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GraspingTheNetTalk 6 - 26 Sep 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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I just read the article about "cooking-pot" markets, which happened to comment on my "altruism" critique (last paragraph), so I will go ahead and provide a block quote, followed by a response: | | |
-- BrettJohnson - 26 Sep 2009 | |
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- I'm not attacking; I'm demanding. The demand is for even a fragment of evidence upon which to predicate the extreme, and morally problematic, propositions that human beings are "rational" and therefore "incapable of altruism." Without evidence, presented as undoubted truth, this is mere propaganda. You don't hear that its smug, or consider what its political meaning might be in the larger context of existing human misery, or acknowledge that it requires factual defense in order to be worthy of consideration, or seem conscious of the overwhelming weight of evidence on the other side. You haven't yet taken aboard what the argument is actually about, but you're pretty sure that it's so insubstantial that you can meaningfully contribute to it by bringing to bear the mere propaganda of capitalism, the Ayn Rand nonsense, as though on that basis what we actually have learned about human beings over the last two thousand years or so can be not even disregarded but ignored. If one wanted to be taken seriously by scientists, one couldn't bring a creationist screed to a seminar in evolutionary theory, and then say that the resulting ire of people who actually know something about biology is a reflection of their defensiveness or the weakness of their position. What you're doing now is no different: you are offering pseudo-scientific cant that you have uncritically accepted without evidence as though we should be prepared to accept it too, and you're surprised that I think the propositions are not only ludicrous but outrageous. Okay, start with the evidence that disproves the existence of the unconscious, or demonstrates the absence of unconscious motives in social behavior or individual creativity, or invalidates all of the large literature in the statistical ecology of altruism, or falsifies Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation or shows that Rebecca Solnit has it completely wrong in her A Paradise Made in Hell on the persistent and predictable state of mutual cooperation generated by disaster crises, or disqualifies the received understanding of the social psychology of self-sacrifice in infantry platoons, or any one of the thousand other elements that make up the consilient demonstration that your propositions are pour rire. If you know how to show that Freud is wrong, or H.A.L. Fisher, or Karl Marx, I shouldn't be at all surprised that you don't need to know anything I know about the history of technology, either, before you begin to decide whether it is "desirable" to impose crippling ignorance on billions of people in the interest of "continuing incentives for [technological] advancement." But if you actually have no serious evidence to show on behalf of the twin propositions that human beings always act rationally and that rational action is always (or even almost always) incompatible with altruism, wouldn't a rational actor in your position hasten to reconsider?
- It is also important to understand that your propositions about altruism, however ridiculous, are also irrelevant. If they were true, the Wikipedia wouldn't be the largest reference work in the history of humankind because of altruism, and free software wouldn't be displacing all the proprietary knowledge of computer technology because of altruism, and the textbook industry and journalism done for hire wouldn't be dying because of altruism. But the Wikipedia and free software and book ripping and the blog-o-sphere would be happening all the same, and the legal destruction created by social destabilization would still be happening, and you still wouldn't know what's going to happen next and I still would. In order to go beyond teaching you what will happen next in order to give you the ability to understand why it happens, however, I need to refer to a body of social science accreted over the past 175 years that you are reflexively denying even exists, not because you know something else, but because you have been brainwashed into believing without knowing.
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| META TOPICMOVED | by="EbenMoglen" date="1253993531" from="LawNetSoc.GraspingTheNetTale" to="LawNetSoc.GraspingTheNetTalk" |
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