7.1.The Game of "Who is Right?" - What is
Right, and What are Rights Anyway?
People usually quote the saying "might is right" as a reproachful, resigned, or ironic comment to mean that it is not supposed to be. This constitutes a perfect example of the clash of the two contradictory codes and shows a recognition on the part of the speaker that Sunday-school morality and everyday mores run at cross purposes. It already pays at least token tribute to the principle of equality in a world ruled by violence.
That in past ages "might is right" could be asserted without even a touch of irony as a simple justification of privilege may be illustrated by another, this time Roman, proverb: "quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi," by which understand that what is permissible for higher-ups is a no-no for the ordinary Tom, Dick, and Harry. In fact, the representation of Justitia holding a scale in her right and blindfolded to indicate the impartiality of the law, did not originally appear in ancient statuary; it was a later addition. And realistically the goddess would even today be more aptly portrayed peeping out from under her blindfold.
Traditionally, persons belonging to certain categories have been, as it were, constitutionally right no matter what they said; they shared rightness as a permanent attribute. In class societies the elite were right. In a feudal setting the serf had no recourse, no presumption in a disagreement to contest the word of the landowner. A given society may reserve the quality of being right to men over women, adults over minors, the educated over the unschooled, or vice versa, irrespective of objective fact. In the traditional family father knew best; some cultures still adhere to this, while in others the phrase is no longer even funny as a sitcom title. Members of a certain unfavorably perceived ethnic or other group should better forget it: their name might as well be Mr., Mrs., or Miss Wrong; they will never be right. In the courts picking the jury is crucial for lawyers, since they can take it for granted that jurors will find members of their own socioeconomic or other background credible. Not only do nationals of states or inhabitants of regions look down upon, and name dread diseases after, one another--gonorrhea and syphilis for example were commonly named mutually after natives of the neighboring state--but, not infrequently, townspeople in every single locality of a county will seriously propose that while they are generally upright and trustworthy citizens, folks in the next town are a bunch of chiselers, dope peddlers, and addicts. Blacks used to think it befitted their skin color to assent to whatever whites would say, preferring to mislead rather than disagree with them. Mislead is an important word. For ultimately it is the human community that is being misled.
In various Indo-European languages right, depending on whether it is used adjectivally or substantively, means "true," "just," "privilege," as well as "law;" and this is no mere coincidence. The question of who is right usually spills over, as in all the examples furnished above, from the factual one of who has the correct information, into the moral sphere, influencing and becoming indistinguishable from the question of who is the worthier person, entitled to advantage. Power has usually entailed being right and having rights. In truth this power has been legitimated by falsehood.
As a kind of populist retort to (or equivalent of) inherited, aristocratic class privilege, in modern democracies a tendency has taken place whereby ordinary citizens see any opinion or action as rendered respectively infallible or morally irreproachable by virtue of the fact that it happens to be their own: they cannot be or do wrong, are simply incapable of it. Further, they believe that value refers to their own possessions, other people's belongings being characterized as junk (to demonstrate that their neighbors' property is garbage, they may be willing to wreck it). The junk part luckily might not have to amount to a great deal, since a kindred thesis holds that everything on earth, indeed in the solar system and galaxy, rightfully and by the decree of destiny, belongs to their nation or, to be more precise, to them personally and individually, to the actual exclusion of most of their compatriots who after all are not hundred-per-cent specimens of that nation. Some of this grew out of the attitude of the Westerner toward the indigenous population, but is part of a very fundamental tendency, a human tendency that in turn originates in a natural one.
We do not in any way wish to comment unfavorably on the concept of human rights, for they assert freedoms that all human beings should be accorded on purely consequentialist grounds. Yet when you posit rights as conferred on humans by absolute authority or given a priori and inalienably possessed, you invite the sort of skeptical stance that has actually been adopted by numerous contemporary philosophers. (But if all one means by inalienable is that they should not be violated, we emphatically agree.)
In section 6. 5. we referred to the difficulties inherent in the concept of equality as demanded by justice. A certain measure of equality as fairness was already recognized by the first legal codes known to us (cf. Hammurabi's Code), thus we cannot assert that right was exclusively reserved for the powerful even in primeval times. It particularly played a role in Greek thought. Aristotle's approach in the Nicomachean Ethics has been summarized as "treat equals equally, unequals unequally." Various subsequent formulations throughout history show a development toward equality of opportunities, rights, even of outcome. Underlying this is the increasing awareness that unless human beings are treated as equal in some very fundamental ways, a great deal of calamity will eventually ensue.
While reason counsels peaceful mutual compromise--a social contract--privilege has to rely on force and falsehood, both of which provide risky, unsafe protection, causing as they do latent tensions: smoldering resentment on one side, hidden uneasiness and anxiety on the other. A great deal of lip service and empty conference-platform rhetoric laud equality, while its most fundamental premises are violated by the preferential practices of wide segments of probably every society on earth day by day. And so the game of mutual additions and subtractions goes on, perhaps less blatantly in some places than in others, on the whole less excessively with the progress of time, but still in our age, though its absurdities are becoming gradually more transparent and its articles of faith ever more untenable.
Even "treat equals equally, unequals unequally" could be interpreted so as to apply, in a very broad sense, to all cases of what today are called human-rights violations; but it could easily be used also to bolster up the most excessive claims to exclusive, oppressive privilege. That is why general formulas cast in nonexact language must be amply illustrated by concrete example. The instances provided above indicate some of the areas where the abstract term "equality" should apply, aspects from which the principle that all human beings are equal holds if desirable consequences constitute the criterion of value. When it is violated, in the long term it tends to make life miserable for everyone, yet it takes nearly superhuman strength in a community where they are deeply entrenched for any one individual to break out of them.
It is interesting to note that in English guilt means both "culpability" and "remorse," as if the spirit of the language itself wished to pander to the notion that they are the same. In truth they refer to very different phenomena. Even at an elementary level we should distinguish between a number of distinct cases, including: (a) objective responsibility for some evil, (b) imputation of such responsibility by others, (c) recognition of responsibility by the subject, (d) shame, embarrassment, or nervousness.
When one conjectures about the biological origin of the sense of guilt, the obvious answer is that it contributes to the coherence of a group. The word conscience itself refers to its social function, con- or com- meaning "together." Shame, not conceptually but as an emotion, may be closely related. An animal that has been punished appears to exhibit shame. The abused house pet will cower and cringe "in shame." Its owner may fancy that the animal--typically a dog--feels guilty over an objective fault; however, in the artificial human environment, which is not the environment the dog's behavior is genetically responding to, the degree of "shame" as a conditioned reflex is simply the result of specific training, of memory traces. You can recognize a mistreated dog. Pets have been known to starve to death because the owner too successfully imparted the message that they were greedy eaters. Chimpanzees used in experiments have been driven to nervous breakdown by haphazardly, arbitrarily applied shock treatment, their reactions becoming as unpredictable as the punishment inflicted on them.
In the animal pack humiliation helps establish a hierarchy of domination. This usually rests on physical power. We emphasized the importance of exploiting weakness as one of nature's devices. In fact we identified in the exploitation of perceived weakness one of the main constituents of Code One. In human society the difference between perceived as opposed to real weakness is particularly important. But strictly speaking we are dealing with perceptions at any level. The following example may be instructive regarding the root and development of the sense of guilt and its exploitation in human society.
We propose to describe an encounter seen some time ago on a popular TV nature presentation. The scene shows an--in all likelihood staged--confrontation between a leopard and a baboon, and is supposed to yield an unexpectedly amusing spectacle. The leopard, presumably a zoo animal born in captivity, has probably never seen a baboon in his life and does not know what to make of him; the baboon vaguely resembles human beings, to whom he is accustomed to be in a relation of dependence and inferiority. The baboon on his part cautiously examines the leopard from a distance and, upon noticing the animal's hesitancy, approaches and begins to gather a certain amount of boldness verging on pugnacity. The leopard pulls back, then climbs a conveniently nearby tree. The baboon exhibits growing indignation; he hurls himself on the tree angrily chattering and menacingly posturing. The leopard, visibly intimidated, retreats from branch to branch until he is precariously balanced on a limb hardly strong enough to support him. The baboon is now beside himself with rage; he seems to be saying: " What business does this overgrown house pet have showing up on my turf? Just who does he think he is? Doesn't he realize that I can squash him with one blow, that we baboons are in the habit of making mincemeat out of leopards for sheer fun?"
The bluffing baboon is simply exhibiting the fundamental natural tendency of taking advantage of a weakness. Jacques Cousteau observed that if a fish behaves strangely--that is, if it appears sick or wounded--it is promptly attacked by all the other fish in its vicinity. In human terms the weirdly acting fish is the equivalent of a nervous person.
In a recently published article a supermarket security agent maintained that the easiest way to spot shoplifters is that they look nervous. Lie detectors catch nervous people. They reward the good liar. Trial lawyers attempt to rattle defendants or witnesses in order to make them lose their self-assurance and confuse them--by the inherent logic of their profession they tend to measure success by testing the witnesses' ability to dissemble, not by getting at the truth. Actors are among the most idolized and sought-after people. (The intricacies of this will be explored in a separate section.) It is as if society wanted to pay tribute to the ability to deceive, the appearance of honesty instead of real truthfulness, which it fears because of its potentially disruptive effects. People may feel too heavily invested in fraudulence to let it be sweepingly disclosed.
If culpability, remorse, and embarrassment had a high positive correlation, Hitler, Stalin, or Manson would have been guilt-ridden, flustered individuals, oppressed and even crushed by a sense of shame. The case was the opposite. Bloodthirsty savages are rarely burdened by delicate consciences. On the other hand, people who have sensitive consciences scruple over the morality of their actions even when they are not at fault. It does not necessarily hold that vulnerable individuals are innocent, but projecting evil into the vulnerable is a grave and prevalent social injustice, leading to a great deal of unnecessary harm, and a concomitant of Code-One behavior. It is one way of taking the path of least resistance in the effort to destroy.
Common to many of the environmental, sustainable development, ecological balance, conservation, green, wildlife protection, animal rights, earth ethic, Gaia, respect or reverence for life, vegetarian, etc. movements, organizations, federations, and unions thriving, among other places, on the Internet today is much that makes one proud of belonging to the human race: good will; the aspiration to live in peace with all creatures, to free ourselves of a narrow, egoistic anthropocentrism, to realize a magnificent dream and sublime vision of harmony that have inspired and motivated some for millennia. Projected into the past as a paradisiac state or the myth of the golden age, it conjures up images of humans walking with tigers and lions, drinking from the waters of crystal-clear springs, heeding the serene wisdom of snow-capped mountain ranges, and living happily in the lap of nature without the scourges of illness and death, forever. There is something in us that responds to this, a feeling that it should be that way.
Some environmental groups have limited practical objectives and, for better or worse, do not indulge in romantic fancy or utopianism of any kind. But many of them share the ideal of a state of harmony with all living things. Humans have cut the umbilical cord that once connected them to the rest of the biosphere. We must reintegrate ourselves into this order. We are part of one great family, the children of Earth Mother whom we have forsaken: she will welcome us back and provide for us as she has always done for all her progeny. So the story goes.
We have had occasion to point out at various places in our outline that this dream is unrealizable. Despite all the impressive and growing evidence of instances of symbiosis throughout the biota, the whole system is so deeply agonistic as to be impossible to conceive without mutual destruction: life would have to stop without it. It would entail cosmic suicide. "Respect Earth and all life." "All living beings possess intrinsic value." Does this include the AIDS virus? Should we embrace poisonous snakes? In a novel by Silone one of the characters says that if you leave bedbugs alone they will leave you alone. But the children of Mother Earth feed on each other and cannot stop it. This is part and parcel of what is called the interdependence of life. We can become vegetarians, but we cannot do without organic food. The humane treatment of animals just skims off a superficial layer; the operations of nature would have to be profoundly altered to become humane.
