedom means unhappiness.
I see some problems with this, and feel even more; among which: does this account for all of our profound unease at the idea of being brainwashed into Eden?
Maybe the key here is the break in continuity brainwashing implies. If happiness is just a trait like any other, there's no more reason to drum up more of it than there is to paint smiley faces on every tree and rock face you're acquainted with. It has to be a need, something toward which you will always quest when given scope. Brainwashing sounds like erasing the quest and putting something else where it was, not like completion. The quester is essentially annihilated. Unless we're advanced Buddhists we're going to tend to not want this for own selves. But for others? If we acknowledge any responsibility for them, is their happiness or present integrity (as a new integrity will be found, in this model) more important? Obviously they'll feel the same tummyache we do at the thought of self-loss, but suppose we don't have to let them know what will happen, as we have perfected a method of drugging and kidnapping subjects, then correcting them through manipulation of their dreams. Or does this make them like the rocks and trees? Perhaps sympathy requires wanting for the sympathized-with exactly what one wants for oneself. This might be the real source of anxiety: social responsibility demands maximizing happiness, but we don't bother to be socially responsible unless we sympathize, in which case there is something else in people we want to preserve that can conflict with that happiness, but only because we need them to be like us; a chain exposing an intolerable egoism inside altruism. Or perhaps we could tolerate this just fine, and the disturbance I'm feeling now is a biological defense mechanism, designed to shake the mind back into safe lies when it gets too close to recognizing the paltriness of what we live for, mere extension.
Case 1 is that if people are sheep the system must somehow self-correct, and systems don't do that so well: see Kafka's Penal Colony.
But suppose this system somehow knew its business, run by wily Inquisitors or Alpha-plusses who genuinely gave a damn about the flock.
Case 2 is our alleged existential outcry. We're free and must stay free! I.e. freedom is a categorically greater good than happiness, perhaps so much greater that happiness without freedom simply doesn't count. Free, we choose ways to be and goals at the ends of those ways, goals that make us more free rather than merely more happy.
Freedom as force is as problematical as love as force, morality as force, evil as force etc. We don't fully understand the causes and consequences of some set of similarly-behaving phenomena, so we categorize them as intruders into the large set of things we have a hang of, as supernatural. But they of course aren't supernatural, they're groupings of incomplete information. Cutting them off from their source in the world gives up on them, programmatically neglects new information.
So if what we call freedom is just a shadowy corner of the pool, don't its waters interflow with our others? Can't it be subsumed under "happiness", defined as an experienced state worth retaining?
And if it can, is such a state somehow allergic to external definition in principle?
I don't see why. I think the tendency to see freedom as preconditional of true happiness is a recent development; people at large have had enough dealings with "unenlightened" tyrannies, the kind that couldn't care less if they're happy, to know they'd better hang onto all possible freedoms. Practically, as states and religions and ideologies grow large and mad, unfreedom means unhappiness.
I see some problems with this, and feel even more; among which: does this account for all of our profound unease at the idea of being brainwashed into Eden?
Maybe the key here is the break in continuity brainwashing implies. If happiness is just a trait like any other, there's no more reason to drum up more of it than there is to paint smiley faces on every tree and rock face you're acquainted with. It has to be a need, something toward which you will always quest when given scope. Brainwashing sounds like erasing the quest and putting something else where it was, not like completion. The quester is essentially annihilated. Unless we're advanced Buddhists we're going to tend to not want this for own selves. But for others? If we acknowledge any responsibility for them, is their happiness or present integrity (as a new integrity will be found, in this model) more important? Obviously they'll feel the same tummyache we do at the thought of self-loss, but suppose we don't have to let them know what will happen, as we have perfected a method of drugging and kidnapping subjects, then correcting them through manipulation of their dreams. Or does this make them like the rocks and trees? Perhaps sympathy requires wanting for the sympathized-with exactly what one wants for oneself. This might be the real source of anxiety: social responsibility demands maximizing happiness, but we don't bother to be socially responsible unless we sympathize, in which case there is something else in people we want to preserve that can conflict with that happiness, but only because we need them to be like us; a chain exposing an intolerable egoism inside altruism. Or perhaps we could tolerate this just fine, and the disturbance I'm feeling now is a biological defense mechanism, designed to shake the mind back into safe lies when it gets too close to recognizing the paltriness of what we live for, mere extension.
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Date: 2005-03-23 01:17 am (UTC)Let's start by organizing this. Reasons I can think of to not brainwash others so as to make them happier:
1. If it doesn't actually make them happier.
2. If the happiness in question isn't really the best thing for them.
3. If you have no reason to because they are (or will become) too different from you for you to justifiably give a damn about changing them.
4. If brainwashing them somehow changes you for the worse, and this is seen as an unacceptable trade for having changed them for the better.
The brainwashing is desireable if it produces a net real good. You're either saying it doesn't (1 or 2), or that it cannot even occur because a sufficently-informed decision-making subject cannot/willnot make this decision (3 or 4).
The objection I was zeroing in on is that perhaps there's no brainwashing someone without making a new someone and hence murdering the former someone; that someone is not made happier if they no longer exist (well, see Leopardi and others for dissent).
The "what-if-you're-wrong" objection seems counterable by "what if you're not?" Proof that a person can be made happier by our methods may be acquireable after a single trial; and unless we ascribe a greater value to what we might be risking than to what we might be gaining, there is every reason to make that trial.
The idea that there is or comes to be a categorical difference between brainwasher and prospective or actual brainwashee, and that this difference either makes the brainwashing indifferent or undesireable...I think we need to take this one apart. I also think most of the sub-versions will dump us into the "what's valuable in/about human life" trouble, but we'll see.
According to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, only those in on the secret will be unhappy, under Totalitarian Catholicism. I.e. the Inquisitors, and maybe not even all of those. Can you still feel compassion for those from whom you're estranged? Well, sure. Lot's of people suffer for loved ones they have trouble talking to, and who might not even understand or care that they're suffering. You can find it worth it to invest in the happiness of those with whom you're not in communion.
Obviously there are special dangers to having power over a subject you in some sense condescend to; but are these unavoidable? Specific problems can perhaps be dealt with specifically, especially if your group shares perspectives and insights. A committee of Nobel Prize winners, say, or Ethics professors, might elude corruption. Compassion without fellowship may be possible.
And if it isn't, why not? Do we value in others only what is mysterious, or at least a certain human flavor of mystery? That's a dangerous formula, either/or-ing love and knowledge. But perhaps there's something to it.
One thing that alarms me is the possibility that ethics is based in a biologically-encouraged mistake, putting others in our shoes and ourselves in theirs when there's no actual reason to. If the discomfort we feel at witnessing another's pain is because it triggers our own, it's exactly as right for us to dull our own pain via self-hypnosis or alcohol or whatever as it is for us to prevent or assuage the other's pain. And it's certainly more right for the individual to see their sympathy as a context-based urge rather than as a higher force, if that's the truth of the matter, and then deal with it in the way they find best. But I'm going on too long.
Incidentally, I think Clockwork is actually dead-on, because it dodges the what-ifs, is a social rather than philosophical novel. Authorities are prone to think they know what they're doing before they actually do know what they're doing, so the individual sphere should be insured against any intrusion that isn't obviously necessary. End book.