| |
|
(My God....the Utopian deregulated vision, the odd sentence structure, the tendency to use quotation marks around random words...Leap is Bizarro Darkseid!)
The first section of Leap's argument is what I have referred to earlier as the "we believe kittens are lovely" stage. Leap mistook this to be a reference to his fluffiness, but is rather a comment on the use of largely uncontentious statements. These statements are then represented as logically justifying a position they do not relate to, but later for that.
People are by nature multifaceted generalists rather than rather two-dimensional specialists; being human is made up of a variety of things.
This is perfectly reasonable, but in its current form also so vague as to be rather unhelpful. Human beings *do* do things that contribute to a varied make-up all the time - read, swim, talk, laugh, work. "Multifaceted" usually refers to character rather than competence, but Leap here seems to be using it as antithetical to "specialist", which tends to refer to skills. So, Leap appears to be arguing that to have many skills is better than having a single skill at a high level of sophistication.
Now, personally I'd suggest that this is trying to do two things simultaneously - that is, commenting simultaneously on vocation and person, which is why it doesn't exactly work. I imagine that a specialist might argue that their specialism in, say, obstetrics is no bar to them being in other professional regards a multifaceted human being. So, let's assume he means vocationally that people should be "multifaceted" rather than specialised. At this point you come up against the "shoemaker problem" - Leap may want to refer back to Plato's Republic, which is perhaps unknowingly rather relevant to his vision, here. Put simply, somebody who has spent ten weeks learning to make shoes will make ten pairs of shoes quicker and better than 10 people who have spent a week learning how to make shoes, or indeed one person who has spent a week learning how to make shoes and the other 9 weeks learning other skills. A degree of specialisation is necessary for successful production. This is less the case if we assume that there is no pressing need for shoes, or psychiatry, or nuclear science, but that goes into the problems of Leapworld as agrarian utopia, which will be addressed more elsewhere.
People are personal critters – we are ‘suited’ to being personally involved in our lives rather than hand aspects of them over to others; when things are too much for us to do alone, it is better to share than delegate (keeping our hand in, maintaining personal involvement in what is an intimate part of being human).
This is apparently uncontentious, although used to support dubious principles later. Questions - what is the "intimate part of being human" that we are maintaining personal involvement in by sharing rather than delegating? I think Leap's grammar is possibly mangled here, and he means "keeping our hand in, maintaining personal involvement is an intimate part of being human", but I'm not sure.
However, human beings are personally involved in their lives, and should as far as possible be free to exercise control over aspects of our lives (who to associate with, what jobs to take, what colour lipliner to wear, that kind of thing, presumably - Leap is consistently vague about what he actually means by these statements). Fair enough.
People are social critters – although we often need time on our own, as a rule we welcome living in groups (feeling distressed and lonely when not part of them).
As so often, Leap is here arguing that a situation is general and universal, when in fact it may merely be common. He is also performing what might be considered sleight-of-hand, but in this case is more likely naivete, by implying through omission that the only reasons to live in groups are *emotional* reasons. This is a rather limited view; not wishing to trail, through Hobbes, but I think we can all hopefully agree for the moment that one reason for humans to live in groups is for collective security, and another is because other people in that community will be able to provide things (shoes, obstetric care, wheat) that we lack the knowledge or skills to produce for ourselves, and it makes more practical sense to obtain them from another than to learn how to produce them badly (images of Leaptopia, in which everyone in multifaceted kind spends 1 hour a day ploughing their 5 square feet of field, 1 hour a day knitting, 1 hour a day making shoes, 1 hour a day digging their own personal well, and dying of starvation, thirst, exposure and bunions simultaneosuly).
So, we are not just social animals but pragmatically community-building animals. Different thing.
People are generally capable of seeing to their needs and directing their own lives without interference – this is what marks the difference between an adult and a child; in nature, it is the role of the parent to bring the child up to be self-reliant (not to be confused with selfish or asocial). We are not drones by nature (in need of managing – except, that is, when we are children or kept artificially in a child-like/ish state).
True to an extent, but it fails to take into account the degrees of interdependence described above. The social contract generally calls for the surrender of a degree of autonomy in the interests of the broader community - I lose the right to kill you (with my "melee" weapon) without consequence, in exchange for the security that you are less likely to kill me (with your "melee" weapon), because you are aware of the potential consequences imposed from above. In the good old days this was done by vendetta, but a process of law started up fairly early, earlier for example than the 18th century, where Leaptopia largely appears to reside.