Yet looking at it from a different perspective and seeing that, for one thing, these organizations show undeniable benevolence and nobility of purpose and, for another, despite their relative abundance, represent only a tiny minority of humankind--while the vast bulk of it think nothing of polluting the air, fields and streams, driving gas guzzlers and using lethal weapons, exhausting nonrenewable sources of energy, and generally engaging in activity that abuses the environment--does it make sense to criticize them at all?
It does, because even well-intentioned misstatements boomerang in the long term. When advocates of hunting organizations say that the protests of animal rights groups are unrealistic and naive, they are right to the extent that what goes on in the wild is an unremitting massacre anyway. We have initiatives to save the arctic fox, the gray wolf, the Bengal tiger, coyotes, cougars.... Their stomach contents are analyzed, and we are given to understand that they feed mostly on small rodents. "You see, they are not so wicked, after all; on the other hand they are beautiful creatures contributing to the diversity of life and the balance of the ecology." The ecology, by the way, has never been in (substantive) balance; evolution and (real, permanent) ecological balance are contradictory notions. "Balancing the ecology" has scientific and rational validity, but it is indiscriminately applied and has become a senselessly repeated mantra. Particularly the movements for saving predators reveal the impracticability of respecting all life. We deplore cruelty to pets, yet we feed them the meat of slaughtered animals whose lives should be no less precious to us.
7.3.2. Optimum Realistic Limits of Respecting Life 7.3.2.1. The Ethics of Environmentalism Sustainable development, conservation, environmental protection make sense primarily in a contingent way as the defense and maintenance of an ecosystem where human beings can lead rewarding lives. To appeal to higher transcendent values is entirely justifiable. But where these values would make human life impossible or where they are self-contradictory and unattainable they should not be asserted and demanded. However generous, such efforts will backfire.
7.3.2.2. Is Cruelty to Animals Wrong? Most assuredly. It is absurd to blame a spider for trapping and killing its victims, just as it is absurd to accuse the cholera bacterium of malice aforethought. Nature's ways are a fact; they are unedifying and frightening in a direct sense because we might be among the victims, but in an indirect sense also because there is always a possible analogy with and spread to human conduct: the risk that people will imitate them. And by the same token there is a palpable likelihood that persons who see nothing wrong with maiming, torturing, and killing animals will find it easy to transfer this onto the human plane.
There is of course an opposite logic: let people vent their aggressiveness where they cause no harm to other humans, and they will behave like lambs in their interpersonal relations. In today's society this might hold, at least in some cases. The frustration of overweening ambitions, instilled by parents or peers, can cause pent-up anger that can be channeled this way; in a similar sense, sports that allow participants to kill symbolically are greatly preferable to actual murder. However, the venting of one's fury on animals or the joy of chasing them is unlikely to provide a lasting fundamental remedy to society's ills.
The answer runs parallel with the general requirements of environmental ethics. All unnecessary, wanton harming of life, whether animal or plant, is to be avoided. 7.3.2.3. Some Examples of Unnecessary Harm Done to Life Forms
7.3.2.3.1. Hunting and Fishing A pro-hunting spokesperson will maintain that, in the first place, this activity causes no, let alone unnecessary, harm to the animal population: it rather serves as a tool of conservation in that it keeps numbers within sustainable limits. There is some truth in this. Generally, to adopt a confrontational stance with hunters is likely to be counterproductive. Persuasion is always preferable to prohibition and coercion. Instead of an adversarial approach, people should be brought around to a rational view that will ultimately protect their own interests. Those who object to hunting and fishing on moral grounds can hardly be accused of having a financial stake in the matter; therefore, anti-animal-rights proponents should realize that they may be dealing with well-intentioned people.
Especially fishing is widely seen as a peaceful, relaxed, in fact morally praiseworthy activity that permits a person to appreciate nature. But why is it necessary to use deceit (bait), violence (killing), and exploitation of incognizance to enjoy nature?
Whereas sports are predicated on a roughly equal chance between opponents, these activities are heavily weighted in favor of the pursuer. Much of the fun appears to consist in the chase: pursuing a virtually defenseless creature and, without being provoked, wreaking a kind of vengeance on it by torturing and hurting it and taking its life-- an analogy of the worst kind of evildoing, were this at the human level.
Hunting and fishing are largely speaking no longer a means of livelihood and a necessity for those who engage in them. Technology has liberated humankind from it.
When ecological considerations justify restricting animal populations, the sound and efficient way to achieve this will be increasingly to employ safe and painless scientific methods of control. (Unfortunately methods used at present in fish and game management are not always either efficient or painless. Game wardens all too often fancy that they are authorized to treat animals in inhumane ways not permitted even to the public.)
7.3.2.3.2. Meat Eating, Animal Husbandry, Pets A potent argument hunters use is that those who shed tears over the extinction of wildlife will sit down to a dinner of roast beef or lamb chops. Meat eaters could at best protest that they do not personally engage in the barbarous ritual of slaughter.
In 6.8. we already referred to the quandaries of animal husbandry. We bring up children to regard farm animals as friends; we blather about bunny rabbits and moo cows. How straight could those youngsters expected to be when they notice that the lovable cuties wind up on our tables? Domestic animals often trust their keepers who pretend to and sometimes actually imagine that they do care for their welfare, while at best they are being perverted and exploited--if we regard the relationship as an analog of interhuman relationships--more usually they are just fattened to be butchered: a flagrant betrayal of trust.
Often animals are raised in confined quarters, their entire existence amounting to an endless tale of misery. Many of them are mammals having sympathetic nervous systems very like those of humans, so that they suffer much as we do.
In fact in species that are evolutionarily close to us learning plays an important part; there is indisputably intelligence at work and some rudimentary free choice. It is not altogether mistaken to blame a dog for misbehaving when it should "know better;" this of course applies to a yet greater extent to anthropoid apes. Such cases are in an uncomfortably intermediate, gray area; animal rights advocates could justifiably invoke in this connection, if not the inherent value of life in an absolute sense, value understood not just analogously but much as applied directly to human beings, urging to respect it on grounds of reciprocity.
The ethical dilemma here is that, while it must be recognized that many animals can be assumed to have sensations, feelings, and emotions very similar to ours and intelligence comparable to ours in kind, many of them are also unalterably pitted against each other by nature: this is why we said (in 6.8.) that identification--solidarity--cannot be extended to all living organisms. Albert Schweitzer, who made the phrase "reverence for life" current, and was no hypocrite, himself acknowledged that life on this planet is tragically divided against itself.
It was a fatal choice for humans to choose two predators, the dog and the cat, as their closest friends in the animal world. But it was not inconsistent with the Code-One principles that characterized early human history. At this point we are just beginning to recognize the irony of it. The hope to bring them up on and get them accustomed to a vegetarian diet may seem odd to some, but it is the only reasonable course to adopt unless we wish to part with them. It is also possible that some innately herbivorous or at least omnivorous species might eventually develop into suitable pets to partially replace them.
It may be proposed that protection be extended to some herbivorous animals, e.g., deer, as opposed to carnivores. The feasibility of this would depend on ecological sustainability. Yet we should realize that such selective measures would be qualified as ingenuous even by some hardheaded environmentalists and would in any case barely graze the surface.
Knowledge is the liberator of the human race. The pressures that at one time necessitated hunting, enslaving herds of animals for use as food, labor, clothing, etc. no longer weigh on us nearly as heavily as they once did. Notwithstanding all its curses and perils, technology is bringing us closer every day to the prospect of a more humane lifestyle. On the other hand, we cannot fundamentally change the ways of nature.
7.3.2.3.3. Animal Experimentation We do not wish to deal with bioethical issues such as genetic engineering and cloning here, but will briefly comment on the ethical implications of the use of animals in laboratory research. Considerations obtaining in this matter are the same as those in the foregoing sections.
The view that animals come under a completely different category than humans, known as speciesism in this context, has made many scientists conclude that they have a free hand in treating them in a manner that has been arguably characterized as abhorrently cruel and sadistic. Extrapolation from nonhuman to human life in research is not as easy and reliable as the public is led to believe. Much of the experimentation is whimsical. Nevertheless, some biomedical research seems justifiable within strictly imposed guidelines. In our judgment no vivisection ought to be performed. The number of animals currently used for this purpose is astronomical. Animals are subjected to torture even in the science laboratories of high schools, where--optimistically--perhaps a fraction of the students can be expected to profit from such experiments. The practice can be expected to instill a callous disregard for human life; it is objectionable per se when done to animals possessing feelings and intelligence; much of it is wanton, unnecessary, and wasteful to resources.
7.3.2.3.4. Plants When we talk about respect for all life we of course have to include flora. The serenity and tranquillity that a beautiful landscape exudes is something of an illusion. Vegetation acts slowly, so that we are not immediately aware of the ruthless struggle that characterizes it. The truth is however that--despite fairly extensive symbiotic arrangements--plants are engaged in ceaseless competition for light, space, and nutrients, and do everything in their power to deprive these from one another.
Nature conservancy, organic gardening, disuse of chemicals, protection of rain forests, generally curbing unsustainable development, desirable as they are, do not address this problem, which is so basic that it cannot be effectively counteracted. You may plant a garden where flowers thrive, you can plant wildflowers instead of cultivated ones, yet even within those walled, artificial surroundings you will only crudely change conditions and not at all the iron laws by which nature operates.
Apart from this and most relevantly, humans (supposing that at one time in the future most of us will be converted to vegetarianism) and herbivores belonging to other genera cannot revere life in the sense of abstaining from plants as a source of diet.
Certainly we can prevent the wanton destruction of the vegetative environment.This important aim is the optimum realistic limit to respecting plant life.
Recently a fashionable photographer was admitted to the presence of Michael Jackson. Surrounded by his staff, the rock idol was bandaged from head to toe; water was pouring from all over him, collecting in a pool at his feet. The photographer beheld the scene transfixed, not knowing what to make of it. Would he be witnessing the tragic dissolution of the world's greatest celebrity?
He was relieved to learn that Jackson was just holding a strategy session with his advisers while taking his skin-fading cure. The picture is strikingly allegorical: the world's number one entertainer melts like a snowman, leaving behind the naught he was molded of. This fortyish Barbie doll has been fashioned to look neither male nor female, neither black nor white; in a way he is heir to the legacy of Marilyn Monroe, who had the reputation that everything on or about her was fake. Jackson is fantasy all over, this is an open secret. This precisely is his secret. That is what makes him perfectly substitutable: he is not bound by age, sex, or race; when he melts away, nothing is left behind. Better yet: he has no real gift for anything. He is lauded by media critics for being unique in that he can both sing and dance; the plain truth is however that he has no outstanding endowments or attainments: what he can do the average person could do. Anyone whose toe has been stepped on can scream or jump like him--and the same could be said of most rock, pop, rap, and hip-hop idols. This too is clear to all unless they are deliberately deceiving themselves; which, however, is not an uncommon symptom of rock worship.
The media have concocted the ultimate nonentity, the perfect nothing. The significance of this accomplishment is that anyone can identify with him. It is a discovery of our age that merit is not a requirement for respect. Merit and fame have separated.
Is this an authentically new phenomenon? It is rather the end result of a long development. The eminent figures of ages long past, personages of myth, fable, and lore, accomplished miraculous feats; they possessed either extraordinary qualities or exceptional will power. Gods performed supernatural deeds, national heroes showed stupendous courage, the saints were capable of unusual self-abnegation. Here we are not disputing whether the giants of history actually benefited humanity or not; by merit we are simply referring to a relative reputation. The merits of the traditional hero, military leader, prince, or king were more or less predicated on the criterion of might as right or power as virtue. Yet the class system deemphasized personal merit, though characteristically the ideology of the ruling class affirmed the moral legitimacy and inherited privileges of the prevailing social order--being a nobleman meant being a nobler specimen of humanity as well--thus for instance the medieval hero was typically the noble knight. Industrialization began to undermine the rigid class system, allowing a proportionately larger role for the individual and, consequently, also for personal merit. The rising new social philosophy of the 18th century championed universality and equality, but in a context where the bourgeoisie actually called the tune and free competition guaranteed individual enterprise: now hero worship would surround differentially the Napoleonic upstart.
