When I was much younger, I tended to think in universal terms. That’s common among the young and bright. We grasp a powerful idea; we see its possibilities for improving things; and we want to apply it everywhere, to everyone. The appeal of a powerful idea stems from its apparent prospects.
But ideas are human artifacts. Humans being not universal but partial, everything we produce is partial as well. And anything partial will have a proper domain: a set of conditions within which it applies, but not outside it. Outside its proper domain, the idea will become irrelevant or worse.
An idea doesn’t float free of all other things. It’s founded on premises about the natures of the things it addresses, and about reality itself. An idea divorced from its foundation premises is worthless if not destructive.
This is so basic that we never think about it. We merely live in it, as we live in a particular space and time. Because of that, when we step beyond our habitual space and time, we all too easily lose our moorings. The ideas we carry around with us, largely unexamined but relied upon even so, can become our enemies.
The idea I have in mind this morning is one of the greatest ever propounded. It made possible the emergence of Western Civilization. Without it, we would still be in Hobbes’s “state of nature,” in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Indeed, before the earliest, incomplete versions of the idea were enunciated, that’s exactly what Mankind endured.
That idea is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
* * *
The Golden Rule is founded on an unspoken assumption: i.e., that the unnamed “others,” were your position and theirs exchanged, would do unto you as they would have you do unto them. But how can you know what they would “do unto you?” Well, they might already have done it. That would be applicable to persons near to you – your neighbors — and to others with whom you’ve interacted in the recent past. For all others, it would require fresh interactions: not one, but enough of them to be reasonably sure of them.
The famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” studies provide a way of arriving at the answer:
- Be benevolent upon initial interaction.
- On further interactions:
- If they were benevolent toward you in the previous interaction, be that way toward them;
- Else be hostile or aloof toward them.
For you cannot maintain a benevolent posture toward one whose response is to attack or exploit you. That’s suicide, albeit prolonged. Christ Himself, the formulator of the Golden Rule, said so in the Sermon on the Mount:
Give not that which is holy to dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest perhaps they trample them under their feet, and turning upon you, they tear you. [Matthew 7:6]
The Redeemer wasn’t talking about animals. He was defining the domain of application for the idea He enunciated next: The Golden Rule. For that Rule is only applicable within a context of reciprocity. Should reciprocity fail, you must withdraw from further interaction, at least for the present.
This has implications for many settings.
* * *
The greater part of any man’s learning is done by doing: i.e., by living, experiencing, and coping with necessities and opportunities as they arise. That’s equally true for Robinson Crusoe and for persons in an advanced First World society of many millions. Among the things we learn is the domain of application of our personal benevolence: when it applies, and to whom.
Everyone capable of comprehending the crap here at Liberty’s Torch is familiar with the concept of the enabler: one who makes it possible for some other person caught in a pattern of destructive behavior to continue in that pattern. Among the things we learn through experience is which of our fellows are enmeshed in such a pattern, and whether they can do so due to the contributions of an enabler. Many Americans can count one or more such persons among their acquaintances.
No decent person actively wants to be an enabler. Yet a great deal of destructive behavior is possible only because enablers make it so. Moreover, the idea applies at scale: to individuals and to whole societies as well.
First World societies were premised on ideas of great power: from Christ’s message to the Enlightenment, and more. They worked, when they worked, because they were “inside the domain of application.” That is, the persons who held them lived and worked among other persons who held them. Exceptions were few and reliably dealt with.
But when individual responsibility was pushed aside for collective responsibility – notions that “society is to blame” rather than the actor for his bad actions – it changed the game. Suddenly everyone but the bad actor was “on the hook” for disruptive and destructive behavior. Mass immigration from Third World countries to our own has highlighted the perniciousness of that change, but it was already at work before the tides of Third Worlders reached our shores.
* * *
Hearken to an unusually perceptive and intelligent young woman:
White males have ENORMOUS difficulty in not projecting their nature onto others and so will always do so to some degree or another. They seem almost incapable of grasping that difference. And they THINK they know, but they rarely do.
If you think I'm wrong, and if you're a White fella I just know ya do, ask yourself just how much of your suffering... how much of your blood and treasure, as a person, as a culture, as a genetically distinct group of people, has been spent with the expectation that they are as you are.
That if you just spent more, if you just tried harder, if you just found a way, if you just did this, if you just did that that the outcome would be different because if if they're not YOU that they're enough *like* you that there's a bridge that could be crossed.
And you might be like "Well, we spent an awful lot, but we learned eventually..." and THAT RIGHT THERE is an example of how different you are because they would have NEVER done that for you. Never, not once, not in all of history.
They *started* with the assumption that they would never do that for you, and they never have, but it's taken you decades and trillions to JUST NOW come to that realization, and most of you *still* don't get it.
Black Dumpling has laid it out plainly.
For the umpteenth time, I’m put in mind of a passage from C. S. Lewis:
If Ransom said nothing, it was because he could not speak. He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” It was this that kept Ransom speechless. What could you say—what appeal or threat could have any meaning—to that?
[From Perelandra]
Ransom had come face to face with something that was wholly Other. It was not Weston as Ransom had known him. Indeed, it was not a man as he knew men to be, but an entity that shared nothing with men but Weston’s shell. Ransom knew at once that there could be no arguing nor bargaining with it.
Our problem with those who disdain the key premises of our society – responsibility, honesty, good will toward others – is not quite as severe as Ransom’s. However, it requires a comparable quality of understanding. We cannot treat them as though they were “just like us, but misguided.” They lie outside the domain.
