Chapter 5:
The “love” model
 Here is the “love” model; a way of thinking about ethical agreements. The model changes the usual assumptions of self-interest that lie behind negotiation and compromise, enabling an almost unlimited incorporation of interests. The “love model” is an alternative description of the “Golden Rule”, and we can use these to understand the ethics of our basic social arrangements, or “contracts”, and also to see how, for free people, an educational contract would have to be one of the most fundamental contracts of all |
“Respect for persons” falls within social contract tradition. “All persons are to be respected equally” wherever and whenever people join together, collaborate, cooperate, create or fulfill mutual dependencies, exercise care for each other, look to each other for support or are supportive of each other, and even where, over common resources or circumstances, their interests enter into competition. Whatever rules of the game are devised, this is the rule that rules the rules. It is the principle or set of principles that establishes the ethical terms under which the rules must be devised or revised.
The contract tradition has a long history, and the shadow of a delusion hangs over it; the fantasy of historical contracts of some sort. This idea that has dominated the long history of social contract thinking, is that at some time in the historical past people actually did get together and parlay and reach agreement on the rules, conventions and traditions of social life by which we live.
A very strong incentive for believing in historical contracts was to explain and justify our culture, including the things that seem, “on the surface”, to be wrong or unfair. Why do those people have the power and the privilege? Why do we have to obey the king (and what makes him a legitimate king anyway?) Our ancestors agreed to it, including the ancestors of those of us who now wonder if it might not be so fair after all. Our ancestors were wise, we revere them. They must have known what they were doing, had their reasons (what could they have been thinking?). The idea of an original contract works so well when our ancestry matters to us, and when we put great emphasis and trust on the weight of tradition.
The “real” contracts of this kind, if they could have been made, would have to be prehistorical, because no records of them exist. They are prior to law, because they set up the possibility of law. They are prior to property, because they set up the conventions of property. They are prior to political authority because they set up political authority. So far back as we can remember or have records, conventions of property, communal authority and the dispensing of justice have always existed.
The historical idea always founders on the fact that in order to get together and reach agreements, people needed to have language. Indeed, they had to have had minds, and the only way that we can really understand minds is in the presence of culture. The contracts would have to be prior to language and minds, because they set up language and minds.
People already had to have arrived at some sorts of agreement over language in order even to discuss reaching agreements at all. So they could never have lived alone in the forest like Orang-utans, and one day wandered together into a clearing and started discussing how to create property. All we can say is that our species has always been social and cultural. There never could have been a primary and beginning social or constitutional convention.
What makes the social contract tradition viable, however, is not the historical possibility of contracts, but their virtual possibility. None of our social forms, rules, conventions, traditions or practices are immutable. One thing that we can say of all of the vast variability across culture and time is that any of them could have been different.
This means that any of them could be moved out into the spotlight of question, of doubt, of choice and decision, no matter how firmly we have taken them to be the bedrock of our lives, how thoughtlessly we have assumed them, or how confident we have been in their authority. We can put any of them on the block of “respect”. We might even say that the social contract is a living contract, like a living document. So long as there has been agreement over anything there has been the possibility that the agreement could be re-examined in order to see if it is fair. Does this cultural or conventional agreement satisfy the requirements of respect?
It is important to understand how fundamental this can be; to realize that it can go to the agreements of language itself, and to notice our own recent experience of this. As the civil rights movements evolved in the 1960s, considerable attention moved to the ways in which common and conventional language denigrated groups that were not receiving equal respect. Racial language and racial slurs became very obvious, and today they make us cringe, or provoke outrage. Writing was sexist, and assumed maleness. Forms of address (mr, mrs or miss) signaled the marital status of women, but not of men. Many of these things have been re-negotiated. There was a language watershed, and reading books prior to this period reveals linguistic practices that are different from our own now.
At the same time, our re-negotiation requires that we acknowledge some of the issues of intelligibility on which our language depends, and which means that we cannot just revise everything at the first sign that something is going wrong. We saw, in the previous chapter, that popular corruption of the word “choice” does not mean that we could eliminate the concept of choice altogether without huge portions of our lives falling into senselessness.
Academia has been riddled with similar absurdities; over “individual”, “truth”, “freedom”, and “fact”, for instance. Popular and corrupt forms of these words arising from bankrupt theoretical or ideological positions cannot be grounds for the elimination of the core concerns of the concepts themselves without intolerable loss. Such a discovery shows us, nevertheless, that we can indeed entertain the possibilities of revision, even of conventions so well-established. The virtual contract, we might say, even makes philosophy possible.
To the extent that we can, however, bring the meaning of a word, or a linguistic practice from its taken-for-granted acceptance in our language into the glare of investigation under the principle of respect, and then re-negotiate the agreements about its rules of use, or abolish it altogether, shows us the power of considering our entire cultures and their conventions in terms of virtual contracts or agreements. We can therefore look to the rules, conventions and practices across the entire span of our more formal institutions. We can look to all of our institutions, formal and informal.