Tracing the road that has led to what we understand today by celebrity through successive changes wrought in the image of the monarch, the transition is represented by the 19th-20th centuries, when the ruler is already an idealized model of the citizen and thus, somewhat, of the average person: Louis-Philippe, literally citizen king by nickname; Francis Joseph, easily imitable with his signature sideburns and dinner jacket because, apart from his title, mediocre; so too Victoria, George V, and George VI, the last great successful royal stars. As--at least in their image--average persons, they were, to some extent, already celebrities in our contemporary sense of the word.
The case of the ruler who embodies the average person is somewhat similar to the case of the sports idol; that is why it represents a suitable transition. Sports heroes have to show extraordinary ability (this is why the admiration surrounding them cannot compare with the worship accorded to pop, rock, rap, hip-hop idols, who are genuine, bona fide nonentities), but their exploits are entirely devoid of any true importance: you neither help nor harm the world by throwing or pitching or hitting a ball better than others. From the point of view of their skill, sports stars are certainly exceptional; apart from that, they tend to be nondescript, commonplace human beings, just like popular constitutional monarchs who are exceptional in one respect only: their birthright to inherit the crown. With the ruler fame was due to power, though the exercise of power was becoming increasingly symbolic for the monarchs mentioned above. And at the end of the 20th century there is no king or queen left who could compete with the popularity of a Presley, the Beatles, or Madonna. As John Lennon put it, "the Beatles are bigger than Jesus."
The nearest predecessor leading to the present-day celebrity is the actor. Actors are ideal candidates for nonentity inasmuch as by profession they lack essence: their vocation is to imitate others. It is specific to the nature of their calling that the better they can "lie," the better they pursue it. This is however not equivalent to deception, as the audience understand the conventions of the stage. While viewing the show the audience suspend their sense of reality. Professionally actors are admired for the credibility of their performance. This aspect does come into consideration even today. But with the passing of time the most celebrated Hollywood stars typically wound up playing "themselves"--their stereotyped copies, that is--which was a harbinger of the postmodern celebrity.
Yet the actor's art is also a metaphor of what is most profoundly, if you wish: ontologically, human: the fact that we are in a certain sense condemned forever to act ourselves, play at being ourselves: the stage is an allegory of the inner stage of human consciousness. This is one of the essential though generally unacknowledged reasons for the attraction of the theater; unacknowledged because we do not like to admit the divided nature of our inner selves.
Another important reason for the attraction of the stage is the exact reverse of the above: the dramatic representation reinforces the spectator's self-image. God incarnated in human shape: Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, the mythological hero, the saint held up, exemplified the human being and condition as well, solidifying the ego of the follower of the cult or religion in question, in accordance with the prejudices and demands of the respective culture. The aristocrat, the royal court of a given historical period also staged, acted out, impersonated the human being as she/he ought to be, is supposed to be. In the Middle Ages, for example, the commoner's chance of identifying with the royal show was still much narrower than, let us say, in the age of constitutional monarchs, who were already partly fashioned by professional image managers.
This function survives in the role of the contemporary celebrity. The celebrity whose image is omnipresent in the media substantiates, strengthens the fan's ego, who imagines that they are peers. But while the former archetypes were based on merit (relative to the culture) or some other trait regarded as desirable--thus for example the typical movie stars of the era between the two world wars still had to be physically attractive--the most successful postmodern celebrities are empty receptacles, offering in this manner the greatest latitude for their fans to project themselves into them. The admirer fills a vacuum.
At the same time, the critics hurl superlatives at the celebrity. The Beatles made Liverpool into the cultural center of the world, raved Ginsberg. The critic enters into a kind of pact, a mediation between the star and the fan. Behind the rock idol's mask, the critic actually exalts the fan. The rules of the game require that both parties pretend not to be aware of this in order for the rite or surgical operation mystically uniting the idol with the cult member to be successfully performed. The rustic who, throwing his cap in the air, ran cheering after the king's carriage was, in a certain sense, cheering himself too, as the king symbolized the nation. The metonymy "l'état, c'est moi" is easily reversible, and the reversion in fact did take place a hundred years later, when "le peuple est souverain" became the slogan of the revolution. The tables were turned; had the revolution carried out its promise, equality would have been established.
Today neither beauty nor blue blood nor talent nor power separates the fan from the idol; the fiction is that they are equal; the spectators can much more easily celebrate themselves under the guise of their chosen celebrities. Thus could we be witnessing the triumph of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" in the present apotheosis of the celebrity? After all, the criterion of the ideal society consists precisely in one's identification with the whole human race and each of its members.
Is it an inhuman development that--it would seem--we have discovered: esteem does not require merit? No, because presumably all of us since time immemorial have desired acceptance and respect; and it seems the simplest solution to lift the requirement of accomplishing difficult tasks, of self-sacrifice and tests of valor: unlike the legendary hero suing for the princess's hand, we do not have to pass an ordeal. Monarchs have more or less had it, the Queen sits mournfully brooding on her wobbly throne, the royal bugle corps is sounding the taps. The princess, on the other hand, is splashed all over the tabloids and greets us featured in special bulletins. Lady Di was the child of our age, a genuine celebrity. While the complex ironies of her tragic death are rich in significance for our theory, we lack the necessary space here for an adequate analysis.
Are we, then, progressing in the right direction? Let us put it this way: the good cause has jumped the rails or has been sidetracked; more aptly yet, a generally favorable tendency is being parasitized.
When the celebrity worshipper thinks that by the apotheosis of the lowest common denominator she has succeeded in stealing into heaven on the celebrity's back, she is being duped though, to quote Adamov, every victim is at the same time executioner, and since his deceit is also self-delusion, he becomes his own willing executioner. Madonna stares into the fan's eyes from the screen: "I love you," she whispers; and since her image has been fabricated to represent her as bisexual, this is meant for every single human being on the face of the earth. By contrast the flesh-and-blood Madonna lives in a fortified compound; should a fan chance so much as to appear before her gate he is turned away by bodyguards; stubborn admirers get arrested and are promptly sued by the star's hard-working attorneys. In the real world celebrities regard their fans with contempt or at least want to keep them at arm's length.
This is not surprising. For the average mortal Hollywood stars are the sons and daughters of heaven; people count it among their most memorable experiences to spot them on the street; and should their greeting be returned, the result is sheer ecstasy. Yet the grand masters of public relations do their business so cunningly that the viewers feel the celebrities are their intimate personal friends: they send them homemade pies on their birthdays, write them about their cares and worries, and talk about them before their real friends by their first names. And since fans consider themselves on a par with the celebrity, they look down upon their own environment--just as, in the real world, they are disdained by the star--they neglect their friends, are bored by their spouses, waiting only for the sublime moment when, in the subdued lighting of the TV room, they can again be united with the object of their adoration.
Celebrities drive a wedge between the public and their real environment. Yet they also build a bridge. Two groupies can rave about their idol who creates a shared language between them. Presumably in the Serbian and Moslem enclaves of Bosnia or in the Catholic and Protestant quarters of Belfast youngsters look at some of the same videos. Yet they are ready to pounce on each other. The international rock culture claims to reconcile people around the world. There could be some validity to this claim; however, at this time the indications are not very encouraging.
Videos and the most popular TV shows targeting young people are apt to carry a double message: seemingly they preach love and cooperation while frequently or perhaps for the most part they inspire aggression and destruction. Jackson sings about peace while smashing in windows with an ax; his alter ego is a panther; the power rangers champion peace too while they are punching and kicking. Heavy-metal singers were among the initiators of Band Aid. Apart from these occasional noble gestures, however, heavy-metal and rap stars squarely stand for cruelty and brutality--there is hardly any equivocation in their case.
Let us admit it: equivocation and brutality are choices open for humans. They are human traits unless we determine the meaning of human on a normative basis. In this sense unfortunately even the celebrities who have the most detrimental societal influences are not inhuman. Though their public images are synthetically manufactured, celebrities, once they have been launched into orbit, awaken true human impulses and emotions: the fan projects real human qualities into them.
As far as endowments, accomplishments, and real human values are concerned, celebrities tend to be unremarkable. But in some respects they usually do show exceptional aptitudes: to achieve fame they need to be manipulative, ruthless, and exploitative. (Even these requirements are not always indispensable, since celebrity, like royalty, can be inherited, dynastic--it gives you an indisputable head start to be named Sinatra or Fonda.) From there on, the manager will take charge. But if there is a decisive difference distinguishing the celebrity from the groupie, it is the former's manipulativeness, ruthlessness and exploitativeness--perhaps above all, impudence.
Celebrities, then, alienate their fans from their surroundings, cut the ties attaching them to society by wedging themselves between the groupie and the environment, creating a kind of virtual reality that does not at all correspond to the real world. In the false belief that a tie obtains between them and the idol, the fans waste their affection. They feel they may legitimately hate their neighbors, the people they meet on the street, while this intimate contact obtains between them and their chosen idols. In other words, it is precisely the ostensible identification embracing all humanity that in practice severs them from other human beings. Rock, rap, break, hip-hop culture creates a certain common ground among its enthusiasts. But this common language nurtures hatred, destructiveness, and violence rather than human solidarity.
In summing up, we will more explicitly situate within our theory the tendency we have examined in this section. We can observe a trend throughout history whereby the role model's traits change from Code-One toward (though almost never attain) Code-Two ideals. Generally speaking, admiration was first the recognition of power or brute force, sheer force being gradually complemented and supplanted by cunning as the application of power became more and more indirect with the advance of civilization. The group leader who owes his authority solely to physical strength stands in this scheme at the beginning as a theoretical extreme example. In reality of course human beings show a mixture of traits, they are not pure types; yet, as Weber rightly remarked, the construction of ideal types is helpful in comprehending a historical phenomenon. In the course of this development, cunning (Machiavellian intelligence) is to some extent replaced by impartial or benevolent intelligence. As the concept of equality gains credit, on the whole the role model gradually shifts to the person who on the one hand does not wish to dominate but on the other hand renders some significant objectively beneficial service to society. The postmodern (or late-20th-century) celebrity as the most popular member of society and role model represents a peculiar quirk in this development. The contemporary celebrity, who is famous for being famous, sort of cashes in on or exploits and abuses the democratizing tendency by epitomizing triviality and under the guise of equality in effect alienates people from one another.
Stogdill also condemned autocratic leaders, though he was unmistakably partial to the leader we might well call authoritarian, one who issues firm directives and brooks no contradiction; he shared the majority opinion in dismissing the conclusions offered by Lewin, Lippitt, and White, whose study had indicated that leaderless groups could function successfully.
Writing in 1977 ("Where have All the Leaders Gone?" The Technology Review 75:9 [March-April 1977]), Warren G. Bennis, one-time president of the University of Cincinnati, complains precisely of the fact that he is forced to act as a mere manager instead of a leader:
Nixon and Agnew were forced out of office, he points out; and in the business world it is just as bad, albeit business is the concentrated epitome of our culture: Coolidge was right when he said that America's business is business. Confronted with all the advocacy groups, leaders have become paralyzed. Abraham Zaleznik, professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, makes the same observation ("The Leadership Gap," The Washington Quarterly 6:1 [Winter 1983]): "The increasing imbalance in our society weighted toward management has created a shortage of leaders in American institutions." He denies that leadership is an elitist concept, though admits that, considering the issue superficially, there could appear to be a contradiction between leadership and the democratic ideal.
Max Weber in his 1921 classic, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, coined the since overabundantly employed term charismatic leader. Though he always wrote about the legitimacy of power in a merely subjective sense--i. e., as socially recognized--many subsequent authors have represented Weber as a spokesman for objectively legitimate leadership; indeed the adjective "charismatic" has been used overwhelmingly in praise by authors commenting on the subject.
