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Maturing In US Society

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In the last post I offered a story about human evolution. In this post I offer a framework story for how we mature in US society.

Introduction

I’ve read a lot of philosophy material trying to define human nature. It seems to me that almost all those accounts start with adults. They start with a fully mature male (because of course they do), and you can almost feel the self-examination at the root.

One obvious example is René Decartes with his skeptical doubt of everything, leaving him with his “I think therefore I am”. He never seems to think of asking himself what he was before he could think, and then what he was when he first started to think, and then, wait, when did I start to think and what was that like? All those questions seem more interesting than his trivial proof of his own existence as a first step to deriving the world.

When I read this material, or listen to podcasts like Philosophize This by Stephen West and The Partially Examined Life. I often find myself asking the air “What is the pathway to that view?” The absence of a pathway permits all sorts of answers that seem ill-suited to our day.

And that’s what attracts me to Pragmatism. It tells me that those old guys are asking interesting questions, but that the answers aren’t always connected to the way we actually come to be ourselves, or the way we actually are. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, who seems to think all philosophers asked interesting questions for their day. He says we need to ask questions relevant to our own times, taking what we can from our predecessors. (Disclaimer, I haven’t read Deleuze, and rely solely on outside sources.

Becoming

So, here’s a story. It’s not a universal story like the one in the last post. Instead, it’s a kind of individual story that might apply to us.

Cat Bohannon writes a lot about nursing babies in her excellent and very readable book, Eve. One critical part of the process begins shortly after birth when the mother offers her breast to the newborn. As Bohannon describes it, the two have to work together to get the breast to provide sustenance. The newborn has an instinctive behavior, rooting, but the mother must help and the newborn must respond to the assistance. This might be a very early example of the cooperation that I think forms part of our wiring.

Through the next year or so the infant takes in all sorts of information without using words, without knowing what a word is. (H/T commenter Gruntfuttock). This information is experiential, not formal.

Then the little one learns to talk. This is also a cooperative process. It has already heard words, and maybe even worked out what they mean, like its name and mama and dada. As the vocabulary grows, the child can take in information from parents and others, including information about the use of language. Hopefully our little person stops licking everything in sight.

Then the questions start. Why is the sky blue? Why do I have to go to eat these green things? And more and more. And then they get harder. Why doesn’t X like me? Why can’t we go see Grandmother? Why do I have to go to school? Kids expect their questions to have answers, and to expect that the parents know the answer. Gradually they learn that other people have answers.

Then they learn that their parents don’t have all the answers and that they have given incomplete and misleading answers, and even wrong answers. They turn to new sources of information and answers. Hopefully they don’t get many wrong answers.

The point of this story

None of us made the world we live in. We didn’t create social norms, we didn’t generate any of the material goods we have, we didn’t create a morality. We just showed up. Our parents first, and then everyone else in our lives helps us grow accustomed to the social, physical, and moral world we inhabit. Hopefully we become able to survive in it, to succeed in it on its terms, and maybe even to add something to the accumulated store of human understanding.

We get used to living in a certain way. As Pierre Bourdieu explains, we develop a habitus, a set of practical responses to the things that might happen in our world. Once that habitus is in place, we have stock responses for almost all events. We don’t think. We just respond.

So how do we react  when something happens for which our habitus is inadequate? What happens when something arises that raises doubts about the assumptions behind our habitus? I turn to the early Pragmatist C. S. Peirce (pronounced “purse”). I discuss his seminal 1879 essay in this post. Peirce says we don’t like to think. It’s hard. It’s no fun. And besides, we were just fine before that stupid doubt appeared.

Peirce says there are four responses to doubt. First, we could just ignore that irritating doubt. That works more or less well, depending on how important the belief is to our daily lives, and how irritating the doubt is. For example, we can do just fine with “the sun rises in the East”, unless we hang around with normal people who know better and laugh at us.

Second, we can look for an authoritative source to force other people to agree with us. Galileo found out about that.

Third, we might get together with other people and try to create a new view by consensus. That might work, depending on who we talk to. Hint: avoid QAnon people. Also people who you just found online.

Finally, we can try what we now call the scientific method.. This approach has been elaborated and partially formalized since Peirce’s time. For a good discussion, see Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of knowledge, discussed here. Because the same method, modified slightly, can be used for most subjects of expertise, we now generally think that expert knowledge is always contingent on new information and new ways of thinking about old information.

Individuals as individuals

1, So this, I think, is the way people mature. Of course, specific people can stop anywhere along the way. But the goal is always to find a place in a complex society that was there before us, will be there regardless of what we do, and will remain when we’re gone. But the process of maturation isn’t in itself a satisfying answer to the question of what it means to be an individual in the context of our society. I’ll offer a tentative answer in my next post

2. I don’t think this description is judgmental; it wasn’t meant to be. I think judgment of individuals has to be based on criteria outside the process of maturation.

3. I didn’t mention individual agency in this story. One element of habitus is the range of responses available to each of us in response to specific events. One of the goals of the people who raise us is to shape the rane of responses we consider in confronting an event. For example, our parents don’t want us to hit a sibling for taking a toy. That is a restriction on our individual agency.