The respectful “contract”
In my first year at the University of Illinois, I took a graduate course on ethics conducted by Professor B.J. Diggs. In this course he opened up the social contract work of John Rawls for me, but before he did so he presented a simple formulation of the social contract. It consisted of two principles. To the best of my recollection (forty years later) they went like this:
1. Arrangements must be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements.
2. Those who benefit from the arrangement must do their part.
At the time, the first of these took my breath away, because of what I realized that it would involve, since I came to Illinois with the problem of indoctrination very much on my mind.
The idea that reasonableness must be understood from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements should evoke the discussion, from the previous chapter, of the unique ways in which “reasonableness” is played out when it is understood in terms of each one of us reasoning to our own good. We can, indeed each be more or less reasonable, but reasonableness will also differ according to the personal histories out of which they have developed. Thus the fairness of the arrangement, the respect that is built into it, will depend upon deferring to each of the parties and achieving their consent on their own terms based, often enough, on different, self-referencing considerations.
But the consent of each party must be free if the agreement is to be equally respectful, and this throws up an additional huge wall of things to worry about; real, practical things. It means, of course, that consent must not be coerced, or forced, or manipulated through love or fear or dependency. It also means that it must not be the product of indoctrination.
We must not enter into arrangements with the freedom of our consent compromised in such ways, but nor must the other parties, and the onus is as much on us as it is on them to ensure that the consent of each of us is free. If theirs is compromised, then the ways in which it is compromised will frequently mean that they will not admit it, or even be aware of it, which suggests that we need to be proactive about the consent of others, as well as ourselves. Respect requires of us that we not take advantage of them.
It might not be easy to do much about this, though, unless we know the other person well. And . . . all arrangements? On any given day that might be an awful lot. Do we discuss it with the bus driver, the doorman, the waitress, the delivery person? If we go back to consider the coercive and debilitating nature of conditional self-esteem, and the companion effect, or bad management practices and the prospect of unemployment when there are mouths to feed, we are likely to have issues of free consent all around us. Any sort of exploration of indoctrination will have shown it to be everywhere, and people whom we meet who deny its effects on themselves are could well be in denial about that as well.
On a day-to-day level we have to assume that such standard, legal, conventional and contractual arrangements meet the conditions despite our doubts; which probably means, despite the reality. When people seem to be willing to go beyond standard expectations or outside them, there is usually at least room to ask. The more familiar we are with them and the less conventional the pending arrangement, the more we can target our questions and check the consequences. The more profound the commitment, or the more potentially dire the outcome if things go wrong, the more free we should feel to explore, and the more inclined we should be to do so.
We should however, have serious doubts about the quality of the reasonableness of all of those points of view with which we must deal on a daily basis. To fail to do so would surely be to fail to draw the only conclusion that we can draw from quite elementary knowledge we should all have of the extent of disrespect in our societies.
There is, for instance the sheer ubiquity of toxic and badly managed organisations and institutions that will put their interests ahead either of the interests of those they employ or those with whom they deal. Then there is the absence of any real educational conditions in our growing up, or across our lives that could have refined respect and encouraged us to demand it for each other. Finally, there is the extraordinary scale of the indoctrination that fills the gap left by the absence of education, much of it so blatant in the spin, public relations and marketing efforts that are made to put a congenial face on unworthy agendas and motives.
As we noted in previous chapters, where reasonableness is concerned in the case of almost all adults, we must respect what we find. But if we are to take these conditions of respectful contracts seriously, as I think we must, then we must do so largely through the kind of commitment that we make to their general possibility – commitments to the ways in which education is secured in the general culture, indoctrination minimised, and awareness cultivated in all. The degree to which we can trust the integrity of the day-to-day arrangements we enter into is the degree to which we can have confidence that these conditions exist.
The “love” model VS the “compromise” model: let’s make a deal!
One way of illustrating how this contractual concern for each other works in the development of our arrangements together is by contrasting a more conventional understanding of how we often see ourselves as reaching agreements – which I will call the “compromise” model – with the respectful approach, which I will identify as the “love” model.
The “Compromise” model
Conventionally we think of reaching agreements by negotiation, in which, in the course of discussion, each party compromises its interests as it must, but as little as possible until a deal can be struck upon which all are able to agree. The idea is about bargaining positions, bargaining chips and maintaining as much advantage as possible throughout the whole process. This is more or less the standard position in politics. The politician represents a certain group interest, and her job is to come out of the negotiation with the best deal for those interests that she possibly can. Of course the whole idea of a “deal” makes this the standard expectation of business as well. Our goal is always what is best for our shareholders, and our bottom line. Nations, too, go into negotiation measured simply by their ability to enable the best for their own national interests. It is sometimes thought of as “rational self-interest”.
