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
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