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In these discussions, there's always an implicit assumption of certain intentions being the "real" ones. Statements like "police were created to..." first imply
by ewzimm 4y ago
In these discussions, there's always an implicit assumption of certain intentions being the "real" ones. Statements like "police were created to..." first imply that there was a creator whose intentions define the police through incarnations, a kind of "god of police," and, more likely, if it was not a single individual, it is a "pantheon of police" composed of its creators and sustainers. And then we have the image of the state as a composite entity which exerts control over the pantheon without being corporeal itself, maybe as the composite will of a class of people.
To me, this idea of the personification of state power into an all-powerful driving force seems more mythological than the importance of individual decisions being made by those who carry out the work of the state. An individual officer may have a similar belief in the intentions of the state, but their actions are ultimately their own.
It seems ironic that the more we tend to be critical of state power, the more we tend to mythologize it into a kind of personification. You might not fall into this trap, but many do. But why should the intentions of the composite pseudo-entity matter more than the intentions of the real individuals who carry out the work? Isn't each police officer a person who has different goals and ideas about who they are and who they serve? Is this really so insignificant, or is it so overwhelmed by institutional goals that it becomes irellevant? Or could the real people and not their abstractions be the real bedrock of civilization?
- the-printer 4y agoWhat is to make of the overlap between institutional goals and those of individuals? We live in a time where people are developing institutional abstractions as their civil bedrock. How can we reasonably differentiate institutions that are fundamentally man-made from the men who are the means of the institution’s goals?
- ewzimm 4y agoMy answer would be that individual intentions are ultimately the only thing that matters, but they are shaped by cultures which use abstractions to communicate and connect. Social control means learning which abstractions will stick, like finding a catchy tune, but the most memorable ideas aren't always the best. When an internalized abstraction leads to negative consequences, people tend to rebel against it and find another one. The goals of abstract institutions are abstractions of intentions. They exist in both the minds of those who write them down and those who carry them out, and a perfect translation between those two groups will never happen. If we want to get down reality, we have to talk about the intentions of the actual people involved.
- the-printer 4y agoWho decides when the “tune” of an abstraction becomes stale? The people, but which people? And how is it determined that an institution is yielding negative or positive results?
- ewzimm 4y agoEvery individual makes this judgment all the time. When people notice a problem with their ideologies, sometimes they will just ignore the issues, and other times they will decide to rebel. When enough people make that choice not to follow the tune, there's a revolution. That's why power is so precarious. It's hard to get people to dance to the same tune forever.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y agoDo you get upset when people say "evolution does X"? It's the same thing, it doesn't really matter if the process is clean or tumultuous, it's a reasonable heuristic to understand the status quo.
- ewzimm 4y agoI'm not upset in either case, but that's another good example of the problems in attributing personified intelligence to an abstraction. Especially in the early days, people tended to substitute "God" with "evolution" and shoehorn evolutionary processes into areas where they didn't apply because they used to attribute them to God. This still happens! Sometimes, it's just "the universe." This was usually based on the further misunderstanding that evolution represents a progression from lower to higher life forms. For example, Engels was especially influenced by the idea that political processes followed Darwinian principles and that societies inevitably move from lower to higher forms, leading toward perfection in communism. In the U.S.S.R., science fiction assumed that aliens would all be Marxists because it was a fundamental law of the universe. Even in the case of evolution, there are minds with intentions. Our ancestors wanted certain things, and the ones who were able to get them passed on their programming to the next generations.
- nescioquid 4y agoPut another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary. They take place in the mind, and I doubt society or culture could organize itself without some shared imaginary space strewn with personifications and myths. Take that away and society and culture become impossible. Your unease is more warranted for things like evolution, which does not depend on a shared imaginary space.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago>Put another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary. Where did you get that from GP's post? They're simplying saying not to anthropomorphise societal systems.
- williamcotton 4y agoThe term is "reification".
- ewzimm 4y agoPersonification is a special case of reification, but it is the underlying issue. We reify signifiers based on memories.