Topic: 16. PRELIMINARY: FROM FORCE THEORY TO RACE THEORY
RICHARD SWARTZBAUGH AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF AGREEMENTS: STATES OF SOCIETY
New major thesis statement: Before there can be a disagreement, there first must be an agreement.
The issue of unity: Anthropology and political theory both focus heavily on the problem of group unity. That issue is not of direct concern here. Not so much how humans are united or divided among themselves is the issue; rather how they are united or divided within themselves is my question. The issue of inner "alienation," or split in the individual personality, has appeared more out of Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy than out of behavioral science and political theory. The biggest issue of our day, and the one that occupieds much of my own thinking, is race. Where race is concerned my approach is the same. No special attention is given to what things and symbols cause people to identify with this or that race. A lot of discussion regarding race in this sense can be found lately on the internet. My immediate lack of interest in white unity puts me, on the other hand, outside the mainstream of "racial" thinkers. Human beings are divided among themselves because of what divides the individual person within himself. To understand this division it is necessary to view the whole spectrum of human evolution, wherein humans learned of weapons and turned these weapons against themselves and others. What concerns me is the "alienated" state of mind that has come about through millenia, perhaps since the European Paleolithic, wherein tools--essentially, weapons--have come to dominate human relationships. As leveraged violence, weapons have brought about a human condition wherein small acts of intimidation, such as occur daily in what I have called the ritual of baboon fascism, into major social chaos. This chaos is obvious even today in Africa.
The word society may be defined, simply, as animal group life (consisting of individuals) that is organized; and whose organization is formed and directed towards some purpose. (We do not need to specify what purpose this is.) Human society is usually--but we don't have to say always--three things: it's animal life in general; it's human-specifically force-abjuring; it's human-specifically force-leveraged. When we talk about human society, then, and distinguish this society from that of animals, it is force that is the central issue. Some kind of force, whether this be the force of personality and physical strength or the force of pure physical causality, is what makes a mere aggregation of individuals a society. This principle holds true of physics; some force--gravitational pull, centrifugal motion--is what causes a molecule to cohere and what sets the molecule's elements in motion. Also, when we talk of some human principle that is universally recognized in social theory, such as equality and inequality, we mean essentially equality and inequality in force. We may insert here some brief criticism of communism as a social theory: no real significance can be found, for purposes of social theory, in the inequality of possessions among human beings: only the social force implied in these possessions is socially meaningful. Socialist thinking falters, finally, on this basic assumption. Thus follows that when we talk of equality and inequality of possessions we mean exclusively the equality or inequality of human force that possessions bestow--the force that permits some humans to coerce the behavior of others. Originally, at the level of early agriculture, the possession of weapons by some persons allows them to enslave others.
We may also consider the example of marriage. In marriage the equality of man and woman are an equality of force. Through the Rule of Thumb individual details of the marriage contract are worked out. But there is no way other than in the issue of force that man and woman can be equal; being as they are so different in every way, the question of their equality or inequality is simply imponderable. Marriage is a promise, made in public, that neither will hit another with an object larger than the length of a thumb. More than that marriage is a concoction of vague assertions and unsupportable conditions, always differing from culture to culture, that would be unenforcable. Agreements and contracts throughout the length and breadth of society are like this: they are inevitably vague and unenforcable. Lawyers and judges struggle with them with no final satisfaction from any party; legal decisions are often arbitrary. What agreements have in common, if they are finalized agreements--either in the form of a handshake or a written contract specifying a third party--is that violence through weaponry is abjured. We may go on to consider an issue one step further: can an entire society be considered an agreement? We will answer no.
What unites human beings as humans is in the first place an agreement. That there is an agreement does not presume that the parties to an agreement "like" one another; this is true even in marriage. An agreement is simply a passive coexistence, wherein humans proclaim only that they will tolerate one another because they recognize their coexistence has some positive result. And furthermore the agreement, as signed, signaled and finalized, stipulates that no force--weapons--will be used in the event of disagreement (dis-agreement) among the parties. Such an agreement might be called a ritual, one of abjuring force and weapons. Europeans as the world's most technological, weapon-oriented people, have evolved the most ritualized relationships: these relations are in displaying, concealing and abjuring weapons. Human relations in general, and European (white) relations in particular, have been reduced over time to agreements: marriage, the simple understanding finalized by a handshake--these are what orient people in their everyday lives.
But all these fleeting agreements can be understood by reference to the underlying factor of weaponry. The agreement as I have defined the word, and as constitutes the formal relations among our people, is simply the abjuring of weapons. This all will be explained. The Rule of Thumb, the handshake, the salute (the gesture that raises the helmet that conceals the face)--these are the basic rituals of our (Europeans') existence. A meeting, even a casual meeting, is likely to be begun and ended by a handshake: that indicates that the meeting is more than a occupation of common space, and animal signaling: the meeting is essentially turned into an agreement. But of greatest importance is the connection that the human being sustains within himself; the human being virtually becomes a "legal entity, or a promise to abjure weaponry and force in human relationships.
