On the language of angels - Democratic Underground

struggle4progress

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Tue Oct-03-06 11:33 PM
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On the language of angels

Rationalists typically do not discourse much on the subject of angels. But perhaps there are more uses to such a language than is commonly thought.

The essential point is this: social structures often evolve as if they had intentions. This can be a convenient view, even if one does not believe that social structures actually have intentions. Let us therefore set aside the question "Do social structures really have intentions?" and explore more fully instead the handiness of the metaphor.

Whether we speak of families, companies, religious bodies, clubs, towns, or nations, a social structure is maintained by countless small daily decisions, made by the people who (in aggregate) form the structure. Some of these decisions are conscious -- but many of the decisions are made in an automatic manner by people who are completely unaware that they are making a decision, who feel that they are doing the only right and natural thing under the circumstances, or who believe that they do not really have a choice.

Each of these decisions, individually, may seem as inconsequential as the firing of a single neuron in a brain. In aggregate, however, they can produce a substantial amount of social force and can lead to material evolutions which seem far beyond the power of any individual to change.

For example, in a structure the size of the United States, the natural decisions of millions of people, to prefer the convenience of their automobiles over public transportation, produces huge parking lots, highway exchanges, and urban sprawl; similarly, such decisions produce foreign policies intended to secure oil supplies and television appearances of pundits who favor demonstrative military action in the Middle East. Whether such consequences are "deliberate" or not, they are as predictable, and as organized, as if they were the actions of a conscious entity with certain self-interested motives. In this sense, we might talk of certain events as being guided by the nation's angels or demons.

Marx's achievement was to recognize that the countless individual decisions that make up these social forces involve a number of different interest groups, with potentially conflicting interests, and that the decisions themselves can be conscious or unconscious. The unconscious decisions are conditioned by traditions and societal histories and blind self-interest. But conscious decisions, based on a deliberate effort to see a larger picture, are also possible.

This leads to the idea of "raising consciousness" in social groups -- and the idea of appealing to the "better angels" of human nature. The object is to cut through social conditioning and to present facts in a clear way forcing decent people to look up from their narrow daily concerns to see a larger picture and to make an ethical choice.

Gandhi applied such a method brilliantly. The notion, that a nearly naked unarmed man might take on the British Empire and win, was simply laughable. But in a sense Gandhi appealed to the better angels of the Empire: he forced the English, by thousands, to look up from their cosy tea-trays and to see that the economic advantages they reaped from British control of India was associated with a brutal colonial system. He cut through the social conditioning that allowed the British to think that their association with India was a magnificent example of the modern West bringing goodness and light to the backwards East. Once the self-serving ideological justifications for the colonial system had been demolished, the daily decisions that had masked and perpetuated that system ceased to reproduce themselves with full vigor.

I know of no better way to describe such phenomena, than by using the language of angels.