A comment on my entry about Catholic Church structural reforms said:
I wish there were a structural solution to the problem of child abuse. But the problem has to do with sin and human nature, not with the structure of a human institution. As you note, all human institutions have an incentive to bury scandals.
Every one of us believes we are the captains of our souls, the masters of our fates, autonomous and self-creating, unaffected by political spin, by advertising, by the influence of our peers and parents and authority figures and society, and even the very language that we speak.
I feel all these things myself, all the time. To understand otherwise takes as much effort as trying to grasp 10-dimensional string theory. My mind is Newtonian--I don't know where to tuck all those extra dimensions, and I bet even those who can grasp the mathematics still have to wrestle with the human mind's Newtonian nature.
Yet as someone trained in the social sciences (and having worked in marketing in a previous career), I'm here to say the first step towards true autonomy is recognizing the degree to which each of us is an atom embedded in a social structure.
As Spinoza said, "Freedom consists of arranging your chains as comfortably as possible" or words to that effect.
Note that my commenter alluded to human nature trumping institutional structure. But human nature is social. We lived in small tribes for roughly 100,000 years. Our morality evolved to be constantly socially mediated--especially considering the fact that we had to be both murderous (towards enemy tribes) and tenderly loving (towards our own), and able to switch between those very different states quickly--and never adopt one state when the other is called for.
Years ago I read a powerful book on the Nazi phenomenon titled "They thought they were free." An American journalism professor (also a Jew, unbeknownst to those around him) got a job in a German university after WWII. He got to know a bunch of ordinary citizens who'd been Nazis, and this book is about how they became Nazis--and it's dedicated to them.
That really showed me how good people do bad things. I'm not talking about sociopaths and psychopaths. Just ordinary people with ordinary brains, ordinarily raised.
The infamous Stanford University prisoner-jailer experiment of the 1970s took just such people, and with nothing more than a different social structure, turned them into sadistic jailers and hardened prisoners in 24 hours.
Abu Graibh did the same thing, only for real. Most of the sadistic jailers were ordinary people, not -paths of any sort (though one ringleader probably was abnormal--but the others followed him).
Other social experiments have shown the same thing repeatedly, including a recent one in France disguised as a game show, where participants we led to believe they were administering painful electric shocks to contestants.
All this is only shameful if we cling to our false image of ourselves as totally independent. Yet even the old Aesop fable about the stork and the crows talks about the company we keep.
None of this absolves us of individual responsibility, or of the personal dark nights of the soul we have when we're wrestling with the toughest moral issues.
But it should affect our approach to criminality. If it's all about morality, then the law is about punishment. But if it's about keeping us safe, then the law is also about keeping us safe--in preventing future crimes above all.
And that's why the Catholic Church should change its structure (as per my previous blog entry), and why we need to adopt nonpartisan redistricting and proportional electoral college representation, and why we need to keep after large institutions constantly to keep/make them transparent.
None of this is a substitute for personal morality. It just takes our influence-ability into account, and it tries to tilt the playing field in favor of the sort of behavior we want as a society.
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2 comments:
"Other social experiments have shown the same thing repeatedly, including a recent one in France disguised as a game show, where participants we led to believe they were administering painful electric shocks to contestants." we = were
Scripture explicitly delineates the godly construct of ecclesiastical /familial structure and calibrates disobedience thereto as distinguishable sins. Hence, personal morality relates directly to the organization and submission thereto of institutions we abide in.
The sensibility among some contemporary Christian thinkers considers the encroachment of the enthusiasm for stringent application of Islamic social/group constructs in the West as on account of and in substitution for the current vacuum created by the lackadaisical or economically practical as opposed to moral post-modern 'Christian' approach to the organizations of society. According to some Christian fundamentalists since the concept of personal morality as a purely "individual" matter allegedly dominates liberal 'Christian' thought, and increasingly obliterates Christianity's cultural and hence personal relevance, they have instituted a resurgence of theonomic enthusiasm to retake and remake the culture and its institutional structures and thereby reconstitute the means of personal morality and the cultural domination of Christianity i.e. http://www.hisglory.us/.
Institutional structure, from the theonomic perspective, constitutes the primary basis and expression of personal morality.
I think my secular understanding of social structure and personal morality overlaps a lot with your religious one.
That is, one of our most important individual moral decisions is the company we choose to keep and the organizations we choose to support.
I married a deeply moral person and attend church with her, despite having zero belief in any kind of supernatural agency.
Nevertheless, choosing to spend an hour each week in the company of people and an institution focused on moral considerations helps me examine my self and my behavior each week--encourages me to make the right decisions and assess my own behavior the way I'd most like to.
And choosing to be married to someone who doesn't just avoid being bad but is actively good all the time really helps to spin up my own moral compass.
And in general I lean towards keeping company with pretty decent people--in many cases, people much better than I am--and avoiding the company of those who are irresponsible and/or malicious, whether they're entertaining or not or could help me in some way.
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