So, as a function of the building of community, it seems reasonable to suppose that humans can be expected of their own free will to surrender autonomy in certain areas in exchange for the benefits of membership of that community. In a sense, Leap has already admitted that - in order to be members of the Leaptopian parish, you have to have good character, that is accede to the desire of the community for virtues or actions that it deems beneficial. As such, no, adults do not instictively shun all forms of non-autonomous living, nor are they designed to do so by nature (incidentally, Leap, for future reference and your next philosophy degree, both "natural" and "common sense" do not as speech acts make an argument inviolable) - our primate ancestors presumably surrendered a degree of autonomy to the pack leader in order to enjoy the benefits of membership of the pack. What we do have is the decision to choose what autonomies to surrender - Leap, for example, could have registered his aversion to taxation and welfare in all sorts of ways - protest (as he is doing), refusing to pay, moving to another country, living off the land and thus ceasing to earn enough in sterling to be eligible. The fact that he *chose* to sign on means that he surrendered certain freedoms in exchange for one of the benefits of belonging to his community.
People are generally born equal; there are differences but none are actually born with a suitability to serve, nor rule (this comes as an amalgam of our personal and generally capable aspects).
Although the second statement is based on what I hold to be invalid precepts, I'm happy to accept that the evidence suggests that people are born in some sense equal, although that equality need not be expressed in terms of circumstance, environment or ability. I'd also question "generally" - does this mean that most men are created equal?
People are historically aware – we gain a sense of perspective and a sense of the ongoing and orderly nature of life / the world, the bigger picture into which we fit and by which we are contextualised.
This is basically res cogitans - humanity has the ability to remember, consider, and learn from history, and working from one's experience of the past construct hypotheses about actions in the future. Fair enough.
So, the "kittens are lovely" phase is actually rather more contentious, through commission or omission, than it might first seem, but we can perhaps accept that human beings are, in a state of nature, autonomous, historically aware, equal, socialcakes.
To quote the man himself, "Okay that is part one over. Now onto part two."
As personal, social, capable, historically aware, multifaceted beings we are demeaned by a loss of the centrality of the personal, the social, our capability (or natural path to such), our historical awareness and our many facets.
Note that "capable" here seems to mean "autonomous" or "self-directing", rather than the more traditional "able". Leap's choice of words is somewhat eccentric and needs to be observed or we will end up taking issue with things he is not in fact saying.
"Demeaned" is not defined here, but we can assume that he is saying that it is antithetical to our status as human beings to have these elements (some of which I recognise as valid, others of which are either poorly thought-out or poorly-expressed, IMHO) abraded, as it results in a loss of "dignity". Dignity is an important but never defined word, but we can assume it to be a thing by which we are able to construct value for and of ourselves.
Thus our dignity is intimately tied into the centrality of the concepts of privacy (to replace it with supervision is an attack on our ‘personal’ and ‘capable’ nature), self-restraint (to replace it with enforcement is an attack on our ‘capable’ nature and a denial of our ability to learn for ourselves from history and taker personal charge of our own lives), egalitarianism (to replace it with elitism would be to deny that we are all, as rule, equally capable of being human and equally endowed with our human nature (and so all of this argument should be respected, and the modest, the common, should be sought whilst the exceptional, the superiority-granting, is denied)) and vigilance (to replace it with sleepiness denies the value of our human nature to live private and personal, egalitarianistically expressed, self-restraint guided, lives – vigilance teaches that we should as a rule neither deny these things to others nor to ourselves).
This is the "kittens are lovely LOOK OVER THERE THE POPE so as we were saying, supervision is evil" moment. Privacy and supervision are of course not antonyms, but we can assume he means by "privacy" something along the lines of "the respect of others for personal autonomy". His "privacy" and "self-restraint" complaints, therefore, if we remove the quasi-metaphysical elements he set up earlier, both essentially read "in order that the ability and characteristic inclination of humans to decide matters for themselves be allowed to function, people should not be compelled to do anything, or not do anything. "Egalitarianism" basically boils down to the same thing - "To give one person control over another's way of living would be to assume that that person is better (read: more suited to rule), and as such must not be allowed" is essentally the same as "people should be able to decide both what to do and what not to do entirely according to their personal desires, as they are competent to govern themselves and personally inclined to be autonomous. "Vigilance" as a term enters into the discussion late and is largely meaningless, but can be seen as a capstone - that in order to be autonomous, people need to keep an eye out to protect their and other people's autonomy.
