You are describing people living in a society - any functioning society - as not free. The two alternatives free from state property enforcement you describe are a hunter-gatherer and a pirate ship. To present them in this light you have to really stretch the truth for both. You have to imagine the hunter-gatherer to be living outside of a tribe and far from other tribes. In reality, very few people lived like that; the dictate of a small parochial group balancing on the edge of survival is something that even North Koreans would dread. The level of tribe violence was also pretty high with warfare mortality estimated at over 25% for some societies. Pirate ships might have lacked state property enforcements, but the whole point of a pirate ship was to be an instrument of violent property re-distribution. For those in-group on a pirate ship, property rights were enforced much more brutally than they would have been administered by most states at the time, with death penalty imposed for many infingements. I think a death penalty is a far greater assault on liberty than a short arrest. So it looks like the only free alternative society you see is an imaginary lone hunter-gatherer on a virgin continent. The problem with this is that a single person is not a society at all and the moment you remember how hunter-gatherers actually lived, you realise that they were not free at all. If you are unhappy with capitalist or socialist ways to organise a society, it would help to describe an alternative. If there is no alternative, it means that even if "civilisation is inherently unfree", a society lacking a civilisation is much more unfree.
That's a fair assessment. I do think some hypothetical forms of anarchist society or HG bands at low population density are examples of society with high levels of freedom. Mostly I'd just like the socialism-capitalism debate to move away from arguing over freedom, since neither side can offer much of it it in a meaningful way.
I live in a big city, but in my youth I did some extreme mountaineering with a small group of friends. I think the risks and challenges on these trips were roughly in-line with risks normally taken by hunter-gatherers; we had a better supply of food and medicines but a less hospitable environment. The next nearest humans were sometimes 5 days of walk away from us, but I can assure you that one is much freer from other people in a big city than on these trips. If you try to be free from people on whom you daily depend for your survival, you are not going to survive for very long. If we tried to raise some children in that kind of environment, it would have required even greater curbs on individual freedoms. So I am afraid you have no non-hypothetical examples at all.
I am afraid you overestimate how easy it is to survive in any kind wilderness and underestimate the degree of interdependence in small groups. A sprained ankle is a small nuisance in a city, a major group-wide challenge and a days-long infringement on everyone's freedoms in a small isolated group, and a good chance of death for a lone hunter-gatherer or mountaineer.
Love the post overall. But some bits "just ain't so". Particularly
> In his own time, [an ancient hunter-gatherer] was free to go where he pleased and sustain himself on anything he could find. In the modern world, he finds himself surrounded by things he could use, but isn’t allowed to.
That's not how it worked, ever. There would very seldom be an ancient H-G who ambles around anywhere he wants by himself.
There were tribes. Tribes held their territories. You could do most anything within your territory, yes, but the tribes had rules about how the collected resources were used by the tribes-members. Those H-Gs that ambled around by themselves would be the few who got exiled from their tribe for not abiding by the tribe's rules. And so they'd amble alone for a while until some bear or wolf-pack ate them.
Even for the non-exiled tribesman, "go where he pleased" bit stopped at the boundary of that tribe's territory. Those boundaries could shift, and did, but some skull-bashing and gut-piercing exchanges had to occur first. (people *understood* the meaning of "territory" ever since back when they were fishes that flopped out to the seashore). And "free usage of obtained resources" was well regulated by the tribe's internal rules and pecking order. Anything else is a Rousseauian fantasy.
Civilization has introduced regulated rules of private property as the necessary facilitation for building up kingdoms or empires that are quite larger than a tribe; the tribe was broken down into what we now call "extended families" to facilitate such larger-scale integrations. The demands of the industrial revolution have further broken down those extended families into nuclear families, to sustain a more frictionless capitalism, by making the workforce more fungible / relocatable / interchangeable. We're at the final stage, where the nuclear family is being further broken up into a sea of consumerist-workdrone individuals. The abolishing of gender roles started about a century ago, and the abolishing of genders started relatively recently.
You're right. Not really sure why I wrote that, maybe I was thinking about a HG on some kind of frontier or somewhere with very low population density, or just for rhetorical effect. Like I lay out in my unnecessarily long 2 part essay on Malthusianism, I'm also a lot closer to Hobbes than Roseau (Roseau's still my boy though).