This model is fundamentally competitive. We seek cooperation through the agreement, but we firstly seek to ensure that the agreement is the best that we can get for ourselves. In the conventional democracies of our day, failure in this regard is not considered good for electoral success. It is a model that readily entertains the idea of winners and losers, although it is not uncongenial if all leave the negotiating table happy, which can happen if all the parties think they got the best deal that they could hope for.
This is not a respectful model, because it allows for the possibility of all kinds of considerations of advantage – power, coercion, threat or knowledge – to sway what would be reasonable from the points of view of all who are parties to the arrangements. The person or group that is considered to be in the best bargaining position tends to dominate over those who aren’t. None of us are really concerned at all for what the other parties might really want or desire, except as a form of intelligence that might be useful in the negotiation. It is a model in which the interests of each are isolated from the interests of each other, though that does not mean that their interests might not happily converge on occasion.
The “Love” model
I call it the love model because the most vivid illustration of the 
respectful contract that I can think of can be found in what we might typically understand in a mother’s love for her child. The loving mother does not work out that relationship in terms of a compromise between her interests and the interests of the child, because the best interests of the child are incorporated into her own. The child is a part of her own interests. To think of the outcome of “winners” and “losers” would be to make a mistake.
There are not two competing interests that must be negotiated here, but a single interest that may have tensions in it that need to be reconciled, but that reconciliation is not be understood as potentially competitive. It would make little sense to say, for instance, that the mother’s interests could prevail in the reconciliation. The child’s interests are her interests too. If the interests of the child lost out, then to that extent the loss would be a loss to her own interests.
There is here, a combined interest. It is not quite what we commonly think of as a common interest, because that tends to convey what is held in common, with what is uniquely individual being left out completely or the differences somehow made to cancel each other out. The common interest must incorporate the detail of what is in the interests of each.
We might be tempted to think of this resolution in terms of sacrifice, but that won’t quite do either. The child is needy and dependent, and as the caregiving mother, the needs of the child must be met; and because of this we tend to think of this in terms of the sacrifices that she makes. But this is surely just to fall back on the idea of compromise and competition, because mothers, commonly enough, might not think of it as a sacrifice, but take it on board as a fulfilment of their own interests to the extent that they have made a commitment to the role of motherhood, rather than having felt themselves forced, unwillingly into it.
Still, if we think of it all as giving up everything for the sake of the child, then we have still got it wrong. There are limits to what the mother owes to the child from within their common interest, and that a dependent child must be taken to appreciate, at least in a virtual contract; a contract that the child is too immature to enter into literally, and that the mother must maintain on its behalf.
At the limits – of survival – it is intelligible and common when a mother gives her life to save her child. Under less marginal conditions we, and she, recognise that she, too, has a life, and she is owed that within the relationship. It is not just that she is less able to satisfy the needs of the child by being exhausted, or by being so engrossed in motherhood that her mind, social life, career, health and fitness and needs for re-creation may be left to rot. It is because within her own self-respect these, as well as the needs of the child, demand attention too. At times she will have to prioritize and make choices among conflicting demands and possibilities. There is no oddity in these internal conflicts about our good. We have them even if we do not have children.
Inevitably, if fortune favours, the child will mature, become independent, and leave, taking charge of its own life. While the child is dependent, the mother will have needs relevant to this time of the child’s dependency, but she also has a different future ahead of her, once the child become independent. There is her future self to respect as well. In that sense there is more than just the two of them involved. There are two continuing series of persons – a small community.
We sometimes see how this inner contract of the love model has gone wrong, in the quarrels and manipulations that can occur between mothers, on the one hand, and their older offspring on the other. “After all that I have done/sacrificed for you!” “I didn’t ask you to do it!”
The love model, in relationships generally, involve an incorporation of the interests of all parties into the interests of each participant. The compromise model involves a single interest on the part of each, plus the knowledge, skills and strategies to advance that interest, some of which will involve the knowledge of the interests of other parties, but separate from the self-interest; held instead as a form of intelligence that is necessary to enable an effective contest in service of that interest.
It is interesting to remember this role of intelligence in the compromise model, because one of the first concerns that I think people will be likely to raise about the love model will be about the difficulty of truly understanding the interests and reasoning of the other parties. That is an issue that has already emerged over the idea that arrangements should be reasonable from the points of view or all who are parties to the arrangements.
But effective negotiation and contest on the compromise model already depends upon intelligence about the interests of the other parties, and their bargaining position. There is, of course, a surplus of strategies here; raw power, coercion, manipulation, but this surplus is also surplus to the possibilities of the negotiation having a fair or just outcome.
