To play Devil's Advocate....
The Joker: Introduce a little anarchy…upset the established order…and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos...You know the thing about chaos? It's fair.
[hands the newly-minted Two-Face a gun to see if he'll try to murder him, points the gun at his own head]
Two-Face: [shows the Joker his signature coin] You live,
[turns it over]
Two-Face: you die.
The Joker: Now we're talking.
(From "The Dark Knight," quote taken from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/quotes)
Welfare and the very concept of distributive justice act on the premise that it is not fair for individuals to suffer for being born into unfortunate circumstances; or that they should not be punished for genetic predisposition for drug addiction; or that somehow since an individual did not deliberately will him or herself into a circumstances, he or she should not be punished for it. In the case of New Hope, the program itself was formed to try to impose "fairness" on a system which had allowed individuals like Russel and Sheryl Harvey to lapse into poverty and joblessness. But is "fairness" really the issue here, or is it the seemingly ubiquitous human fear of chaos? To more clearly define "chaos," I mean a state of being separate from human control. Not necessarily something random--it could be subject to laws of nature, for instance--but something not formed out of deliberate human action.
If there is a concept that dominates Western legal theory (the area of theory that has been most often put into practice, at least), it is the concession that a prerequisite for justice is order. Social contract theorists speculate that the original form of government arose from the necessity for an ordered society with set rules. These rules were seen as necessary for the protection of people from outsiders, from nature, and from each other. Since then, most political theorists have worked on the assumption that order is good and chaos is bad. According to most, the way to justice is through deliberate human thought and action. Among the synonyms listed for "justice" on thesaurus.reference.com are "fair play" and "fair treatment," so it can be argued that a key premise for much of modern (and probably ancient) political thought is that order is necessary to guarantee fairness--that a state of chaos, the absence of human control, is fundamentally unfair.
I challenge this supposition. I challenge it using the logic the Joker used to turn Harvey Dent into Two-Face. Because chaos is fair. A coin-flip is fair. It is the perfect embodiment of fairness. It is absolutely free of human bias, completely removed from human control and its outcome can be attributed to no deliberate human act of will whatsoever. I argue, then, that a deliberately constructed society is less fair than one in which chaos reigns. Chaos leaves no room for human bias. Human-created institutions do.
Using this definition, the New Hope project did not add fairness to society. A poor person had as much of a chance as anyone else at being born rich or in the middle class, or with a disease or in perfect health, so his or her situation is just as fair as anyone else's. What New Hope and welfare add to society is not fairness, it is order. The problem with being born into poverty is not that it is unfair; it is that it a person has no say in whether he or she is born that way. If there is one essential characteristic of human beings, it is the desire for agency--the ability to control one's situation through free will.
So, really, human beings don't want fairness. If we wanted fairness we would avoid constructing our own societies and subject ourselves to the chaotic, random interplay of genetics, space-time and all the other variables nature throws at us independent of whether we exert our will or not. No, we do not want fairness. We want control. We want order. We want society to be what we want it to be. But it is a mistake to call an ordered society any more "fair" or "just" than a completely random one. Similarly, it is a mistake to say that a welfare state is any more just than a Milton Friedman Free Market Paradise.
So why don't we all follow the Joker's advice and "introduced a little chaos" to this world? If we really wanted fairness, that's exactly what would do.
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Dave, I really like the point you make here about order, rather than fairness, as being the primary principle we want government to promote. In an American government class I took through the Twin Cities campus of the U, my professor introduced the various political ideologies as a result of the hierarchal positions in which we place three important values: freedom, equality, and order. Liberals, he explained, prioritize equality over freedom and freedom over order. Conservatives, on the other hand, place order over freedom and freedom over equality. As we would expect, libertarians view freedom as the most important and communitarians place both equality and order over the value of freedom.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know if this two-dimensional approach to political ideologies is a prevalent model now for studying various political ideologies rather than the more linear one we use when we talk about someone being right- or left-wing. I recognize that this model is a very oversimplified version of the wide spectrum of political views that exist in our world, but it helped me understand the differences between the views and I have always found it to be a fairly comprehensive way to classify people’s individual political leanings. However, your example, Dave, made me realize that the values of equality and order, which are assumed to be incredibly different in this approach to political ideology, may actually be incredibly similar. While most liberals would probably not think of themselves as people who place a high value on order within society, it is absolutely correct to point out that they see order as a necessary evil in order to achieve equality. Most liberals that I know are not idealistic enough to think that if we were to live in a state of nature, there would be equality (fairness, yes, but not equality). Liberals, it seems (myself included), want a government that dictates social order in the same way that members of the right-wing do, for no equality seems to be possible without a government dictating it. So are the views of people at the far reaches of the linear model—those that are at the far left and those that are at the far right—really as different as we have always perceived them to be?
Dave, I'm sorry you couldn't join us for the movie last night. I hope your paper-writing went well (I saved way to much of mine for last night too). I would highly recommend checking The Reader out sometime, though, if you haven't seen it. It directly addresses what you wrote about in this blog, and the relationship between chaos vs. order and Nazism. I think you'd find it really interesting. See you in history class in a couple of hours!
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