[p2p-research] Helping the Helpless

Sun Sep 27 05:57:02 CEST 2009

Hi Edward and all,

I'm behind in my emails, so as yet missing the  context of this discussion,
yet I believe that this is quite relevant:

You may have missed it:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/civilisational-competition-social-change-and-p2p/2009/09/08

Civilisational competition, social change, and
P2P<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/civilisational-competition-social-change-and-p2p/2009/09/08>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]Michel Bauwens
8th September 2009

 The evolution of civilization can be seen as dialectic between the
systematic selection for power and the human striving for a humane world,
between the necessities imposed upon humankind regardless of their wishes
and their efforts to be able to choose the cultural environment in which
they will live.

*Book: The Parable Of The Tribes. by Andrew Schmookler. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984*

This very important book poses a fundamental problem for social change. No
nation can change without ignoring the competition with others, which
constrains change. Do we have answers to this challenge. I think we have
two, to be developed separately: 1) the objective idea of Peak
Hierarchy<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-peak-oil-to-peak-hierarchy/2008/07/27>;
2) the political answer of Multilateralism
2.0<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/james-quilligan-21st-century-commons-the-new-social-charters-and-the-state/2009/08/30>,
recently explained to us by James Quilligan.

But here is the thesis <http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC07/Schmoklr.htm> that
challenges social change advocates:

*Summary*

The book *“argues that the history of civilization has been largely shaped
by the way that, as a system, civilization has no mechanisms for restraining
the raw struggle for power between societies. Schmookler brings a remarkable
depth of both scholarship and insight to this issue, tracing (in the latter
parts of the book) the myriad insidious ways that this struggle has thwarted
human choice. He makes it clear that the problems we face now, as we try to
come to grips with our planetary interconnectedness, can’t simply be blamed
on personalities or ideologies, but are rooted in the fundamental structure
of 5000 years of international anarchy. The problem of power that he raises
and explores is a fundamental challenge for governance (at many levels) that
we must deal with somehow if we are to have any hope of creating a humane
sustainable culture as a successor to the darkness we call civilization. If
you want to deepen your understanding of the full challenge we face, you’ll
find the book a mind-stretcher and a sobering treat.” *

*Key Thesis*

*“power is like a contaminant, a disease, which once introduced will
gradually yet inexorably become universal in the system of competing
societies. More important than the inevitability of the struggle for power
is the profound social evolutionary consequence of that struggle once it
begins. A selection for power among civilized societies is inevitable. If
anarchy assured that power among civilized societies could not be governed,
the selection for power signified that increasingly the ways of power would
govern the destiny of mankind. This is the new evolutionary principle that
came into the world with civilization. Here is the social evolutionary black
hole that we have sought as an explanation of the harmful warp in the course
of civilization’s development.” *

*Discussion:*

*1.*

*“In nature, all pursue survival for themselves and their kind. But they can
do so only within biologically evolved limits. The living order of nature,
though it has no ruler, is not in the least anarchic. Each pursues a kind of
self- interest, each is a law unto itself, but the separate interests and
laws have been formed over aeons of selection to form part of a tightly
ordered harmonious system. Although the state of nature involves struggle,
the struggle is part of an order. Each component of the living system has a
defined place out of which no ambition can extricate it. Hunting- gathering
societies were to a very great extent likewise contained by natural limits.*

*With the rise of civilization, the limits fall away. The natural
self-interest and pursuit of survival remain, but they are no longer
governed by any order. The new civilized forms of society, with more complex
social and political structures, created the new possibility of indefinite
social expansion: more and more people organized over more and more
territory. All other forms of life had always found inevitable limits placed
upon their growth by scarcity and consequent death. But civilized society
was developing the unprecedented capacity for unlimited growth as an entity.
(The limitlessness of this possibility does not emerge fully at the outset,
but rather becomes progressively more realized over the course of history as
people invent methods of transportation, communication, and governance which
extend the range within which coherence and order can be maintained.) Out of
the living order there emerged a living entity with no defined place.*

*In a finite world, societies all seeking to escape death- dealing scarcity
through expansion will inevitably come to confront each other. Civilized
societies, therefore, though lacking inherent limitations to their growth,
do encounter new external limits - in the form of one another. Because human
beings (like other living creatures) have “excess reproductive capacity,”
meaning that human numbers tend to increase indefinitely unless a high
proportion of the population dies prematurely, each civilized society faces
an unpleasant choice. If an expanding society willingly stops where its
growth would infringe upon neighboring societies, it allows death to catch
up and overtake its population. If it goes beyond those limits, it commits
aggression. With no natural order or overarching power to prevent it, some
will surely choose to take what belongs to their neighbors rather than to
accept the limits that are compulsory for every other form of life.*

*In such circumstances, a Hobbesian struggle for power among societies
becomes inevitable. We see that what is freedom from the point of view of
each single unit is anarchy in an ungoverned system of those units. A
freedom unknown in nature is cruelly transmuted into an equally unnatural
state of anarchy, with its terrors and its destructive war of all against
all.*

*As people stepped across the threshold into civilization, they
inadvertently stumbled into a chaos that had never before existed. The
relations among societies were uncontrolled and virtually uncontrollable.
Such an ungoverned system imposes unchosen necessities: civilized people
were compelled to enter a struggle for power.*