So, if we discard for a moment the "kittens are lovely" stage, everything Leap is saying seems ultimately to boil down to "people are by nature autonomous and equal, and this autonomy must be respected. In order to respect that autonomy, and thus selfhood, which is eroded by the removal of autonomy, no person can be in a position of power over any other person, and no person can be seens as in need of control or governance. No person can be the subject of decisions by other people in which they are not intimately invovled, as so to be would erode selfhood, as a condition of autonomy and equality is that one should be involved in every process relating to oneself". Which is again not incoherent, just very vague - see my high-taxation, high-involvement model below.
There's a missing stage here, by the way, which emerges elsewhere in his thinking - that "excellence" is too highly prized and highly rewarded by society (because non-egalitarian, presumably). Thus, competence should be one's watchword, and modest should be one's means. This has practical problems, most obviosuly how people are to be prevented from excelling and how means are to be kept modest without taxation or redistribution, but we can get onto those in more detail later (hint - EDUCATION).
A tax funded, institutionalised, big govt, welfare statist, system denies the above by replacing the personal/private/self-determined/egalitarian/intimate way of living that we are suited to with an impersonal/managerial/supervisory/elitist/interactive way of living by means of giving control to an institutionalised elite that formalises social processes, stripping away personal judgement/responsibility and a generally egalitarian view of life in favour of a hierarchical mechanisation of life.
This is the "so, supervision is evil SHIT THERE'S THE POPE AGAIN as I was saying the state must be abolished" moment. Leap sees the state as it exists as antithetical to human autonomy and thus to human dignity, and thus in turn to humanity. This is because he sees it as denying self-expression, by placing strictures on human action, managerial, because...well, I'm not sure about that one. Presumably, managerial because there are people in positions of authority who have the right to demand that one not walk on the grass, rob banks or dhit on the pavement and by doing so are treating people (who in a state of "nature" woudl do none of those things anyway) from behaving autonomously. Anyway. Supervisory because see managerial, elitist because of the existence of people with the power to compe, for which see managerial, and...well, I'm not sure what the differneece between "intimate" and "interactive" is, but what it appears to mean is that people are no lopnger intimately involved with every process affecting their lives, because the state is huge, and takes, for example, taxation, the redistribution of which is not under the direct control of the individual (although see voting, elections and manifestos).
Note the term "replace" here. Leap constantly expresses a rather Hesiodic undertone that man in a state of nature has previously enjoyed Leaptopia, and it is only our tyranny of statism that took it away. Attempts to locate Leaptopia vary - personally, it seems to draw heavily on a rather idealised view of 18th century England and, probably unconsciously, Sparta after the reforms of Lycurgus - for true Leaptopianism, one would unfortunately be talking about prehistory, since kings and leaders seem to crop up pretty early for an aberration, and prehistory on Lemuria. Hooever, it is worth bearing in mind that in a sense, he is the opposite of Hobbesian, if only because it is so very counter-intuitive and counter-rational.
So, boiled down, the three pillars of Leap are:
1) Humanity has certain intrinsic qualities
2) As a result of those qualities, certain ways of associating with other people are desirable
3) Those desirable ways involve the destruction of the state as we know it.
These are three perfectly coherent propositions - it's only when you go into the details that they are indentified as monadic and lacking anything more than a tenuous logical connection; a sort of unintentional sophistry. Leap has yet to explain, for example, the invalidity of my consensual model, in which people, with autonomy and selfhood, decided to contribute to a welfare state, with high taxation and a high sense of involvement and pride in one's own autonomous contribution to improving the lot of one's fellow man, acknowledging that redistribution of wealth through a state is simply the best way to do it. Those not wanting to benefit from the good schooling, good healthcare, clean streets and absence of street crime have the option of moving to another country or electing a government that promises no taxation and no public services, with their autonomy (with a daily plebiscite, if you fancy - it's just a theory). This seems to me perfectly autonomous and vigilant - people have made the decision that in order to develop their many facets they want some other people to handle the stuff they don't feel, through ability or autonomous will, inclined to do themselves. Those who administer the system see themselves not as rulers but as public servants, not as elites but people who happen to be competent at administrating systems, an equality enforced by the relatively uniform standard of living. It's a utopia, but actually a more realisable one than Leaptopia.
