[lbo-talk] The "Law" of Unintended Consequences WAS Re: Contradiction

Robert Wrubel bobwrubel at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 2 10:21:21 PST 2007


I'd say that the fact that the right uses the idea of unintended consequences to stigmatize progressive social action is a good reason to embrace it. Unintended consequences, or unexpected consequences, is the heart of the revolutionary vision. We don't want the same old, the predictable, the manageable -- we want the new, the unleashed, the unpredictable. Why? Because we trust human nature. We're not afraid of it, we dont want to manage it.

Liberation is by definition asking for unintended consequences.

BobW

--- bitch at pulpculture.org wrote:


> At 10:24 AM 12/2/2007, John Adams wrote:
> >On Dec 2, 2007, at 9:09 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> >
> > > Doug Henwood wrote:
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> It's deployed as a weapon against people on the
> left who want to
> > >> improve the lot of humanity and only "end up
> hurting those whom they
> > >> aim to help."
> > >
> > > So?
> >
> >I'd go further than Doug and say it's a bedrock
> piece of faith on the
> >libertarian right that, due to the "law" of
> unintended consequences,
> >you cannot do anything to help people without
> hurting them more. It's
> >the flip side of faith in the invisible hand, and
> one of the most
> >pernicious ideas I've ever had to argue against.
> >
> > John A
>
> I'd say that the difference is not the law of
> unintended consequences
> because this same concept is marshalled in left
> analysis such as marx's
> claim that the unintended consequence of the pursuit
> of wealth by capital
> is that class society creates its own demise.
>
> Marx saw all revolutionary change emanating from the
> contradictions within
> its own system.
>
> Not quite but almost Conservative uses of the same
> observable phenom tend
> to be more like Max Weber's response. The unintended
> consequence of the
> protestant ethic was to help usher in a capitalist
> regime and the
> unintended consequence of that spirit of capitalism
> was to entrap us in an
> iron cage where we, without anticipating it, become
> ""Specialist without
> spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity
> imagines that it has
> attained a level of humanity never before achieved"
>
> Max Weber just got depressed because he didn't know
> what to do. He couldn't
> embrace the do nothing attitude of a Kristol, but he
> ended up arguing that
> change would eventually come about in the form of
> charismatic leadership.
> (This is where Carrol tends to sound like Weber: in
> his embrace of the
> concept punctuated equilibrium, which Stephen Jay
> Gould ended up rejecting
> in his last book anyway.
>
> Weber never went completely conservative on this
> issue. The difference
> between a conservative and leftist analysis is each
> has a different
> conception of human being. Kristol's argument is
> that the unintended
> consequences result from Liberals' mistaken concept
> of human nature.
> Liberals tend to think humans aren't naturally lazy,
> greedy, selfish, and
> prone to inertia. That they arenaturally good and
> are only not good by
> virtue of unnatural forces -- like a deformed
> society or 'bad' culture.
> (The best and often funniest essay I can think of is
> by some economics
> dude, name I've forgotten, which was in a book
> called something like
> "Capitalism, Democracy and Ralph's Pretty Good
> Grocery". His last name
> began with M. Muller or something. Anyway...)
>
> Conservatives are hard-headed realists, damn it!
> People are greedy,
> selfish, lazy, and prone to inertia and any system
> of government that
> creates policy as if that weren't so is doomed to
> fail. (Weber may have
> seemed conservative, but he never really believed
> people were lazy asses at
> heart.)
>
> So, it's not some irrevocable law since if it were,
> it would apply to
> everything, including the neocon program -- neocons
> hope to direct the
> course of human events too.Kristol thinks that the
> real problem is that
> Liberals work against human nature, and thus the
> unanticipated
> consequences. If you create social policy to work
> with human nature, no
> more unintended results.
>
> Kristol does not against Adam Smith's work on
> unintended consequences,
> right? He does not rail against that! That is
> because Adam Smith's program
> worked *with* human nature -- at least in Kristol's
> mind. (If it --
> uninteded consequences -- was anyone's idea to begin
> with, it was the
> Scottish Enlightenment, yes? IIRC, there is an
> extended chapter on this
> concept in the book, _The Idea of Civil Society_. In
> fact, the birth of
> sociology was all about the rise of inquiry into
> this puzzle: how is it
> that, when humans act X way on an individual basis,
> it turns out that their
> individual level actions do not necessarily make for
> a society that you'd
> expect? Why the unintended consequences?)
>
> Anyway, Smith argued that, in spite of the fear at
> the time, that everyone
> pursuing their own self interest would result in a
> world of chaos and
> despair. the unintended effect of everyone pursuing
> their own ends was the
> good society directed, magically, by the invisible
> hand. In trying to get
> my own beer, bread, and beef, and serve my own
> desires and needs, I end up
> helping everyone else get their own beer, bread, and
> beef. The idea was so
> endemic, unintended consequences of governmental
> ("social engineering") at
> the time that it formed the basis of the U.S. first
> government, the
> government that governs best, governs least. I mean,
> for christ sake, it is
> the united STATES of america, not the united STATE
> of america. and then you
> had the federalist papers whereupon, repeatedly, we
> find arguments about
> how to "social engineer" a society by creating, not
> tendencies toward
> solidarity, but fostering "factionalism". The idea
> was that unintended
> consequence of factionalism would be -- voila! -- a
> more cohesive society.
> Foster factionalism -- contention, differences,
> adversarial politics, etc.
> etc. -- and you magically get the "good society" and
> the boat rises with
> the tide and all that happy horse shit -- the
> unintended consequence of
> greed, selfishness, etc.
>
> Our entire legal system is founded on that very
> principle: foster an
> adversarial politics (not a politics of consensus),
> foster an adversarial
> system where "truth" emerges from the struggle of
> idea against idea, where
> we learn who is guilty or not guilty (there is no
> such thing as "innocent")
> by virtue of a struggle of adversarial opponents --
> since truth can't be
> determined by any consensus building politics.
>
> And all of it, Smith too, was a product of Scottish
> Enlightenment -- which
> got its shiggles and gits from kind of freaking out
> about how it would be
> possible to have a society that didn't fall apart if
> it weren't directed by
> god > king > knight > peasant. If there was nothing
> holding it together,
> what then? Why wasn't it just going to disintegrate
> into chaos? If value
> wasn't dictated by something firm and solid, then
> what? Omigod! Omigod!
> Omigod! And so when some of these guys started
> studying it all, they
> examined "unintended consequences".
>
> Anyway, if Kristol really took it as a law -- and
> I'd argue that Marx's own
> thought *does* take it as an operative law of social
> change for we'd pretty
> much never relieve ourselves of economic oppression
> and strive toward
> freedom without this "law" -- then Kristol and his
> followers wouldn't
> imagine that it would be possible for the US to be a
> force
=== message truncated ===



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