Visions of justifying society
The nature of a just society lies at the heart of many political debates. Ought we to have a working welfare state, or should everyone be expected to get by as rugged individuals? What is the proper goal of a criminal justice system: deterrence, retribution, or reformation? What is a fair distribution of the wealth that a society produces and who is the cause of that production? And in how many hands shall we allow weapons to be held?
These all presume that we are working on a society that we have agreed, implicitly or otherwise, to accept as a fact. The question that I instead wish to consider here is how we justify society itself. That will necessarily touch on matters of internal structure, but my primary concern is how society as a category can be seen as a good idea in itself we might go into discussions about how to improve it.
As one of the characters in Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit says, “hell is other people,” by which is meant the effect on our selves that result from being made the object of someone else’s attention. Get caught scratching an itch in certain regions of one’s body or singing a song or reading a love letter, and the world can neatly if mostly trivially be divided into before and after, at least until the shock wears off. Because we interact with others, we have to stop at red lights, refrain from playing the bagpipes in the dark hours, and manage to get trash into containers. We are forbidden to spit on the sidewalk and required to pay taxes. And as Sartre understood, we are shaped by being observed. Something inside us is left to wonder how else the wave function might have worked itself out, what freedom of movement we might have had if we could have escaped being pinned in place.
And yet, if we are realistic, we know that such disquiet can go nowhere. A person in a state of nature of the type discussed by eighteenth century political philosophers would have no time for speculations and little opportunity for enjoyment—of freedom or of anything else. This wild man would choke down his food in fear of having it snatched away, would collapse in fatigue and wake at the slightest sound, and would be the victim of a thousand injuries that a modern emergency room could easily treat. Even if a solitary person were not subject to attack and misadventure, someone utterly alone would begin inventing others for the sake of variety.
While we are each not the same persons we would be in isolation, there is nothing to regret in this. If a bucket filled with water is the only object in the universe, would the water climb its sides were it to spin—and does “spin” have any meaning in that situation? Would personhood have any meaning without other persons?
There is another matter outside of the psychological that justifies society. Take the case of Mr. Henry Bemis, of the Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” finally free of the nagging distractions of others and with all the books he could want to read following a nuclear war, but lacking the glasses that he needs to be able to see. Society makes glasses. That may be only fair, since society also makes us aware of the quality of our vision—how would I know that I have excellent or poor sight if I had no one to compare with and no objects that I am expected to discern at twenty feet—but think of how much richer our experience of sight is because we have been taught to see.
At the same time, just as our vision would have no awareness in isolation, society must take care not to freeze the whole picture. A single particle’s path is changed by being observed. Many particles together lock each other into a pattern by observing each other, and looking at the combined object from outside is a neutral act. In political terms, we can be ourselves while living with others only so long as we do not inhabit a panopticon. By being able to choose when we can be observed and when not, by being able to decide how our bodies will be used, how we identify ourselves without asking anyone else’s opinion on the subject, and so on, we can live individually in groups. There must be added to this the ability—and the desire—to think individually. If I think the thoughts of others without having good reasons of my own, how am I different from them?
Thomas Hobbes, contemplating the transition from a state of nature to life in society, concluded that the only real choices were between original anarchy—a life that he imagined to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—and total rule by a monarch, but that is no real contrast. It is simply two kinds of singleness. A society is justified only if we can have both interference and reinforcement of vision as we each will choose.