Those who follow this tack have implicitly embraced the irrational aspect of leadership, stressing it in fact at the expense of all other aspects and engaging at the same time in an inflationary spiral of ever higher encomia heaped on leaders. James McGregor Burns and B. M. Bass invented the variant transformational leader. Adopting this term and combining it with the theory of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, two professors of psychology, Karl W. Kuhnert and Philip Lewis, examined the motivational states of transformational leaders ("Transactional and Transformational Leadership: A Constructive/Developmental Analysis," The Academy of Management Review 12:4 [1987]). They found substantially that the higher they were found on the ladder of political, organizational, military, etc. hierarchy, the higher leaders were likely to score on a scale of self-chosen principles of justice, integrity, altruism, and--surprising as this may sound--even equality! (As we know, all animals are equal, and successful animals are more equal than others.) At these heights, they do not need to barter for goods and rights like lower types, the authors assert. (The moderation of company CEOs when it comes to financial compensation for their services is after all proverbial.)
The theses of Kegan and, in turn, Kuhnert and Lewis, bear the unmistakable imprint of Piaget's influential cognitive developmental psychology theory (particularly as interpreted and developed by Kohlberg [cf. 5.2.3 - 5.3 of this outline]). But attention! Kuhnert and Lewis are turning Piaget upside down. They, as do many others who are prominent in leadership studies, in effect take it for granted that the highest status in the organizational hierarchy coincides with the highest moral stage in personality development. Piaget maintained nothing of the kind. They on the other hand take success as proof of the pudding.
For practical purposes the effect is to legitimate precisely the most harmful type of leader, the essential leader who commands prestige not because of expertise and competence but charisma, magnetism, showmanship, manipulation, etc., the demagogue and rabble rouser in the political arena.
From our perspective this trend is substantially inspired by Code-One values, characteristically using Code Two as a screen. The result is that power-over is turned into the supreme moral value. It is the same type of make-believe that wants to turn a vulnerable innocent person into a culpable one, taking advantage of a perceived weakness (see 7.2) or confuses fame with merit (see 7.4). The insistence that these values are self-chosen highlights the dangers of the Kantian bias for deontological ethics founding Piaget's and Kohlberg's theories. When you divorce principles from consequences it is easy to exploit your ideas in the service of causes you never contemplated.
In accordance with the inflation in terms (superlative praise) coupled with a penchant for the occult, from charismatic through transformational we arrive at the magic leader (so named by David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman in the article "What Makes for Magic Leadership?" in the June 6, 1988 issue of Fortune), whose distinguishing mark is vision. The literature on visionary leadership alone could fill a bookcase. Let us start by citing a characteristic example, an article entitled "Visionary Leadership: A Perspective from Education," by Marshall Sashkin, in the volume Contemporary Issues in Leadership (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984).
Sashkin, a recognized authority on the subject, says that there are three major aspects to visionary leadership. The first is visioning itself. The process of conceiving a vision calls for certain cognitive skills, he adds as a note of caution. Effective executive visionaries must vision over periods of at least five years; more often, ten years or longer.
He subsequently discusses visionary activities recommended for high school principals. The exemplary leader conforms to the truth. However, truth has a variety of definitions; the successful leaders adopt the definition that help them achieve their goals. Should they have difficulty in accepting this, they ought to remember: "One aspect of the development of moral character is understanding the difference between what is right and what works" (p. 231).
When followers of the cult of visionary leadership combine esoteric mysticism and the most prosaic and pragmatic managerial considerations, the result is apt to strike the reader as verging on parody. One does not expect a toothpaste or thumbnail manufacturer to be a seer subject to beatific visions. Metanoia, a shift of mind, meaning in the Gnostic tradition an awakening of shared intuition and direct knowledge of the highest--of God--is the deeper meaning of learning, says Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, New York: Doubleday, 1990: 14). The learning organization continually expands its capacity to create its future by generative learning. As a founding partner of Innovation Associates, the author imparts this arcane doctrine to the assembled managers of Ford Motor, Digital, and Procter & Gamble.
Senge states that he believes in new types of organizations: decentralized, nonhierarchical, dedicated to the well-being of employees as well as success. Robert K. Greenleaf took this spirit even further with his conception of servant leadership. Though belonging to a much earlier generation, in his numerous works Greenleaf, who acted as consultant to the Brookings Institution among others, already exhibited the full panoply of mystical and symbolic inspiration exemplified in visionary leadership literature. According to him the only authority deserving allegiance is one knowingly granted by the follower in response to the servant stature of the leader. The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership is carrying the torch of his spiritual heritage. Undoubtedly these and similar enterprises do not lack some good motivation, but at times the impression that one is listening to a sort of propagandistic double talk may also enter the mind.
Professor Robert E. Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University believes and, in fact, furnishes concrete cases to show that leaderless groups, where all members assume equal responsibility for achieving goals, can be highly productive ("In Praise of Followers," Harvard Business Review Nov-Dec.1988). Delegation to the lowest level is another technique. Organizations must find ways to bring followers into full partnership because engaged, energized, appreciated followers can make a business prosper, he affirms. Yet he gives an operative definition of the leader in which the desire to lead has the greatest weight. Somehow the desire to lead is supposed to justify the need for leaders. Effective followers manage themselves well, Kelley also insists: they see themselves as equals of the leaders they follow (another touch of Animal Farm?).
A dossier of literature condemning leadership outright would be much thinner. One eloquent recent publication is by Frederick G. Bailey (Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). "[N]o leader can survive...without deceiving others.... Leadership and malefaction go hand in hand" (ix), writes the author. According to Bailey astute leaders consolidate their power by playing on and taking advantage of contradictory and simultaneously proclaimed values of their civilization, choosing the side helpful for their designs. They thus always remain as it were one step ahead of their enemies.
Though in our view Bailey's diagnosis is closer to the truth, it would be wrong to qualify the school exemplified by the likes of Greenleaf and Senge as merely hypocritical. It is best seen as part of a development that, despite temporary ups and downs, has so far proved favorable to the cause of equality.
In its December 5, 1994 issueTime devoted a long report to the future of leadership. In his introductory comments Lance Morrow condemns the universe of rights and entitlements that started to replace in the United States the old territory of duty during the 1960s. Entitlements represent the decadence of the American guarantee, claims Morrow. He unequivocally maintains that there is an imperative need for leaders, but emphasizes that the type of leader needed today is no longer the traditional (authoritarian) one, as the leader now is faced with a reasonably well-educated and informed electorate.
Morrow's stand probably voices the majority opinion obtaining in this country. The anti liberal turn inaugurated in the 1980s and culminating in 1994 has led to a mild backlash since, but the spirit of the 1960s is gone, and at present the dominant mood is perhaps best described as one of moderate conservatism. Yet even moderately conservative experts take it almost for granted nowadays that power will become gradually diffused in the future, self-management will gain a larger role, employees will participate in leadership, the category of the governed will be divided into smaller entities, and within those entities the principles of self-government will make headway.
In our view neither leaders nor followers are needed inasmuch as reason and experience serve as the best criteria for decisions. The spread of knowledge, improvement in educational levels, advances in information technology and communication have tended to undercut the operational field of the leader despite all the sidetracking, paradoxical phenomena, prestidigitation, and temporary setbacks.
Taking the last 300 years, one could cite two conspicuous examples of seeming exception to this general trend: 18th-century absolutism and the rise of dictatorships between the two world wars. Both of them in fact confirm the rule. The absolutist monarch was typically reaching out, over the heads of the established inherited aristocracy that had impeded progress, to the wider and professionally more competent new bourgeois class, thereby ultimately contributing to a dispersion of power. The typical dictator of the interwar period on his part rose from the people as a challenger of monarchical rule in countries with weak democratic traditions only to betray the populist message that had helped him to power. These dictatorships succeeded temporarily just because of the infirmity of local democratic roots and were successively replaced by more widely based regimes.
We will have leaders in our ranks for a long time yet; however, their dominance will likely diminish. Today the dimensions of power are still vast, the most significant change is however that its original, primitive and crude forms have become progressively more indirect, mediated, and diffused. From the military and political, preponderance has shifted to the economic and the high-tech informational spheres. "Knowledge is power." But our hope is that, in its own best interest, knowledge will have the foresight to reach out to each member of the human family.
People usually quote the saying "might is right" as a reproachful, resigned, or ironic comment to mean that it is not supposed to be. This constitutes a perfect example of the clash of the two contradictory codes and shows a recognition on the part of the speaker that Sunday-school morality and everyday mores run at cross purposes. It already pays at least token tribute to the principle of equality in a world ruled by violence.
That in past ages "might is right" could be asserted without even a touch of irony as a simple justification of privilege may be illustrated by another, this time Roman, proverb: "quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi," by which understand that what is permissible for higher-ups is a no-no for the ordinary Tom, Dick, and Harry. In fact, the representation of Justitia holding a scale in her right and blindfolded to indicate the impartiality of the law, did not originally appear in ancient statuary; it was a later addition. And realistically the goddess would even today be more aptly portrayed peeping out from under her blindfold.
Traditionally, persons belonging to certain categories have been, as it were, constitutionally right no matter what they said; they shared rightness as a permanent attribute. In class societies the elite were right. In a feudal setting the serf had no recourse, no presumption in a disagreement to contest the word of the landowner. A given society may reserve the quality of being right to men over women, adults over minors, the educated over the unschooled, or vice versa, irrespective of objective fact. In the traditional family father knew best; some cultures still adhere to this, while in others the phrase is no longer even funny as a sitcom title. Members of a certain unfavorably perceived ethnic or other group should better forget it: their name might as well be Mr., Mrs., or Miss Wrong; they will never be right. In the courts picking the jury is crucial for lawyers, since they can take it for granted that jurors will find members of their own socioeconomic or other background credible. Not only do nationals of states or inhabitants of regions look down upon, and name dread diseases after, one another--gonorrhea and syphilis for example were commonly named mutually after natives of the neighboring state--but, not infrequently, townspeople in every single locality of a county will seriously propose that while they are generally upright and trustworthy citizens, folks in the next town are a bunch of chiselers, dope peddlers, and addicts. Blacks used to think it befitted their skin color to assent to whatever whites would say, preferring to mislead rather than disagree with them. Mislead is an important word. For ultimately it is the human community that is being misled.
In various Indo-European languages right, depending on whether it is used adjectivally or substantively, means "true," "just," "privilege," as well as "law;" and this is no mere coincidence. The question of who is right usually spills over, as in all the examples furnished above, from the factual one of who has the correct information, into the moral sphere, influencing and becoming indistinguishable from the question of who is the worthier person, entitled to advantage. Power has usually entailed being right and having rights. In truth this power has been legitimated by falsehood.
As a kind of populist retort to (or equivalent of) inherited, aristocratic class privilege, in modern democracies a tendency has taken place whereby ordinary citizens see any opinion or action as rendered respectively infallible or morally irreproachable by virtue of the fact that it happens to be their own: they cannot be or do wrong, are simply incapable of it. Further, they believe that value refers to their own possessions, other people's belongings being characterized as junk (to demonstrate that their neighbors' property is garbage, they may be willing to wreck it). The junk part luckily might not have to amount to a great deal, since a kindred thesis holds that everything on earth, indeed in the solar system and galaxy, rightfully and by the decree of destiny, belongs to their nation or, to be more precise, to them personally and individually, to the actual exclusion of most of their compatriots who after all are not hundred-per-cent specimens of that nation. Some of this grew out of the attitude of the Westerner toward the indigenous population, but is part of a very fundamental tendency, a human tendency that in turn originates in a natural one.
We do not in any way wish to comment unfavorably on the concept of human rights, for they assert freedoms that all human beings should be accorded on purely consequentialist grounds. Yet when you posit rights as conferred on humans by absolute authority or given a priori and inalienably possessed, you invite the sort of skeptical stance that has actually been adopted by numerous contemporary philosophers. (But if all one means by inalienable is that they should not be violated, we emphatically agree.)