This is probably realistically the fourth stage of the Leaptopian program, it being the NANOBOTS stage.
A brief recap of the idea of NANOBOTS for those new to the board. NANOBOTS were put forward originally as a solution to the technical problems of sterilising an entire population, electively. They were then further advanced as ways to cure cancer and ultimately death, because we were getting silly. Since then, NANOBOTS has been used to describe a solution in which a single element is advanced as a deus ex machina to every possible objection.
The NANOBOTS of Leaptopia is basically EDUCATION, and to a lesser extent Leaptopia itself. This has become clear in the raising of objections. Thus:
How would the poor, sick and helpless be looked after in Leaptopia?
EDUCATION would allow people to discern who was of good character and who not, by looking at their past works and current actions. This would allow a division to be drawn between the worthy and unworthy. The worthy would be sustained by acts of charity intended to get them back into the swing of things, the unworthy would be left to get themselves together and make a living or starve to death. Becasue of LEAPTOPIA, only the lazy and feckless, the surplus population, would suffer as a result of this. This surplus population., lest we forget, can be identified as such by EDUCATION.
And the charity....
Comes from people who, thanks to EDUCATION, have understood the importance of modesty, and as such will happily give away their surplus wealth to those identified as deserving.
Identified...
By EDUCATION.
Hmmm. But with these unworthy people having no means of support, and thus recognisably being for less well-off than those of modest means, might crime, caused, you claim uncontentiously, by inequality, not become a problem?
Fortunately, EDUCATION will give people the necessary discernment, as mentioned above, to be happy to starve in silence if they are undeserving and too lazy to do all those things that people on the dole could be doing if they weren't lazy. Besides, people will be freely allowed to carry "melee" weapons, and will use them wisely and discriminately in self-defence.
Right. That seems to take care of that. But what if somebody is wounded by one of these unworthies, or just in a tragic accident of the sort often resultant from equipping entire populations with weapons? Without central taxation, people will have to organise medical care, the roads to get people to medical care, the schools to teach people how to deliver medical treatment, all that stuff, in small groups. Isn't that a far less efficient way to do things? Especially if you still have a free market, as economies of scale will no longer function in the same way...
Fortunately, the lifestyle of LEAPTOPIA will be low on stress (apart from fending off attacks by the undeserving poor), low on unhealthy habits (no chemically-treated lagers, just a few pints of real ale at the end of a productive day of autonomy), low on unhealthy food (except for the salt you need to put on the fish, because you no longer have a mass transit network, and shit of that nature). These are the causes of ill-health, which is why life expectancies were much longer in the 17th century than they are now. As such, there will be little need for healthcare, and what healthcare there is can easily be afforded by the modest wealth of individuals.
Oh, cool. So, you have "melee" weapons, with which you hack to death hunger-maddened layabouts because....
Because the alternative would be depersonalising to them. Obviously.
I don't get it.
That's because you haven't had EDUCATION.
So, begging is better?
It's not begging. It's asking. Begging is dehumanising. Asking somebody for help is a sign of modesty.
Modesty good?
Absolutely, and modesty, developed by EDUCATION, will mean that people have no problem with leaving it to others to decide whether they are worthy of receiving charity.
Much like the DSS, then?
No, the DSS is impersonal and dehumanising.
Unlike having to ask the local burghomeister for coppers.
You're learning. That's a personal intimacy between two people, and much more humanising.
That sounds counter-intuitive.
Well it would, you haven't had EDUCATION. If you had, you would see how much better it is. History is full of situations where a community has pulled together and helped the needy.
Could you give me an example?
Bedford Falls, for starters.
Oh-kay
For Leaptopia to work...well, actually, I can't think of any way Leaptopia could work in the modern age, which is probably a failing of my EDUCATION. However, it would involve a return to a largely rural community, small parishes, no need for national security and the obliteration of about 90% of the population of the UK (to bring us back to turn-of-the-century levels); how this woudl be achieved (EDUCATION, Battle Royale stylee?). On the bright side, members of the AA would once again be required to doff their caps to cars passing by displaying their badge.
As a cry of pain against somebody alienated from modern life, resentful of taxation, suspicious of mechanisation and fearful of the rising of surplus population into a mighty drone race, Leaptopia is an imaginative piece of creative writing. The scary thing is that he actually seems, in a way that Plato didn't even manage in The Republic, to believe not only that it is a viable but also a desirable and possibly a vital development of human society. |
|
|