Depending on the way we are raised, and the reactions we get from our responses to events generally, we limit our agency so that the responses are at least bearable. As an example, if we repeatedly do badly at school, we might form a habitus including the proposition that we aren’t very smart, and that limits the things we think we can do. This amounts to limiting our own agency. There are many ways in which society operates to limit our exercise of individual agency.

Background For A New Book

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Index to posts in this series

This series about rights began with the observation that there is a lot of talk about rights, but not a lot of clarity about their nature and origin. I think the readings so far provide a bit of clarity. Earlier series add additional background.

Several commenters recommended Jamal Greene’s How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart. I’ve read the introduction which summarizes some of Professor Greene’s ideas, and I think it will be a good next step.

This post sets out ideas that form the background of my approach to Greene’s book. In the next post I’ll examine Roe v. Wade, which is at the center of a contest about rights in the US.

The nature of us humans

The Evolution Of Agency by Michael Tomasello leads me to think that we humans invented ourselves by a slow process involving observation, learning, teaching, memory and luck. Many species can learn behaviors by trial and error coupled with varying degrees of observation and reasoning. Many of those species can teach learned behaviors to others of their species by example. Humans are especially good at that. Humans add the layer of verbal communication which speeds things up. We can also pay attention to our own words and reason with and about them in a kind of iterative learning. This gradually gave us a tremendous capacity for abstraction which is a valuable asset in problem-solving.

Early humans taught their young their knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, giving them tools for survival. Natural curiosity brought change. This view of evolution is supported by Cat Bohannon’s book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Bohannon says  most likely females taught basic language skills to the young, on the ground that females spent most of their time tending to helpless infants.

Philosophical insights

“Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not.”

That, of course, is Protagoras, quoted in §2.1 here He meant that individual observation of the world is the best anyone can do in determining facts about things in the world. The example he uses is weather. If it seems cold to me then it’s cold and if at the same time it seems hot to you then it’s hot.

But when a group of people compares notes on such observations, and generates and tests explanations, something else happens: we start to approach truth, at least truth in the sense of the Pragmatists.

This kind of truth is the goal of participants in the Epistemic Regime described by Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution Of Knowledge, which I discuss here (Side note, the earlier posts in that series took Brooks’ false definition of the term as a starting point. I wrote the linked post after I read what Rauch actually wrote.)

William James, one of the founders of Pragmatism, says that everything we think and know came from our human ancestors. Everything they taught us, including language, the meaning of words, and the rules of reasoning, all came from the actions and thoughts of our forebears.

We socialize each other. We learn how to act, think, and be human from other humans. We aren’t the individual atoms described by neoliberal economists, and we aren’t the husks created by totalitarianism. The social human is a better view than most philosophers offer. Descartes with his cogito ergo sum tries to reason his way into understanding the self, as do other philosophers, but it doesn’t work like that.

We can’t understand anything useful by starting with individuals. We only have meaningful existence in the context of our social groups. If I come up with what I think is a new idea, it only becomes useful if I share it with others who check it, and perhaps find some use for it.

Basic principles of rights

In Chapter 9 of The Origins Of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt demonstrates three relevant points. First, rights are guarantees given by citizens to each other. Here’s how Arendt puts it:

Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization insofar as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights. P. 301.

I read this to say that equality is an element of citizenship in a well-organized state. Each of us as a citizen participates in the public life of the group on an equal footing. Equality only exists in societies guided by a principle of justice. Arendt doesn’t say which principle of justice. To my mind this is a valuable insight, as different societies can have vastly different ideas about justice based on their own cultures. I’d guess Arendt would approve of the notion of justice laid out by John Rawls in A Theory Of Justice.

Arendt rejects Jefferson’s pious formulation that the Creator endows us with certain rights. She says, correctly I think, that we endow each other with rights and by doing so we hold those rights reciprocally. We create our own rights by consent. Over time we reach for the rights we think are most conducive to our flourishing as a group. Again, this doesn’t tell us which society is best, or what “flourishing” might mean, simply that it is acceptable to the majority.

Second, Arendt says that as a practical matter rights only have meaning if they are the creation of a state or a nation capable of and willing to enforce them against all comers, foreign and domestic. The first nine chapters of the book can be read as supporting this view, if you think of them from the point of view of people acted on by the dominant class. It is especially obvious in her discussion of the vast migrations set off by World War I. Modern examples abound, including the formation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the attack on the Rohingya people of Myanmar, and the contemporary attack on Gaza.

Third, Arendt agrees with Jefferson that the governed must participate in social decisions as a matter of the equality of all citizens. I take that to be one of the principles of justice.

Freedom and Equality

When we say that all people are created equal we mean equality in civic life. This is the way Elizabeth Anderson talks about it as I discuss here.  Here’s the index to the series, which also takes up her discussion of the dimensions of freedom in civic life. Equality is closely tied to her concept of freedom, which includes freedom from domination by others.

Supreme Court Cases

I have discussed a number of Reconstruction Era Supreme Court cases (here, here here, and here). These show the dangers of letting a group of unaccountable lawyers make decisions about rights.

Conclusion

I hope this summary helps explain how I am approaching the ideas in Greene’s book. I will use these ideas and definitions as starting points for understanding his book.

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Front page picture: By Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57477584