In section 6. 5. we referred to the difficulties inherent in the concept of equality as demanded by justice. A certain measure of equality as fairness was already recognized by the first legal codes known to us (cf. Hammurabi's Code), thus we cannot assert that right was exclusively reserved for the powerful even in primeval times. It particularly played a role in Greek thought. Aristotle's approach in the Nicomachean Ethics has been summarized as "treat equals equally, unequals unequally." Various subsequent formulations throughout history show a development toward equality of opportunities, rights, even of outcome. Underlying this is the increasing awareness that unless human beings are treated as equal in some very fundamental ways, a great deal of calamity will eventually ensue.
While reason counsels peaceful mutual compromise--a social contract--privilege has to rely on force and falsehood, both of which provide risky, unsafe protection, causing as they do latent tensions: smoldering resentment on one side, hidden uneasiness and anxiety on the other. A great deal of lip service and empty conference-platform rhetoric laud equality, while its most fundamental premises are violated by the preferential practices of wide segments of probably every society on earth day by day. And so the game of mutual additions and subtractions goes on, perhaps less blatantly in some places than in others, on the whole less excessively with the progress of time, but still in our age, though its absurdities are becoming gradually more transparent and its articles of faith ever more untenable.
Even "treat equals equally, unequals unequally" could be interpreted so as to apply, in a very broad sense, to all cases of what today are called human-rights violations; but it could easily be used also to bolster up the most excessive claims to exclusive, oppressive privilege. That is why general formulas cast in nonexact language must be amply illustrated by concrete example. The instances provided above indicate some of the areas where the abstract term "equality" should apply, aspects from which the principle that all human beings are equal holds if desirable consequences constitute the criterion of value. When it is violated, in the long term it tends to make life miserable for everyone, yet it takes nearly superhuman strength in a community where they are deeply entrenched for any one individual to break out of them.
7.2. Guilt
It is interesting to note that in English guilt means both "culpability" and "remorse," as if the spirit of the language itself wished to pander to the notion that they are the same. In truth they refer to very different phenomena. Even at an elementary level we should distinguish between a number of distinct cases, including: (a) objective responsibility for some evil, (b) imputation of such responsibility by others, (c) recognition of responsibility by the subject, (d) shame, embarrassment, or nervousness.
When one conjectures about the biological origin of the sense of guilt, the obvious answer is that it contributes to the coherence of a group. The word conscience itself refers to its social function, con- or com- meaning "together." Shame, not conceptually but as an emotion, may be closely related. An animal that has been punished appears to exhibit shame. The abused house pet will cower and cringe "in shame." Its owner may fancy that the animal--typically a dog--feels guilty over an objective fault; however, in the artificial human environment, which is not the environment the dog's behavior is genetically responding to, the degree of "shame" as a conditioned reflex is simply the result of specific training, of memory traces. You can recognize a mistreated dog. Pets have been known to starve to death because the owner too successfully imparted the message that they were greedy eaters. Chimpanzees used in experiments have been driven to nervous breakdown by haphazardly, arbitrarily applied shock treatment, their reactions becoming as unpredictable as the punishment inflicted on them.
In the animal pack humiliation helps establish a hierarchy of domination. This usually rests on physical power. We emphasized the importance of exploiting weakness as one of nature's devices. In fact we identified in the exploitation of perceived weakness one of the main constituents of Code One. In human society the difference between perceived as opposed to real weakness is particularly important. But strictly speaking we are dealing with perceptions at any level. The following example may be instructive regarding the root and development of the sense of guilt and its exploitation in human society.
We propose to describe an encounter seen some time ago on a popular TV nature presentation. The scene shows an--in all likelihood staged--confrontation between a leopard and a baboon, and is supposed to yield an unexpectedly amusing spectacle. The leopard, presumably a zoo animal born in captivity, has probably never seen a baboon in his life and does not know what to make of him; the baboon vaguely resembles human beings, to whom he is accustomed to be in a relation of dependence and inferiority. The baboon on his part cautiously examines the leopard from a distance and, upon noticing the animal's hesitancy, approaches and begins to gather a certain amount of boldness verging on pugnacity. The leopard pulls back, then climbs a conveniently nearby tree. The baboon exhibits growing indignation; he hurls himself on the tree angrily chattering and menacingly posturing. The leopard, visibly intimidated, retreats from branch to branch until he is precariously balanced on a limb hardly strong enough to support him. The baboon is now beside himself with rage; he seems to be saying: " What business does this overgrown house pet have showing up on my turf? Just who does he think he is? Doesn't he realize that I can squash him with one blow, that we baboons are in the habit of making mincemeat out of leopards for sheer fun?"
The bluffing baboon is simply exhibiting the fundamental natural tendency of taking advantage of a weakness. Jacques Cousteau observed that if a fish behaves strangely--that is, if it appears sick or wounded--it is promptly attacked by all the other fish in its vicinity. In human terms the weirdly acting fish is the equivalent of a nervous person.
In a recently published article a supermarket security agent maintained that the easiest way to spot shoplifters is that they look nervous. Lie detectors catch nervous people. They reward the good liar. Trial lawyers attempt to rattle defendants or witnesses in order to make them lose their self-assurance and confuse them--by the inherent logic of their profession they tend to measure success by testing the witnesses' ability to dissemble, not by getting at the truth. Actors are among the most idolized and sought-after people. (The intricacies of this will be explored in a separate section.) It is as if society wanted to pay tribute to the ability to deceive, the appearance of honesty instead of real truthfulness, which it fears because of its potentially disruptive effects. People may feel too heavily invested in fraudulence to let it be sweepingly disclosed.
If culpability, remorse, and embarrassment had a high positive correlation, Hitler, Stalin, or Manson would have been guilt-ridden, flustered individuals, oppressed and even crushed by a sense of shame. The case was the opposite. Bloodthirsty savages are rarely burdened by delicate consciences. On the other hand, people who have sensitive consciences scruple over the morality of their actions even when they are not at fault. It does not necessarily hold that vulnerable individuals are innocent, but projecting evil into the vulnerable is a grave and prevalent social injustice, leading to a great deal of unnecessary harm, and a concomitant of Code-One behavior. It is one way of taking the path of least resistance in the effort to destroy.
7. 3. Nature: Friend or Foe?
7.3.1. Respecting All Life Is an Impossible Goal
Common to many of the environmental, sustainable development, ecological balance, conservation, green, wildlife protection, animal rights, earth ethic, Gaia, respect or reverence for life, vegetarian, etc. movements, organizations, federations, and unions thriving, among other places, on the Internet today is much that makes one proud of belonging to the human race: good will; the aspiration to live in peace with all creatures, to free ourselves of a narrow, egoistic anthropocentrism, to realize a magnificent dream and sublime vision of harmony that have inspired and motivated some for millennia. Projected into the past as a paradisiac state or the myth of the golden age, it conjures up images of humans walking with tigers and lions, drinking from the waters of crystal-clear springs, heeding the serene wisdom of snow-capped mountain ranges, and living happily in the lap of nature without the scourges of illness and death, forever. There is something in us that responds to this, a feeling that it should be that way.
Some environmental groups have limited practical objectives and, for better or worse, do not indulge in romantic fancy or utopianism of any kind. But many of them share the ideal of a state of harmony with all living things. Humans have cut the umbilical cord that once connected them to the rest of the biosphere. We must reintegrate ourselves into this order. We are part of one great family, the children of Earth Mother whom we have forsaken: she will welcome us back and provide for us as she has always done for all her progeny. So the story goes.
We have had occasion to point out at various places in our outline that this dream is unrealizable. Despite all the impressive and growing evidence of instances of symbiosis throughout the biota, the whole system is so deeply agonistic as to be impossible to conceive without mutual destruction: life would have to stop without it. It would entail cosmic suicide. "Respect Earth and all life." "All living beings possess intrinsic value." Does this include the AIDS virus? Should we embrace poisonous snakes? In a novel by Silone one of the characters says that if you leave bedbugs alone they will leave you alone. But the children of Mother Earth feed on each other and cannot stop it. This is part and parcel of what is called the interdependence of life. We can become vegetarians, but we cannot do without organic food. The humane treatment of animals just skims off a superficial layer; the operations of nature would have to be profoundly altered to become humane.
Yet looking at it from a different perspective and seeing that, for one thing, these organizations show undeniable benevolence and nobility of purpose and, for another, despite their relative abundance, represent only a tiny minority of humankind--while the vast bulk of it think nothing of polluting the air, fields and streams, driving gas guzzlers and using lethal weapons, exhausting nonrenewable sources of energy, and generally engaging in activity that abuses the environment--does it make sense to criticize them at all?
It does, because even well-intentioned misstatements boomerang in the long term. When advocates of hunting organizations say that the protests of animal rights groups are unrealistic and naive, they are right to the extent that what goes on in the wild is an unremitting massacre anyway. We have initiatives to save the arctic fox, the gray wolf, the Bengal tiger, coyotes, cougars.... Their stomach contents are analyzed, and we are given to understand that they feed mostly on small rodents. "You see, they are not so wicked, after all; on the other hand they are beautiful creatures contributing to the diversity of life and the balance of the ecology." The ecology, by the way, has never been in (substantive) balance; evolution and (real, permanent) ecological balance are contradictory notions. "Balancing the ecology" has scientific and rational validity, but it is indiscriminately applied and has become a senselessly repeated mantra. Particularly the movements for saving predators reveal the impracticability of respecting all life. We deplore cruelty to pets, yet we feed them the meat of slaughtered animals whose lives should be no less precious to us.
7.3.2. Optimum Realistic Limits of Respecting Life 7.3.2.1. The Ethics of Environmentalism Sustainable development, conservation, environmental protection make sense primarily in a contingent way as the defense and maintenance of an ecosystem where human beings can lead rewarding lives. To appeal to higher transcendent values is entirely justifiable. But where these values would make human life impossible or where they are self-contradictory and unattainable they should not be asserted and demanded. However generous, such efforts will backfire.
7.3.2.2. Is Cruelty to Animals Wrong? Most assuredly. It is absurd to blame a spider for trapping and killing its victims, just as it is absurd to accuse the cholera bacterium of malice aforethought. Nature's ways are a fact; they are unedifying and frightening in a direct sense because we might be among the victims, but in an indirect sense also because there is always a possible analogy with and spread to human conduct: the risk that people will imitate them. And by the same token there is a palpable likelihood that persons who see nothing wrong with maiming, torturing, and killing animals will find it easy to transfer this onto the human plane.
There is of course an opposite logic: let people vent their aggressiveness where they cause no harm to other humans, and they will behave like lambs in their interpersonal relations. In today's society this might hold, at least in some cases. The frustration of overweening ambitions, instilled by parents or peers, can cause pent-up anger that can be channeled this way; in a similar sense, sports that allow participants to kill symbolically are greatly preferable to actual murder. However, the venting of one's fury on animals or the joy of chasing them is unlikely to provide a lasting fundamental remedy to society's ills.
The answer runs parallel with the general requirements of environmental ethics. All unnecessary, wanton harming of life, whether animal or plant, is to be avoided. 7.3.2.3. Some Examples of Unnecessary Harm Done to Life Forms
7.3.2.3.1. Hunting and Fishing A pro-hunting spokesperson will maintain that, in the first place, this activity causes no, let alone unnecessary, harm to the animal population: it rather serves as a tool of conservation in that it keeps numbers within sustainable limits. There is some truth in this. Generally, to adopt a confrontational stance with hunters is likely to be counterproductive. Persuasion is always preferable to prohibition and coercion. Instead of an adversarial approach, people should be brought around to a rational view that will ultimately protect their own interests. Those who object to hunting and fishing on moral grounds can hardly be accused of having a financial stake in the matter; therefore, anti-animal-rights proponents should realize that they may be dealing with well-intentioned people.