It's entertaining to read all this Stalinist contortion in an attempt to demonstrate a false equivalence between free and unfree societies.
You are writing on Substack. It is a website that is banned in China, and has been for years. If the Chinese had access, then they could learn that they are actually just as free as Americans or South Koreans. They would just need to be a little more free, in order to read that here.
(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself — because of the way you then are.
(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.
(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.
(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.
(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).
(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(i) Interested in free action, we’re particularly interested in actions performed for reasons (as opposed to reflex actions or mindlessly habitual actions).
(ii) When one acts for a reason, what one does is a function of how one is, mentally speaking. (It’s also a function of one’s height, one’s strength, one’s place and time, and so on, but it’s the mental factors that are crucial when moral responsibility is in question.)
(iii) So if one is going to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one acts, one must be ultimately responsible for how one is, mentally speaking — at least in certain respects.
(iv) But to be ultimately responsible for how one is, in any mental respect, one must have brought it about that one is the way one is, in that respect. And it’s not merely that one must have caused oneself to be the way one is, in that respect. One must also have consciously and explicitly chosen to be the way one is, in that respect, and one must also have succeeded in bringing it about that one is that way.
(v) But one can’t really be said to choose, in a conscious, reasoned, fashion, to be the way one is in any respect at all, unless one already exists, mentally speaking, already equipped with some principles of choice, “P1′′ — preferences, values, ideals — in the light of which one chooses how to be.
(vi) But then to be ultimately responsible, on account of having chosen to be the way one is, in certain mental respects, one must be ultimately responsible for one’s having the principles of choice P1 in the light of which one chose how to be.
(vii) But for this to be so one must have chosen P1, in a reasoned, conscious, intentional fashion.
(viii) But for this to be so one must already have had some principles of choice P2, in the light of which one chose P1.
(ix) And so on. Here we are setting out on a regress that we cannot stop. Ultimate responsibility for how one is is impossible, because it requires the actual completion of an infinite series of choices of principles of choice.
in addition, why assume that anything is not in its right place and things should or could be in some other way than they are at any given time? no one was ever free.
You are describing people living in a society - any functioning society - as not free. The two alternatives free from state property enforcement you describe are a hunter-gatherer and a pirate ship. To present them in this light you have to really stretch the truth for both. You have to imagine the hunter-gatherer to be living outside of a tribe and far from other tribes. In reality, very few people lived like that; the dictate of a small parochial group balancing on the edge of survival is something that even North Koreans would dread. The level of tribe violence was also pretty high with warfare mortality estimated at over 25% for some societies. Pirate ships might have lacked state property enforcements, but the whole point of a pirate ship was to be an instrument of violent property re-distribution. For those in-group on a pirate ship, property rights were enforced much more brutally than they would have been administered by most states at the time, with death penalty imposed for many infingements. I think a death penalty is a far greater assault on liberty than a short arrest. So it looks like the only free alternative society you see is an imaginary lone hunter-gatherer on a virgin continent. The problem with this is that a single person is not a society at all and the moment you remember how hunter-gatherers actually lived, you realise that they were not free at all. If you are unhappy with capitalist or socialist ways to organise a society, it would help to describe an alternative. If there is no alternative, it means that even if "civilisation is inherently unfree", a society lacking a civilisation is much more unfree.
That's a fair assessment. I do think some hypothetical forms of anarchist society or HG bands at low population density are examples of society with high levels of freedom. Mostly I'd just like the socialism-capitalism debate to move away from arguing over freedom, since neither side can offer much of it it in a meaningful way.
I live in a big city, but in my youth I did some extreme mountaineering with a small group of friends. I think the risks and challenges on these trips were roughly in-line with risks normally taken by hunter-gatherers; we had a better supply of food and medicines but a less hospitable environment. The next nearest humans were sometimes 5 days of walk away from us, but I can assure you that one is much freer from other people in a big city than on these trips. If you try to be free from people on whom you daily depend for your survival, you are not going to survive for very long. If we tried to raise some children in that kind of environment, it would have required even greater curbs on individual freedoms. So I am afraid you have no non-hypothetical examples at all.
What about HGs in an environment where survival is easy enough that they're not interdependent on each other?
You might also be interested in the Semai people as an example of a primitive but settled society with a surprising degree of freedom.
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/the-semai/
Ultimately I don't think historical examples are that crucial for my main argument though.
