Harsh but unfair

 

I remember reading once, in a book on Athenian law (perhaps this one) that anthropologists had observed that in societies where criminals were less likely to be apprehended, penalties were harsher. It made sense; after all, modern developed countries, with their highly developed surveillance technology, have (by historical standards) strikingly lenient punishment regimes; pre-modern ones, by contrast, which had zero or only rudimentary policing, had more of a tendency to turn to the gallows, the guillotine - or the gulp of hemlock.

The observation came back to me recently in connection with the current vogue for 'cancelling.' The frequency of this phenomenon has been questioned, but what seems to concern many people isn't necessarily how widespread it is, but how harsh the punishments can be. A disabled grandfather is sacked for sharing a comedy sketch. A researcher loses his job for re-tweeting a study about the effectiveness of peaceful compared with violent protest. And all the while, not-especially-controversial views and tame jokes elicit the kind of fury that used to be reserved for blood feuds. 

Given the many instances of such 'cancellations' that have occurred, it might seems strange that a good few people continue to insist that the whole phenomenon is made up. But there might be a way of explaining both why they think that and why some of these same people engage in such disproportionately harsh punishings of individuals who violates their norms. 

The reason they think the free speech crisis isn't really a crisis is partly because they see people saying things they dislike all the time. That's been one of the effects of the explosion of social media: whereas twenty years ago you wouldn't often be exposed to views from outside your thought-world, and you'd have to put in some work to have your views broadcast, now it's easy to post things and even easier to see things others have posted. 

If you have narrow parameters for what ideas are acceptable, it follows that you're likely to see quite a lot of what are to you unacceptable ideas. Twitter must be terrifying - all those people saying things you think are terrible! What's more, most of them are getting away scot free.

The temptation, then, is to make an example of anyone you are in a positions to punish, pour décourager les autres. This is what ancient societies were up to as well. It makes sense, especially if you consider the point of view of the potential criminal. 

You can look at risk as the combination of how likely a bad thing is to happen, and how bad it will be if it does. You may not be that likely to fall of the cliff if you go right up to the edge, but if you slip you'll die, so why risk it? If you're in a society without a functioning police force, the chance you'll be apprehended for doing something bad is pretty low. One way for the state to increase the risk you face (and hence deter you from wrongdoing), is to increase the penalty you risk facing. You think you probably won't get caught, but if you do...

The temptation to make an example of someone might be especially great when there are artificial barriers in the way of punishing other people who are up to the activity you dislike. For example, if a lot of the people saying things you find unacceptable are represented by anonymous Twitter accounts. Or if there's been a state amnesty saying you can't punish any of the members of a tyrannical junta.

That last thing, of course, is what happened in Athens after the murderous regime of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Once the democracy had been restored, there seems to have been an agreement not to prosecute anyone involved with the Thirty, except for the Thirty themselves (some of whom had already been killed in the process of restoring the democracy). (What exactly the amnesty required is, like most things in ancient history, a little bit controversial).

In 399, only four years after the Thirty had been toppled, the philosopher Socrates, who had links to some of the Thirty (including Critias, one of the more extreme members), was executed on a vote of a popular jury. Why? It's complicated; there were lots of factors that led to that outcome, including the way he went about defending himself (if that was even what he was up to) in court. 

But one possibility is that his prosecutors indicted him on a charge of inventing new gods and corrupting the youth precisely because they couldn't prosecute him for what they were really angry at him for - the actions of the Thirty. And they also couldn't prosecute many of the people who they knew had collaborated with the Thirty. Nor could they prosecute Critias and others who were already dead. But Socrates was there, still going about his business asking irritating questions in public...

Note that the theory, if it's right, explains not only the excessiveness of the punishings but also the way they have of mistaking their object. At least, it looks an awful lot like all of the guilt for something is being loaded onto the back of one, unfortunate person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That, of course, is another phenomenon that's familiar to anthropologists: scapegoating. 

One way to stop this sort of thing, as you might guess, is to get better at apprehending wrong-doers. But it's very questionable in cases like the ones mentioned above (sharing comedy sketches and so on) whether anyone's done anything wrong at all. Another way is to reduce narrow-minded people's exposure to views they find distasteful. 

Doing that by force would be wrong (people should be free to go on social media, of course), but it might be advisable, considering the kinds of moral risks involved, for some people to think twice about the amount of time they spend online. In other words, if you can't deal with different ideas, it might be best just to stay off Twitter. Otherwise you might find yourself with a cup of hemlock in your hand - handing it to an innocent person. 

In praise of prose

Near the end of his mammoth 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music (which, I must confess, I haven't read all the way through), Richard Taruskin suggests that musical notation may now have outlived its usefulness. Notation emerged in order to preserve and transmit music, to enable other people to play something far beyond the context it was originally composed in. But when I can upload my latest composition straight onto YouTube (be warned), why bother writing it down?

A few years ago, the top Facebook execs apparently decided that prose was going the way of musical notation, if not necessarily the dodo. Their thinking was similar to Taruskin's. Now that we can just speak into a camera and upload the video onto the world-wide web (as they're calling it), why would anyone go to the trouble of writing their thoughts down? 

The huge shift to video on social media that the tech execs anticipated hasn't quite materialized (at least not yet). There are a lot more videos online, and YouTube has become a venue for spoken commentary and argumentation (what the Greeks would have called rhetoric) from ordinary citizens in a way that was never quite possible in the world of TV, with its relatively few channels overseen by hierarchical corporations. And yet, people are also still writing a lot of prose.

I think that's a good thing. The written word, you see, still has its advantages.