Especially fishing is widely seen as a peaceful, relaxed, in fact morally praiseworthy activity that permits a person to appreciate nature. But why is it necessary to use deceit (bait), violence (killing), and exploitation of incognizance to enjoy nature?
Whereas sports are predicated on a roughly equal chance between opponents, these activities are heavily weighted in favor of the pursuer. Much of the fun appears to consist in the chase: pursuing a virtually defenseless creature and, without being provoked, wreaking a kind of vengeance on it by torturing and hurting it and taking its life-- an analogy of the worst kind of evildoing, were this at the human level.
Hunting and fishing are largely speaking no longer a means of livelihood and a necessity for those who engage in them. Technology has liberated humankind from it.
When ecological considerations justify restricting animal populations, the sound and efficient way to achieve this will be increasingly to employ safe and painless scientific methods of control. (Unfortunately methods used at present in fish and game management are not always either efficient or painless. Game wardens all too often fancy that they are authorized to treat animals in inhumane ways not permitted even to the public.)
7.3.2.3.2. Meat Eating, Animal Husbandry, Pets A potent argument hunters use is that those who shed tears over the extinction of wildlife will sit down to a dinner of roast beef or lamb chops. Meat eaters could at best protest that they do not personally engage in the barbarous ritual of slaughter.
In 6.8. we already referred to the quandaries of animal husbandry. We bring up children to regard farm animals as friends; we blather about bunny rabbits and moo cows. How straight could those youngsters expected to be when they notice that the lovable cuties wind up on our tables? Domestic animals often trust their keepers who pretend to and sometimes actually imagine that they do care for their welfare, while at best they are being perverted and exploited--if we regard the relationship as an analog of interhuman relationships--more usually they are just fattened to be butchered: a flagrant betrayal of trust.
Often animals are raised in confined quarters, their entire existence amounting to an endless tale of misery. Many of them are mammals having sympathetic nervous systems very like those of humans, so that they suffer much as we do.
In fact in species that are evolutionarily close to us learning plays an important part; there is indisputably intelligence at work and some rudimentary free choice. It is not altogether mistaken to blame a dog for misbehaving when it should "know better;" this of course applies to a yet greater extent to anthropoid apes. Such cases are in an uncomfortably intermediate, gray area; animal rights advocates could justifiably invoke in this connection, if not the inherent value of life in an absolute sense, value understood not just analogously but much as applied directly to human beings, urging to respect it on grounds of reciprocity.
The ethical dilemma here is that, while it must be recognized that many animals can be assumed to have sensations, feelings, and emotions very similar to ours and intelligence comparable to ours in kind, many of them are also unalterably pitted against each other by nature: this is why we said (in 6.8.) that identification--solidarity--cannot be extended to all living organisms. Albert Schweitzer, who made the phrase "reverence for life" current, and was no hypocrite, himself acknowledged that life on this planet is tragically divided against itself.
It was a fatal choice for humans to choose two predators, the dog and the cat, as their closest friends in the animal world. But it was not inconsistent with the Code-One principles that characterized early human history. At this point we are just beginning to recognize the irony of it. The hope to bring them up on and get them accustomed to a vegetarian diet may seem odd to some, but it is the only reasonable course to adopt unless we wish to part with them. It is also possible that some innately herbivorous or at least omnivorous species might eventually develop into suitable pets to partially replace them.
It may be proposed that protection be extended to some herbivorous animals, e.g., deer, as opposed to carnivores. The feasibility of this would depend on ecological sustainability. Yet we should realize that such selective measures would be qualified as ingenuous even by some hardheaded environmentalists and would in any case barely graze the surface.
Knowledge is the liberator of the human race. The pressures that at one time necessitated hunting, enslaving herds of animals for use as food, labor, clothing, etc. no longer weigh on us nearly as heavily as they once did. Notwithstanding all its curses and perils, technology is bringing us closer every day to the prospect of a more humane lifestyle. On the other hand, we cannot fundamentally change the ways of nature.
7.3.2.3.3. Animal Experimentation We do not wish to deal with bioethical issues such as genetic engineering and cloning here, but will briefly comment on the ethical implications of the use of animals in laboratory research. Considerations obtaining in this matter are the same as those in the foregoing sections.
The view that animals come under a completely different category than humans, known as speciesism in this context, has made many scientists conclude that they have a free hand in treating them in a manner that has been arguably characterized as abhorrently cruel and sadistic. Extrapolation from nonhuman to human life in research is not as easy and reliable as the public is led to believe. Much of the experimentation is whimsical. Nevertheless, some biomedical research seems justifiable within strictly imposed guidelines. In our judgment no vivisection ought to be performed. The number of animals currently used for this purpose is astronomical. Animals are subjected to torture even in the science laboratories of high schools, where--optimistically--perhaps a fraction of the students can be expected to profit from such experiments. The practice can be expected to instill a callous disregard for human life; it is objectionable per se when done to animals possessing feelings and intelligence; much of it is wanton, unnecessary, and wasteful to resources.
7.3.2.3.4. Plants When we talk about respect for all life we of course have to include flora. The serenity and tranquillity that a beautiful landscape exudes is something of an illusion. Vegetation acts slowly, so that we are not immediately aware of the ruthless struggle that characterizes it. The truth is however that--despite fairly extensive symbiotic arrangements--plants are engaged in ceaseless competition for light, space, and nutrients, and do everything in their power to deprive these from one another.
Nature conservancy, organic gardening, disuse of chemicals, protection of rain forests, generally curbing unsustainable development, desirable as they are, do not address this problem, which is so basic that it cannot be effectively counteracted. You may plant a garden where flowers thrive, you can plant wildflowers instead of cultivated ones, yet even within those walled, artificial surroundings you will only crudely change conditions and not at all the iron laws by which nature operates.
Apart from this and most relevantly, humans (supposing that at one time in the future most of us will be converted to vegetarianism) and herbivores belonging to other genera cannot revere life in the sense of abstaining from plants as a source of diet.
Certainly we can prevent the wanton destruction of the vegetative environment.This important aim is the optimum realistic limit to respecting plant life.
7.4. Celebrity, or the Cult of Nothingness
Recently a fashionable photographer was admitted to the presence of Michael Jackson. Surrounded by his staff, the rock idol was bandaged from head to toe; water was pouring from all over him, collecting in a pool at his feet. The photographer beheld the scene transfixed, not knowing what to make of it. Would he be witnessing the tragic dissolution of the world's greatest celebrity?
He was relieved to learn that Jackson was just holding a strategy session with his advisers while taking his skin-fading cure. The picture is strikingly allegorical: the world's number one entertainer melts like a snowman, leaving behind the naught he was molded of. This fortyish Barbie doll has been fashioned to look neither male nor female, neither black nor white; in a way he is heir to the legacy of Marilyn Monroe, who had the reputation that everything on or about her was fake. Jackson is fantasy all over, this is an open secret. This precisely is his secret. That is what makes him perfectly substitutable: he is not bound by age, sex, or race; when he melts away, nothing is left behind. Better yet: he has no real gift for anything. He is lauded by media critics for being unique in that he can both sing and dance; the plain truth is however that he has no outstanding endowments or attainments: what he can do the average person could do. Anyone whose toe has been stepped on can scream or jump like him--and the same could be said of most rock, pop, rap, and hip-hop idols. This too is clear to all unless they are deliberately deceiving themselves; which, however, is not an uncommon symptom of rock worship.
The media have concocted the ultimate nonentity, the perfect nothing. The significance of this accomplishment is that anyone can identify with him. It is a discovery of our age that merit is not a requirement for respect. Merit and fame have separated.
Is this an authentically new phenomenon? It is rather the end result of a long development. The eminent figures of ages long past, personages of myth, fable, and lore, accomplished miraculous feats; they possessed either extraordinary qualities or exceptional will power. Gods performed supernatural deeds, national heroes showed stupendous courage, the saints were capable of unusual self-abnegation. Here we are not disputing whether the giants of history actually benefited humanity or not; by merit we are simply referring to a relative reputation. The merits of the traditional hero, military leader, prince, or king were more or less predicated on the criterion of might as right or power as virtue. Yet the class system deemphasized personal merit, though characteristically the ideology of the ruling class affirmed the moral legitimacy and inherited privileges of the prevailing social order--being a nobleman meant being a nobler specimen of humanity as well--thus for instance the medieval hero was typically the noble knight. Industrialization began to undermine the rigid class system, allowing a proportionately larger role for the individual and, consequently, also for personal merit. The rising new social philosophy of the 18th century championed universality and equality, but in a context where the bourgeoisie actually called the tune and free competition guaranteed individual enterprise: now hero worship would surround differentially the Napoleonic upstart.
Tracing the road that has led to what we understand today by celebrity through successive changes wrought in the image of the monarch, the transition is represented by the 19th-20th centuries, when the ruler is already an idealized model of the citizen and thus, somewhat, of the average person: Louis-Philippe, literally citizen king by nickname; Francis Joseph, easily imitable with his signature sideburns and dinner jacket because, apart from his title, mediocre; so too Victoria, George V, and George VI, the last great successful royal stars. As--at least in their image--average persons, they were, to some extent, already celebrities in our contemporary sense of the word.
The case of the ruler who embodies the average person is somewhat similar to the case of the sports idol; that is why it represents a suitable transition. Sports heroes have to show extraordinary ability (this is why the admiration surrounding them cannot compare with the worship accorded to pop, rock, rap, hip-hop idols, who are genuine, bona fide nonentities), but their exploits are entirely devoid of any true importance: you neither help nor harm the world by throwing or pitching or hitting a ball better than others. From the point of view of their skill, sports stars are certainly exceptional; apart from that, they tend to be nondescript, commonplace human beings, just like popular constitutional monarchs who are exceptional in one respect only: their birthright to inherit the crown. With the ruler fame was due to power, though the exercise of power was becoming increasingly symbolic for the monarchs mentioned above. And at the end of the 20th century there is no king or queen left who could compete with the popularity of a Presley, the Beatles, or Madonna. As John Lennon put it, "the Beatles are bigger than Jesus."
The nearest predecessor leading to the present-day celebrity is the actor. Actors are ideal candidates for nonentity inasmuch as by profession they lack essence: their vocation is to imitate others. It is specific to the nature of their calling that the better they can "lie," the better they pursue it. This is however not equivalent to deception, as the audience understand the conventions of the stage. While viewing the show the audience suspend their sense of reality. Professionally actors are admired for the credibility of their performance. This aspect does come into consideration even today. But with the passing of time the most celebrated Hollywood stars typically wound up playing "themselves"--their stereotyped copies, that is--which was a harbinger of the postmodern celebrity.
Yet the actor's art is also a metaphor of what is most profoundly, if you wish: ontologically, human: the fact that we are in a certain sense condemned forever to act ourselves, play at being ourselves: the stage is an allegory of the inner stage of human consciousness. This is one of the essential though generally unacknowledged reasons for the attraction of the theater; unacknowledged because we do not like to admit the divided nature of our inner selves.
Another important reason for the attraction of the stage is the exact reverse of the above: the dramatic representation reinforces the spectator's self-image. God incarnated in human shape: Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, the mythological hero, the saint held up, exemplified the human being and condition as well, solidifying the ego of the follower of the cult or religion in question, in accordance with the prejudices and demands of the respective culture. The aristocrat, the royal court of a given historical period also staged, acted out, impersonated the human being as she/he ought to be, is supposed to be. In the Middle Ages, for example, the commoner's chance of identifying with the royal show was still much narrower than, let us say, in the age of constitutional monarchs, who were already partly fashioned by professional image managers.
This function survives in the role of the contemporary celebrity. The celebrity whose image is omnipresent in the media substantiates, strengthens the fan's ego, who imagines that they are peers. But while the former archetypes were based on merit (relative to the culture) or some other trait regarded as desirable--thus for example the typical movie stars of the era between the two world wars still had to be physically attractive--the most successful postmodern celebrities are empty receptacles, offering in this manner the greatest latitude for their fans to project themselves into them. The admirer fills a vacuum.