I am afraid you overestimate how easy it is to survive in any kind wilderness and underestimate the degree of interdependence in small groups. A sprained ankle is a small nuisance in a city, a major group-wide challenge and a days-long infringement on everyone's freedoms in a small isolated group, and a good chance of death for a lone hunter-gatherer or mountaineer.
Love the post overall. But some bits "just ain't so". Particularly
> In his own time, [an ancient hunter-gatherer] was free to go where he pleased and sustain himself on anything he could find. In the modern world, he finds himself surrounded by things he could use, but isn’t allowed to.
That's not how it worked, ever. There would very seldom be an ancient H-G who ambles around anywhere he wants by himself.
There were tribes. Tribes held their territories. You could do most anything within your territory, yes, but the tribes had rules about how the collected resources were used by the tribes-members. Those H-Gs that ambled around by themselves would be the few who got exiled from their tribe for not abiding by the tribe's rules. And so they'd amble alone for a while until some bear or wolf-pack ate them.
Even for the non-exiled tribesman, "go where he pleased" bit stopped at the boundary of that tribe's territory. Those boundaries could shift, and did, but some skull-bashing and gut-piercing exchanges had to occur first. (people *understood* the meaning of "territory" ever since back when they were fishes that flopped out to the seashore). And "free usage of obtained resources" was well regulated by the tribe's internal rules and pecking order. Anything else is a Rousseauian fantasy.
Civilization has introduced regulated rules of private property as the necessary facilitation for building up kingdoms or empires that are quite larger than a tribe; the tribe was broken down into what we now call "extended families" to facilitate such larger-scale integrations. The demands of the industrial revolution have further broken down those extended families into nuclear families, to sustain a more frictionless capitalism, by making the workforce more fungible / relocatable / interchangeable. We're at the final stage, where the nuclear family is being further broken up into a sea of consumerist-workdrone individuals. The abolishing of gender roles started about a century ago, and the abolishing of genders started relatively recently.
You're right. Not really sure why I wrote that, maybe I was thinking about a HG on some kind of frontier or somewhere with very low population density, or just for rhetorical effect. Like I lay out in my unnecessarily long 2 part essay on Malthusianism, I'm also a lot closer to Hobbes than Roseau (Roseau's still my boy though).
It's entertaining to read all this Stalinist contortion in an attempt to demonstrate a false equivalence between free and unfree societies.
You are writing on Substack. It is a website that is banned in China, and has been for years. If the Chinese had access, then they could learn that they are actually just as free as Americans or South Koreans. They would just need to be a little more free, in order to read that here.
(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself — because of the way you then are.
(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.
(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.
(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.
(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.
(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).
(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.
(i) Interested in free action, we’re particularly interested in actions performed for reasons (as opposed to reflex actions or mindlessly habitual actions).
(ii) When one acts for a reason, what one does is a function of how one is, mentally speaking. (It’s also a function of one’s height, one’s strength, one’s place and time, and so on, but it’s the mental factors that are crucial when moral responsibility is in question.)
(iii) So if one is going to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one acts, one must be ultimately responsible for how one is, mentally speaking — at least in certain respects.
(iv) But to be ultimately responsible for how one is, in any mental respect, one must have brought it about that one is the way one is, in that respect. And it’s not merely that one must have caused oneself to be the way one is, in that respect. One must also have consciously and explicitly chosen to be the way one is, in that respect, and one must also have succeeded in bringing it about that one is that way.
(v) But one can’t really be said to choose, in a conscious, reasoned, fashion, to be the way one is in any respect at all, unless one already exists, mentally speaking, already equipped with some principles of choice, “P1′′ — preferences, values, ideals — in the light of which one chooses how to be.
(vi) But then to be ultimately responsible, on account of having chosen to be the way one is, in certain mental respects, one must be ultimately responsible for one’s having the principles of choice P1 in the light of which one chose how to be.
(vii) But for this to be so one must have chosen P1, in a reasoned, conscious, intentional fashion.
(viii) But for this to be so one must already have had some principles of choice P2, in the light of which one chose P1.
(ix) And so on. Here we are setting out on a regress that we cannot stop. Ultimate responsibility for how one is is impossible, because it requires the actual completion of an infinite series of choices of principles of choice.
in addition, why assume that anything is not in its right place and things should or could be in some other way than they are at any given time? no one was ever free.