*The meaning of “power,” a concept central to this entire work, needs to be
explored. Power may be defined as the capacity to achieve one’s will against
the will of another. The exercise of power thus infringes upon the exercise
of choice, for to be the object of another’s power is to have his choice
substituted for one’s own. Power becomes important where two actors (or
more) would choose the same thing but cannot have it; power becomes
important when the obstacles to the achievement of one’s will come from the
will of others. Thus as the expanding capacities of human societies created
an overlap in the range of their grasp and desire, the intersocietal
struggle for power arose.*

*But the new unavoidability of this struggle is but the first and smaller
step in the transmutation of the apparent freedom of civilized peoples into
bondage to the necessities of power.” *

*2.*

*“The category of “power maximizers” embraces a couple of different kinds of
actors in the human drama. Most especially, it includes entire sovereign
social entities (like the imperialistic tribes of the parable) who impinge
upon other, previously autonomous societies. The parable of the tribes
focuses primarily on the intersocietal system because that system forms the
comprehensive context for human action, but more importantly because in that
system anarchy has been most complete and least curable. Anarchy is at the
core of the problem of power, making struggle inevitable and allowing the
ways of power to spread uncontrolled throughout the whole like a
contaminant. Thus, nowhere has power had so free and decisive a reign as in
that arena of sovereign actors where, by definition, there is no power to
hold all in awe.*

*Yet the problem of power exists in some form also within societies; for
even though in one sense societies are governed, in another more profound
sense they are usually subject to anarchy. The formation of government and
the establishment of the rule of law can be - and usually have been in large
measure - the embodiment of the rule of raw power rather than a restraint
upon it. The search for a fuller understanding of the problem of power in
social evolution leads therefore to an intrasocietal analogue of the parable
of the tribes. And the category of history’s power maximizers includes those
groups (like the feudal class) and individuals (like Stalin) who are
successful in competing for power within a society’s boundaries. Again, it
is those distinguished by their capacity to grasp and wield power who gain
the means to shape the whole (social) system according to their ways and
their vision. And again, the history makers are cast in their roles not by
the people affected but by an unchosen selective process; and generally,
they are not those whom mankind would choose to guide its destiny.”*

*3.*

*“The process is not hostile to human welfare, simply indifferent. Many
things that serve power serve people as well, such as a degree of social
order and the provision of adequate nutrition to keep people functioning.
(As this implies, there are a great many roads to hell that the need for
social power helps close off.) But the parable of the tribes suggests that
the service to people of such power-enhancing attributes of society may be
entirely incidental to their raison d’etre. Those of us who now enjoy
affluence and freedom as well as power are predisposed to believe that
benign forces shape our destiny. But to the extent that our blessings are
incidental by-products of the strategy for power at this point in the
evolution of civilization, our optimism may be ill-founded. If the forces
that now favor us are the same as those that earlier condemned masses of
people to tyranny and bondage, the future requirements of power maximization
may compel mankind not toward the heavenly utopia to which we aspire but
toward the hellish dystopias that some like Orwell and Huxley have
envisioned. Our well-being may prove to be less like that of the squire who
feeds himself well off the land that he rules than like that of the dairy
cow who, though pampered and well fed, is not served but exploited by the
system in which she lives. The bottom line that governs her fate is not her
own calculation; when she is worth more for meat than for milk, off she goes
to the slaughterhouse.” *

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Edward Miller <embraceunity at gmail.com>wrote:

> I just wanted to agree with both Kevin's and Ryan's comments, but with
> caveats.
>
> Kevin, while I would say that there has been genetic consequences resulting
> from the history of centralized power structures, I do not think that they
> are all that strong. Our higher reasoning abilities may actually have
> increased. Our brains have increased in size in the past 650 years.
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4643312.stm
>
> Perhaps this is just part of the Flynn Effect, or maybe it is something
> else. Certainly in civilized society intelligence is clearly seen as an
> indicator of sexual fitness, and even intelligence and sperm motility seem
> to be correlated. While we may be woefully uninformed as a whole, this is
> not because of a natural ability deficit. Thus, we are clearly capable of
> making choices. Not infrequently do we make choices to revolt against
> authority structures, in spite of any minor selection pressure for docility.
> There are plenty of selection pressures going the other way as well. A lack
> of assertiveness is seen as weakness by potential mates. Conditions of
> geography, climate, and material scarcity also seem to select for
> selfishness, aggressiveness, etc... though simultaneously we have a higher
> level of cultural evolution and world-system evolution taking place which is
> selecting for people who can function well by capitalist logic... thus we
> see multiculturalism, teamwork, entrepreneurship and simultaneously docility
> selected for.
>
> So it is a very complex matter, and we can't make any simple
> generalizations, except that we can say with empirical evidence that certain
> genes promote certain temperaments, and we can speak of how we might like to
> see them changed. Would we like to increase compassion? Increase pleasure
> capacities? Under what mode of production? (capitalism? socialism? open
> source?) Etc. For me it is a pragmatic matter.
>
> ---
>
> Ryan, your definition of pragmatism is consequentialist in nature, and
> likely utilitarian. I am a staunch utilitarian, as is David Pearce. The
> criteria by which we determine what works "best" is how it affects the
> subjective experience of the sentient beings which are being considered.
>
> Now there are a lot of paradoxes in this worldview, such as the Utility
> Monster or the Repugnant Conclusion, but most of them only deal with certain
> types of utilitarianism (preference utilitarianism, classical
> utilitarianism, hedonism, etc), and even still they can usually be dispelled
> by taking a more holistic approach. Yet the ultimate goal of producing some
> variation of the idea of the "maximum happiness for the maximum number"
> remains unchanged.
>
>
>
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>
>

-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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