At the same time, the critics hurl superlatives at the celebrity. The Beatles made Liverpool into the cultural center of the world, raved Ginsberg. The critic enters into a kind of pact, a mediation between the star and the fan. Behind the rock idol's mask, the critic actually exalts the fan. The rules of the game require that both parties pretend not to be aware of this in order for the rite or surgical operation mystically uniting the idol with the cult member to be successfully performed. The rustic who, throwing his cap in the air, ran cheering after the king's carriage was, in a certain sense, cheering himself too, as the king symbolized the nation. The metonymy "l'état, c'est moi" is easily reversible, and the reversion in fact did take place a hundred years later, when "le peuple est souverain" became the slogan of the revolution. The tables were turned; had the revolution carried out its promise, equality would have been established.
Today neither beauty nor blue blood nor talent nor power separates the fan from the idol; the fiction is that they are equal; the spectators can much more easily celebrate themselves under the guise of their chosen celebrities. Thus could we be witnessing the triumph of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" in the present apotheosis of the celebrity? After all, the criterion of the ideal society consists precisely in one's identification with the whole human race and each of its members.
Is it an inhuman development that--it would seem--we have discovered: esteem does not require merit? No, because presumably all of us since time immemorial have desired acceptance and respect; and it seems the simplest solution to lift the requirement of accomplishing difficult tasks, of self-sacrifice and tests of valor: unlike the legendary hero suing for the princess's hand, we do not have to pass an ordeal. Monarchs have more or less had it, the Queen sits mournfully brooding on her wobbly throne, the royal bugle corps is sounding the taps. The princess, on the other hand, is splashed all over the tabloids and greets us featured in special bulletins. Lady Di was the child of our age, a genuine celebrity. While the complex ironies of her tragic death are rich in significance for our theory, we lack the necessary space here for an adequate analysis.
Are we, then, progressing in the right direction? Let us put it this way: the good cause has jumped the rails or has been sidetracked; more aptly yet, a generally favorable tendency is being parasitized.
When the celebrity worshipper thinks that by the apotheosis of the lowest common denominator she has succeeded in stealing into heaven on the celebrity's back, she is being duped though, to quote Adamov, every victim is at the same time executioner, and since his deceit is also self-delusion, he becomes his own willing executioner. Madonna stares into the fan's eyes from the screen: "I love you," she whispers; and since her image has been fabricated to represent her as bisexual, this is meant for every single human being on the face of the earth. By contrast the flesh-and-blood Madonna lives in a fortified compound; should a fan chance so much as to appear before her gate he is turned away by bodyguards; stubborn admirers get arrested and are promptly sued by the star's hard-working attorneys. In the real world celebrities regard their fans with contempt or at least want to keep them at arm's length.
This is not surprising. For the average mortal Hollywood stars are the sons and daughters of heaven; people count it among their most memorable experiences to spot them on the street; and should their greeting be returned, the result is sheer ecstasy. Yet the grand masters of public relations do their business so cunningly that the viewers feel the celebrities are their intimate personal friends: they send them homemade pies on their birthdays, write them about their cares and worries, and talk about them before their real friends by their first names. And since fans consider themselves on a par with the celebrity, they look down upon their own environment--just as, in the real world, they are disdained by the star--they neglect their friends, are bored by their spouses, waiting only for the sublime moment when, in the subdued lighting of the TV room, they can again be united with the object of their adoration.
Celebrities drive a wedge between the public and their real environment. Yet they also build a bridge. Two groupies can rave about their idol who creates a shared language between them. Presumably in the Serbian and Moslem enclaves of Bosnia or in the Catholic and Protestant quarters of Belfast youngsters look at some of the same videos. Yet they are ready to pounce on each other. The international rock culture claims to reconcile people around the world. There could be some validity to this claim; however, at this time the indications are not very encouraging.
Videos and the most popular TV shows targeting young people are apt to carry a double message: seemingly they preach love and cooperation while frequently or perhaps for the most part they inspire aggression and destruction. Jackson sings about peace while smashing in windows with an ax; his alter ego is a panther; the power rangers champion peace too while they are punching and kicking. Heavy-metal singers were among the initiators of Band Aid. Apart from these occasional noble gestures, however, heavy-metal and rap stars squarely stand for cruelty and brutality--there is hardly any equivocation in their case.
Let us admit it: equivocation and brutality are choices open for humans. They are human traits unless we determine the meaning of human on a normative basis. In this sense unfortunately even the celebrities who have the most detrimental societal influences are not inhuman. Though their public images are synthetically manufactured, celebrities, once they have been launched into orbit, awaken true human impulses and emotions: the fan projects real human qualities into them.
As far as endowments, accomplishments, and real human values are concerned, celebrities tend to be unremarkable. But in some respects they usually do show exceptional aptitudes: to achieve fame they need to be manipulative, ruthless, and exploitative. (Even these requirements are not always indispensable, since celebrity, like royalty, can be inherited, dynastic--it gives you an indisputable head start to be named Sinatra or Fonda.) From there on, the manager will take charge. But if there is a decisive difference distinguishing the celebrity from the groupie, it is the former's manipulativeness, ruthlessness and exploitativeness--perhaps above all, impudence.
Celebrities, then, alienate their fans from their surroundings, cut the ties attaching them to society by wedging themselves between the groupie and the environment, creating a kind of virtual reality that does not at all correspond to the real world. In the false belief that a tie obtains between them and the idol, the fans waste their affection. They feel they may legitimately hate their neighbors, the people they meet on the street, while this intimate contact obtains between them and their chosen idols. In other words, it is precisely the ostensible identification embracing all humanity that in practice severs them from other human beings. Rock, rap, break, hip-hop culture creates a certain common ground among its enthusiasts. But this common language nurtures hatred, destructiveness, and violence rather than human solidarity.
In summing up, we will more explicitly situate within our theory the tendency we have examined in this section. We can observe a trend throughout history whereby the role model's traits change from Code-One toward (though almost never attain) Code-Two ideals. Generally speaking, admiration was first the recognition of power or brute force, sheer force being gradually complemented and supplanted by cunning as the application of power became more and more indirect with the advance of civilization. The group leader who owes his authority solely to physical strength stands in this scheme at the beginning as a theoretical extreme example. In reality of course human beings show a mixture of traits, they are not pure types; yet, as Weber rightly remarked, the construction of ideal types is helpful in comprehending a historical phenomenon. In the course of this development, cunning (Machiavellian intelligence) is to some extent replaced by impartial or benevolent intelligence. As the concept of equality gains credit, on the whole the role model gradually shifts to the person who on the one hand does not wish to dominate but on the other hand renders some significant objectively beneficial service to society. The postmodern (or late-20th-century) celebrity as the most popular member of society and role model represents a peculiar quirk in this development. The contemporary celebrity, who is famous for being famous, sort of cashes in on or exploits and abuses the democratizing tendency by epitomizing triviality and under the guise of equality in effect alienates people from one another.
7.5. Leadership
If
leadership ability is due to a personal quality that influences people's
decisions regardless of rational considerations by which the desirability of
actions could be weighed objectively, it can be harmful, and the conclusion that
the societal role of leaders should be minimized or eliminated appears
justified.
But the general public perception of leadership is preponderantly favorable; the likely response to the view expressed above would be: "That is your conception of leadership; by leaders I understand persons who have earned the trust of their fellows by being reliable, concerned about their welfare, and capable; someone has to lead, otherwise anarchy ensues, and no one is the better off for it."
No doubt there have been leaders who had a beneficial impact on the course of history. In our opinion they constitute the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, the great disparity in educational levels that made it necessary in past ages for the large majority to trust the guidance of a few is gradually being reduced by the spread of public instruction and information. If one insists that only those who have exercised their influence in a manner to benefit their followers should be recognized as true leaders, we have to coin a different word for all those who have been called leaders but whose activities proved disastrous.
The substantive part of the argument is: one can observe a widespread algorithm whereby people endowed with the right physical appearance as well as magnetism, self-assurance, acting ability, etc. for gaining the confidence of others, ascend to political, organizational, or military power only to turn around and exploit it in their own interest and contrary to the interest of those who confided in them. It is because of the mystical basis that is independent of rational choice and at least permits betrayal of trust that society would on the whole be better off without those who are de facto referred to as leaders.
As we stated above (6.7), leadership is essentially for cattle; rational human beings should be able to make up their minds on the evidence pro and con. The validity of this proposition is so obvious, it is supported so much even by simple common sense, that the constant harping on the need for great leaders and the obsequious tributes paid to them would appear almost astonishing. But they are securely founded on deeply ingrained irrational and--particularly in a contemporary, turn-of-the-21st-century context--harmful values: Code-One values affirming power, deceit, and exploitation. The ideas of leadership on the one hand and democracy founded on equality on the other are irreconcilably opposed, as are the two codes proposing them. But most righteous citizens would black out rather than be confronted with such inconsistencies in their ethos or Weltanschauungen. Accordingly, we have come up with leadership scientists who explain us all about the democratic leader, just as we have developed rules for humane conduct in war, fair ways for fighters to knock the hell out of each other in the ring, or compassionate methods of butchering animals in hunt and slaughterhouse. "Well, is that not an advance over an even more brutal manner of practicing those fun games?" you might ask. Certainly. But how about not practicing them at all?
The notion of a leader in a democratic society built on equality is like that of a squared circle. The sensible approach would be, in a modern context, to distinguish between leaders on the one side and managers on the other. The efficient and successful operation of an organizational apparatus unquestionably necessitates, for instance, a determination and assignation of tasks and perimeters of operation to insure the smooth co-functioning of different divisions or departments. Management science aims at optimum solutions for pragmatic problems, such as inventory policies, production schedules, or shipping patterns, employing, e. g., calculus and probability theory. The harmonization of interpersonal relations may also be counted among the manager's responsibilities in the capacity of ombudsman. Ombudsmen do not need to dominate or issue orders. The planning of the future course of an enterprise is much more securely entrusted to experts than the vagaries of an authoritarian leader.
The functions of leader and manager are logically distinguishable. However, in actual usage the two overlap. Managers are also often deft behind-the-scenes manipulators, PR men pulling the strings and wielding real power in the name of figureheads, and thriving on fraudulence.
In the United States modern leadership studies were first informed by a behaviorist orientation. This is apparent on the opus known as Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership, formerly regarded as the authoritative compilation on the subject and at this writing still available in a revised edition. The author rejects the suggestion that leadership is a simple power relationship, yet this rather revealing statement appears on page 292 in the work (New York: The Free Press, 1974):
But the general public perception of leadership is preponderantly favorable; the likely response to the view expressed above would be: "That is your conception of leadership; by leaders I understand persons who have earned the trust of their fellows by being reliable, concerned about their welfare, and capable; someone has to lead, otherwise anarchy ensues, and no one is the better off for it."
No doubt there have been leaders who had a beneficial impact on the course of history. In our opinion they constitute the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, the great disparity in educational levels that made it necessary in past ages for the large majority to trust the guidance of a few is gradually being reduced by the spread of public instruction and information. If one insists that only those who have exercised their influence in a manner to benefit their followers should be recognized as true leaders, we have to coin a different word for all those who have been called leaders but whose activities proved disastrous.
The substantive part of the argument is: one can observe a widespread algorithm whereby people endowed with the right physical appearance as well as magnetism, self-assurance, acting ability, etc. for gaining the confidence of others, ascend to political, organizational, or military power only to turn around and exploit it in their own interest and contrary to the interest of those who confided in them. It is because of the mystical basis that is independent of rational choice and at least permits betrayal of trust that society would on the whole be better off without those who are de facto referred to as leaders.