Stages of the history of culture: from Rule of Thumb to the handshake:
Inequality that does not exist outside the man-woman relationship is transformed, through marriage, to an equality that does not exist outside the man-woman relationship. Men as hunters had weapons; women did not, as a group. This and the fact that life in earliest times was more or less desperate gave males an inordinate advantage in arguments with women. Language, promises and "agreements" equalized this relationship. Now, marriage is humankind's first "agreement." At issue is the form of inequality that human beings have, forthwith, at their earliest possession of weapons and the fact, inevitably, that some humans will have better weapons than others. Rousseau alluded to this technics-inspired inequality: he says that "in a state of nature," that is a weaponless state in our terms, one human being, threatened by "slavery," can just walk away from his captor. There is nothing complicated about this equasion. We suggest that it is technics, the fact that some humans possess superior technics, and that human beings as masters can organize themselves around technics, that makes slavery (in our sense) possible. Such organized slavery--as organized society itself--appeared as populations became more settled, or more warlike and mobile as the case may be. But through these complex undulations, with a population rising to dominance and another falling, the marriage vows have, since the beginnings of language and promises, a steady thread of equality that spanns, finally, all human history.
The Rule of Thumb, codified in British common law, stipulates that a man shall not hit his wife with an object larger than his own thumb. Such a formulation suggests clearly what marriage is: it is an abjuring of the use of weapons in the relationship. Through history the provisions of marriage have changed and differ from one culture to another. What has remained the same, however, is that violence in settling disputes between man and woman is expressly forbidden. The details of a marriage contract are vague often to the point of total obscurity; these details are seldom understood by people entering the contract. This difference between the marriage vow and contracts in general has been widely noted. On the other hand, domestic battery remains among the most serious of crimes and the one most punished. The point to be emphasized here, though, is not so much the obscurity of marriage vows as that the Rule of Thumb, as it is called, exists by virtue of the protected authority of the "public in general," or society. Unlike civil matters, where no criminal action can be filed, the protection that the woman (in particular) is afforded in a domestic relationship is in the hands of society in general. And society will meet out punishment that will force the equality of male and female with respect to force and violence.
New major thesis statement: Richard Swartzbaugh's theory of agreements states: "Before there is a disagreement, there first must be an agreement."
An agreeement between two males is, like marriage, primarily in the abjuring of force to settle differences. JJ Rousseau spoke in vague terms of a "Social Contract" between humans and their respective government; we on the other hand, in viewing agreements between specific individuals and involving small issues, may be more to the point. This small agreement is finalized by the handshake between its principals. Earlier we spoke of marriage. But, whereas the Rule of Thumb is a provision enforced by the public in general, the handshake symbolizes that both parties to the agreement have checked each other; neither has found a weapon in the hand of the other. So, in other words, the agreement is just between these two individuals. Such agreements would have to be the rule among hunters; in their society--because any leader of such a group would be himself a hunter on a particular hunt, and have a vested interest in the hunt would be disqualified as a "third party." Such agreements are still an everyday matter for the majority of human beings everywhere; no society could function without such agreements. Finally the issue at hand is as we shall see is that, precisely in a society where physical, man-made weapons create an inequality unlike the inequality of any animal society, an agreement on the other hand establsihes an equality unlike the equality of any animal society.
A contract may be added to the agreeement to strengthen the agreement. What the contract means is that force is still an option to enforce terms of a contract; but the force is held "outside" the contract by neither of the principal parties. The outside party we call the third party; and this third party is expressly commissioned, by a provision of the first agreement, to enforce this agreement. A more detailed account of this proceedure is provided by Otto Gierke in his work on the Social Contract thinkers. [cite] A contract suggests that both principal parties feel that, though they have checked one another (through the handshake) for weapons, the two of them feel the need for a "present force"; there is here an escalated feeling of distrust between the parties. The contract implies not simply a symbolic abjuring of force of weapons, as in the handshake, but an actual relegation of force to a third party. I have elsewhere spoken of a community of baboons, and referred to them as exemplary fascists. Actually baboons evolved in the same environment--the open spaces of African savannah--as did the ancestors of homo sapiens. Unprotected and open to attack these animals became instinctively social in a general way that humans are social. But there is more. Baboons never did devise weapons. Thus if baboons are "fascist" their fascism carries them only so far as their physical and personal traits carry them: the bigger and stronger prevail to dominate the group. With humans it is different. Human beings carry weapons which leverage the personal violence and strength of the individual. Human groupings are structured around this physical, artificial violence; and the groups made possible through leveraged violence of weapons are immense by comparison to those of baboons. What I call baboon fascism is the primal condition of humanity, it is something humans still have and must not be discarded, upon penalty of denying human biological heritage and all the instinctive wisdom this heritage contains. I am going to talk about race in the context of this baboon fascism, as a reality which brings together, finally, the sides of human collective personality "alienated" or separated from one another through agreements and disagreements.
There is a further consideration: human beings themselves, working through and around technics, further leverage what would otherwise be mere biological force to enforce social inequality. As socialists say, inequalities of property contribute to inequality as a general condition of life; but this is only partly true. Technology itself even as serving human material well being, is inherently a source of inequality. Marx and Engels have adequately discussed the implications of a division of labor; but the essential fact to consider is that technology as we know it, in its highly evolved forms, began as weaponry. This technics of violence is the physical expression of personal force and tends, even as technology assists humans, it opposes these same persons and elevates them or destroys them according to its own whims.
Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2009-06-28 14:49:02)