The main one is that it allows both writer and reader to take things at their own pace. That means you can wait till you're really sure of what you're saying to write it down. You can look up everything you can find bearing for or against your argument and include it in a footnote. You can even change your mind and write a completely different sentence to the one you thought you'd be writing. And your reader can go back and puzzle out what you've written if they don't quite get it the first time round. They can pause for a while to ponder what you've said before moving on to the next paragraph.

Writing also has some plus points when compared to conversation. Now, I'm aware we're all intensely aware of the joys of in-the-flesh interaction at the moment, after weeks if not months of lockdown. In-person conversation has its plus points too (not least of which is that we seem to find it inherently enjoyable). But we're also all aware, I think, that there are things we choose not to say to people's faces. Often that's a very good thing. Often it's a result of an apparently natural tendency to want to be kind to each other. At other times it can be a result of hierarchy or outright intimidation. That means it can often be easier to state what we really think in the privacy of our own rooms (or, at least,  behind the partial screen of a laptop screen).

Of course, many people are retreating to their rooms to voice their thoughts - they're just doing so into a camera rather than on a page. They're obviously free to do so - I'll defend their right to that to the death, even if Voltaire might not really. But what shift to video there has been has brought with it its own issues. We're rarely intimidated in front of someone talking to us on YouTube in the way we might be in real life, and (as comment sections attest) we usually feel free to reply in ways we wouldn't in person (sometimes even to a pathological degree). But videos do transmit things about a person - like passion and attractiveness - in a way that often distracts us from the tough but necessary work of evaluating claims on their merits. Since the types of charisma that videos transmit aren't equably distributed, it can also exacerbate various forms of privilege.

All that, obviously, is why I've written this entry. 

Lockdowns and liberalism

For all the different forms the debate over the lockdowns has taken, it's the absence of one argument that's surprised me the most. At least until recently (as the lockdowns have dragged on), I was aware of very few people, at least in mainstream media, emphasizing that the lockdowns were a violation of our civil liberties.

That's surprising, because they clearly did restrict our liberties to a degree that's probably not been paralleled since the Second World War. Putting the whole population under house arrest is quite a serious move, not only virtually cancelling freedom of movement, but also related rights (some of which are constitutionally enshrined in the US) like freedom of assembly - at least until the 'Black Lives Matter' protests.

Come to think of it, though, maybe the reason the civil liberties argument hasn't had much of an airing is simple: it wouldn't be particularly convincing in the context of a global pandemic. That's because a pandemic is a situation in which my freedom clearly impacts others. My going about the place risks spreading a disease to others, and thus doing them harm.

In other words, it violates John Stuart Mill's 'harm principle,' perhaps the essential principle of liberalism. The idea is that people should be free to do as they like as long as they don't harm others. The only problem with this famous principle is that it's no help at all.

Everything we do harms others in some way; even if all we do is sit at home and meditate we're using up space and resources that might have gone to somewhere else. And besides, someone might find my sitting at home and meditating annoying and hence (so the complaint might run) psychologically harmful. So where do we draw the line?

As an objection to Mill's principle as a philosophical principle this seems pretty devastating. But it may retain its usefulness as pragmatic principle or as a rule of thumb. Most liberal democratic societies have in fact operated more or less on the principle that people shouldn't do things which clearly cause others serious harm (on a reasonable definition of 'harm'). Who decides what clearly constitutes harm on a reasonable definition? We do, through our democratically-enacted laws.

This isn't the blog post where I tell you whether I think the lockdowns did more good than harm. At least not at any length: my sense at this point is that, while Covid-19 is clearly dangerous (killing something in the region of 0.1% of people it infects), it's significantly less dangerous than some thought (this widely-read article depended on a 3-4% fatality rate, for example). Against this danger we have to stack all the negative health effects of the lockdown.

Part of those will flow from the economic downturn caused by the lockdowns. But part of them will flow from the suspension of our freedoms. And they'll do so in a way which sheds light on the value of those freedoms.

Simply put, freedom isn't simply a matter of the consequences of what are sometimes taken to be natural entitlements. Besides its moral claims, it also has pragmatic ones. One of these is that it allows decisions about individual lives to be made by the people who know the most about those lives - those individuals themselves.

The lockdowns effectively prevented people from making decisions in reaction to the circumstances of their own lives. My own parents are an example: my father suffers from a medical condition that benefits from him going to the gym, something that also helps release my mother from the strain of being a care-giver for a time. But the British government decided that it would be best for them to stay cooped up at home.

This is a version of a problem Joanna Williams touched on in her piece on domestic violence and the lockdown. She concluded that that problem could easily have been eased if the government had simply decided to trust those who needed 'to take a second walk or go and sit on a park bench for half an hour.'

The point is that liberalism doesn't just function as a system of moral entitlements. It's also partly a solution to problems of information. How do we know who needs to go sit on a park bench, get out and exercise, or whatever? The government could try to gather all that information itself, but it's far simpler just to let individuals make their own choices. They know their own circumstances better than anyone else, and they're more motivated to take care of themselves.

This is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the points at which we can see liberalism and democracy intersect or overlap. Democracy, too, can be seen as the consequence of moral entitlements (the idea that people should be political equal). But it can also be seen as a way of gathering individual preferences in the most efficient way - by allowing people to express them, and then counting them up.

Of course, one of the things people have long seemed to want is a stable state that can ensure a basic level of order. That usually involves imposing some minimal rules. But there's a danger of the state overstepping its bounds, like a clumsy Gulliver, keen to help, who ends up squashing whole footprints of Lilliputians. The trouble is precisely that he's too big, and too far away, to see what the the smaller people are up to, or to hear everything they are trying to say to him.

There are obviously only two solutions: Gulliver knows his place, or he's replaced by a more nimble giant composed entirely of Lilliputians, a millions-strong Megazord. This is something we will come back to. In the meantime, a well-meaning Gulliver is stalking the earth - lovingly and crushingly.