As we stated above (6.7), leadership is essentially for cattle; rational human beings should be able to make up their minds on the evidence pro and con. The validity of this proposition is so obvious, it is supported so much even by simple common sense, that the constant harping on the need for great leaders and the obsequious tributes paid to them would appear almost astonishing. But they are securely founded on deeply ingrained irrational and--particularly in a contemporary, turn-of-the-21st-century context--harmful values: Code-One values affirming power, deceit, and exploitation. The ideas of leadership on the one hand and democracy founded on equality on the other are irreconcilably opposed, as are the two codes proposing them. But most righteous citizens would black out rather than be confronted with such inconsistencies in their ethos or Weltanschauungen. Accordingly, we have come up with leadership scientists who explain us all about the democratic leader, just as we have developed rules for humane conduct in war, fair ways for fighters to knock the hell out of each other in the ring, or compassionate methods of butchering animals in hunt and slaughterhouse. "Well, is that not an advance over an even more brutal manner of practicing those fun games?" you might ask. Certainly. But how about not practicing them at all?
The notion of a leader in a democratic society built on equality is like that of a squared circle. The sensible approach would be, in a modern context, to distinguish between leaders on the one side and managers on the other. The efficient and successful operation of an organizational apparatus unquestionably necessitates, for instance, a determination and assignation of tasks and perimeters of operation to insure the smooth co-functioning of different divisions or departments. Management science aims at optimum solutions for pragmatic problems, such as inventory policies, production schedules, or shipping patterns, employing, e. g., calculus and probability theory. The harmonization of interpersonal relations may also be counted among the manager's responsibilities in the capacity of ombudsman. Ombudsmen do not need to dominate or issue orders. The planning of the future course of an enterprise is much more securely entrusted to experts than the vagaries of an authoritarian leader.
The functions of leader and manager are logically distinguishable. However, in actual usage the two overlap. Managers are also often deft behind-the-scenes manipulators, PR men pulling the strings and wielding real power in the name of figureheads, and thriving on fraudulence.
In the United States modern leadership studies were first informed by a behaviorist orientation. This is apparent on the opus known as Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership, formerly regarded as the authoritative compilation on the subject and at this writing still available in a revised edition. The author rejects the suggestion that leadership is a simple power relationship, yet this rather revealing statement appears on page 292 in the work (New York: The Free Press, 1974):
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Stogdill also condemned autocratic leaders, though he was unmistakably partial to the leader we might well call authoritarian, one who issues firm directives and brooks no contradiction; he shared the majority opinion in dismissing the conclusions offered by Lewin, Lippitt, and White, whose study had indicated that leaderless groups could function successfully.
Writing in 1977 ("Where have All the Leaders Gone?" The Technology Review 75:9 [March-April 1977]), Warren G. Bennis, one-time president of the University of Cincinnati, complains precisely of the fact that he is forced to act as a mere manager instead of a leader:
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Nixon and Agnew were forced out of office, he points out; and in the business world it is just as bad, albeit business is the concentrated epitome of our culture: Coolidge was right when he said that America's business is business. Confronted with all the advocacy groups, leaders have become paralyzed. Abraham Zaleznik, professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, makes the same observation ("The Leadership Gap," The Washington Quarterly 6:1 [Winter 1983]): "The increasing imbalance in our society weighted toward management has created a shortage of leaders in American institutions." He denies that leadership is an elitist concept, though admits that, considering the issue superficially, there could appear to be a contradiction between leadership and the democratic ideal.
Max Weber in his 1921 classic, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, coined the since overabundantly employed term charismatic leader. Though he always wrote about the legitimacy of power in a merely subjective sense--i. e., as socially recognized--many subsequent authors have represented Weber as a spokesman for objectively legitimate leadership; indeed the adjective "charismatic" has been used overwhelmingly in praise by authors commenting on the subject.
Those who follow this tack have implicitly embraced the irrational aspect of leadership, stressing it in fact at the expense of all other aspects and engaging at the same time in an inflationary spiral of ever higher encomia heaped on leaders. James McGregor Burns and B. M. Bass invented the variant transformational leader. Adopting this term and combining it with the theory of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, two professors of psychology, Karl W. Kuhnert and Philip Lewis, examined the motivational states of transformational leaders ("Transactional and Transformational Leadership: A Constructive/Developmental Analysis," The Academy of Management Review 12:4 [1987]). They found substantially that the higher they were found on the ladder of political, organizational, military, etc. hierarchy, the higher leaders were likely to score on a scale of self-chosen principles of justice, integrity, altruism, and--surprising as this may sound--even equality! (As we know, all animals are equal, and successful animals are more equal than others.) At these heights, they do not need to barter for goods and rights like lower types, the authors assert. (The moderation of company CEOs when it comes to financial compensation for their services is after all proverbial.)
The theses of Kegan and, in turn, Kuhnert and Lewis, bear the unmistakable imprint of Piaget's influential cognitive developmental psychology theory (particularly as interpreted and developed by Kohlberg [cf. 5.2.3 - 5.3 of this outline]). But attention! Kuhnert and Lewis are turning Piaget upside down. They, as do many others who are prominent in leadership studies, in effect take it for granted that the highest status in the organizational hierarchy coincides with the highest moral stage in personality development. Piaget maintained nothing of the kind. They on the other hand take success as proof of the pudding.
For practical purposes the effect is to legitimate precisely the most harmful type of leader, the essential leader who commands prestige not because of expertise and competence but charisma, magnetism, showmanship, manipulation, etc., the demagogue and rabble rouser in the political arena.
From our perspective this trend is substantially inspired by Code-One values, characteristically using Code Two as a screen. The result is that power-over is turned into the supreme moral value. It is the same type of make-believe that wants to turn a vulnerable innocent person into a culpable one, taking advantage of a perceived weakness (see 7.2) or confuses fame with merit (see 7.4). The insistence that these values are self-chosen highlights the dangers of the Kantian bias for deontological ethics founding Piaget's and Kohlberg's theories. When you divorce principles from consequences it is easy to exploit your ideas in the service of causes you never contemplated.
In accordance with the inflation in terms (superlative praise) coupled with a penchant for the occult, from charismatic through transformational we arrive at the magic leader (so named by David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman in the article "What Makes for Magic Leadership?" in the June 6, 1988 issue of Fortune), whose distinguishing mark is vision. The literature on visionary leadership alone could fill a bookcase. Let us start by citing a characteristic example, an article entitled "Visionary Leadership: A Perspective from Education," by Marshall Sashkin, in the volume Contemporary Issues in Leadership (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984).
Sashkin, a recognized authority on the subject, says that there are three major aspects to visionary leadership. The first is visioning itself. The process of conceiving a vision calls for certain cognitive skills, he adds as a note of caution. Effective executive visionaries must vision over periods of at least five years; more often, ten years or longer.
He subsequently discusses visionary activities recommended for high school principals. The exemplary leader conforms to the truth. However, truth has a variety of definitions; the successful leaders adopt the definition that help them achieve their goals. Should they have difficulty in accepting this, they ought to remember: "One aspect of the development of moral character is understanding the difference between what is right and what works" (p. 231).
When followers of the cult of visionary leadership combine esoteric mysticism and the most prosaic and pragmatic managerial considerations, the result is apt to strike the reader as verging on parody. One does not expect a toothpaste or thumbnail manufacturer to be a seer subject to beatific visions. Metanoia, a shift of mind, meaning in the Gnostic tradition an awakening of shared intuition and direct knowledge of the highest--of God--is the deeper meaning of learning, says Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, New York: Doubleday, 1990: 14). The learning organization continually expands its capacity to create its future by generative learning. As a founding partner of Innovation Associates, the author imparts this arcane doctrine to the assembled managers of Ford Motor, Digital, and Procter & Gamble.
Senge states that he believes in new types of organizations: decentralized, nonhierarchical, dedicated to the well-being of employees as well as success. Robert K. Greenleaf took this spirit even further with his conception of servant leadership. Though belonging to a much earlier generation, in his numerous works Greenleaf, who acted as consultant to the Brookings Institution among others, already exhibited the full panoply of mystical and symbolic inspiration exemplified in visionary leadership literature. According to him the only authority deserving allegiance is one knowingly granted by the follower in response to the servant stature of the leader. The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership is carrying the torch of his spiritual heritage. Undoubtedly these and similar enterprises do not lack some good motivation, but at times the impression that one is listening to a sort of propagandistic double talk may also enter the mind.
Professor Robert E. Kelley of Carnegie-Mellon University believes and, in fact, furnishes concrete cases to show that leaderless groups, where all members assume equal responsibility for achieving goals, can be highly productive ("In Praise of Followers," Harvard Business Review Nov-Dec.1988). Delegation to the lowest level is another technique. Organizations must find ways to bring followers into full partnership because engaged, energized, appreciated followers can make a business prosper, he affirms. Yet he gives an operative definition of the leader in which the desire to lead has the greatest weight. Somehow the desire to lead is supposed to justify the need for leaders. Effective followers manage themselves well, Kelley also insists: they see themselves as equals of the leaders they follow (another touch of Animal Farm?).
A dossier of literature condemning leadership outright would be much thinner. One eloquent recent publication is by Frederick G. Bailey (Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). "[N]o leader can survive...without deceiving others.... Leadership and malefaction go hand in hand" (ix), writes the author. According to Bailey astute leaders consolidate their power by playing on and taking advantage of contradictory and simultaneously proclaimed values of their civilization, choosing the side helpful for their designs. They thus always remain as it were one step ahead of their enemies.
Though in our view Bailey's diagnosis is closer to the truth, it would be wrong to qualify the school exemplified by the likes of Greenleaf and Senge as merely hypocritical. It is best seen as part of a development that, despite temporary ups and downs, has so far proved favorable to the cause of equality.
In its December 5, 1994 issueTime devoted a long report to the future of leadership. In his introductory comments Lance Morrow condemns the universe of rights and entitlements that started to replace in the United States the old territory of duty during the 1960s. Entitlements represent the decadence of the American guarantee, claims Morrow. He unequivocally maintains that there is an imperative need for leaders, but emphasizes that the type of leader needed today is no longer the traditional (authoritarian) one, as the leader now is faced with a reasonably well-educated and informed electorate.
Morrow's stand probably voices the majority opinion obtaining in this country. The anti liberal turn inaugurated in the 1980s and culminating in 1994 has led to a mild backlash since, but the spirit of the 1960s is gone, and at present the dominant mood is perhaps best described as one of moderate conservatism. Yet even moderately conservative experts take it almost for granted nowadays that power will become gradually diffused in the future, self-management will gain a larger role, employees will participate in leadership, the category of the governed will be divided into smaller entities, and within those entities the principles of self-government will make headway.
In our view neither leaders nor followers are needed inasmuch as reason and experience serve as the best criteria for decisions. The spread of knowledge, improvement in educational levels, advances in information technology and communication have tended to undercut the operational field of the leader despite all the sidetracking, paradoxical phenomena, prestidigitation, and temporary setbacks.
Taking the last 300 years, one could cite two conspicuous examples of seeming exception to this general trend: 18th-century absolutism and the rise of dictatorships between the two world wars. Both of them in fact confirm the rule. The absolutist monarch was typically reaching out, over the heads of the established inherited aristocracy that had impeded progress, to the wider and professionally more competent new bourgeois class, thereby ultimately contributing to a dispersion of power. The typical dictator of the interwar period on his part rose from the people as a challenger of monarchical rule in countries with weak democratic traditions only to betray the populist message that had helped him to power. These dictatorships succeeded temporarily just because of the infirmity of local democratic roots and were successively replaced by more widely based regimes.
We will have leaders in our ranks for a long time yet; however, their dominance will likely diminish. Today the dimensions of power are still vast, the most significant change is however that its original, primitive and crude forms have become progressively more indirect, mediated, and diffused. From the military and political, preponderance has shifted to the economic and the high-tech informational spheres. "Knowledge is power." But our hope is that, in its own best interest, knowledge will have the foresight to reach out to each member of the human family.