The “love” model is much more demanding of our human understanding, but that is because we are aware of the ethical price that we pay for a lack of such understanding. We can only do the best that we can, and that can be no worse than the compromise model is capable of achieving. When our policy decisions affect unknown people at the other end of the country, then our policy-making is in danger of getting things wrong either way. This is, of course, merely a spur to a different sort of discourse for the love model, and a different sort of investigation, so that we may do things better, and such investigations may have to take a larger place in the process.
It is also important to remember that we only need to be aware of those interests that are relevant to the agreement. When it comes to creating the conditions of an educational or just society, or good management practices throughout all our institutions, or proper democratic arrangements, the interests of people at the other end of the country will be the same as those close to us, since their relevant interests will simply be those they have in virtue of being intrinsically worthwhile human beings who have a duty to themselves to achieve their own good. We don’t need to know what qualities they seek in a partner, or whether they want to devote their lives to Olympic athleticism, their families, or covering the walls of their house with seashells.
When we use the love model in personal relationships, each of the parties will be endeavouring to incorporate the interests of the other into their own interests, and they will be as diligent in the service of those interests as they are in their own. The interests incorporated will be of different kinds, of course, since we understand our own life-plans differently than we understand the plans of others, and as we work things out together a large part of what each of us does will entail exploring the plans, the aspirations, the outlook on life that the other person holds. We will want to get that as right as we can.
There will likely be a good deal of questioning, testing, checking, reflecting back, done under carefully nurtured conditions of trust. Interestingly, one of the most powerful and fruitful resources we can have for the intelligent development of our own plans of life is such vulnerable cross-checking; such attempts at transparency with a sensitive other who is equally concerned at doing it well.
In the years when I attempted to explain the two models to my undergraduate classes, I once had an older woman – in her sixties – ask if she could sit in on them. I encouraged such things at the time, because I found it to be enriching to the classroom experience for everyone.
At the end of my explanation, I suggested to the class that if their partner operated on the compromise model rather than the love model, they should consider picking another partner. When I finished, this lady stood up, saying “I hope you young people are listening carefully to this! I have just realized that I have spent thirty years in a marriage in which my husband and I operated on the compromise model, and I now realize and grieve for the loss we have both suffered for our lives and our relationship through doing so!”
The love model is interesting, not only because of the estrangement among people that is revealed in the compromise model through the contrast, but also in terms of the expansiveness in the interests of the person that it can be seen to represent. It takes us back once again to the principle of growth for the sake of further growth.
Though there are severe limits on the number of people whose interests we can understand at all well in their uniqueness, there is no limit, in principle, to the number of people whose interests can be incorporated into one’s own, and no loss to the self, so long as self-respect enables the equality of persons to be maintained. It is, I think, the clue to a concern for the whole community; for the society at large, for a commitment to the good society, to justice, and to the vital importance of education everywhere. It is the answer to those who would think that any such focus on the self must be a recipe for atomistic individualism, and to those who would indoctrinate into various sorts of “commitment to society”. Self-respect, properly understood, is not at all to be confused with what is commonly thought of as “rational self-interest”.
The previous two chapters have been considerations of the principle of “respect for persons”, that all persons should be respected equally; a principle that has two aspects – self-respect and respect for others. Very quickly in each chapter respect-for-the-other has however, been set aside in favour of extended discussions of self-respect, understood in terms of the duty of each of us to endeavour to achieve good lives for ourselves.
This partial emphasis was crucial because it is the most poorly understood, and without it an education grounded in respect will not even be a possibility. It is the good of each of us as valuable human beings that needs to be the ultimate test of the whole enterprise. But the enterprise is a social enterprise, and self-respect is hardly possible unless it comes to terms with our social nature and relationships. Our very minds, in terms of which any idea of the good must be conceived, are dependent on the social for their formation. The love model enables us to bring these two aspects together.
The possibility of correcting our fundamental educational mistakes depends upon the power that this moral point of view develops in our minds, and although I have devised the “love” model in the hope that it might make the moral relationships more vivid, its relative novelty may distract from how deeply rooted and ancient are the judgments I am attempting to convey with it. For that reason, it may be helpful to look at another construction of it; the “Golden Rule”.
The “Golden Rule” as respect for persons
If we were trying to find one ethical principle that most cultures share in common, we are likely to turn to the Golden Rule, because something that appears to be at least a rough expression of it seems to have emerged in so many diverse communities. The Golden Rule is usually stated as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. It is, perhaps, worth noting however, that a significant number of my students appeared not to have heard of it. They roughly knew how to read and write, though, and they could probably do fractions, so that’s all right then.
As I understand it, this positive version of the Golden Rule is mostly limited to Christian tradition. It is more common across cultures to have it stated in the negative: “don’t do unto others what you would not have them do unto you”. The negative version comes across somewhat passively. Just don’t hurt other people by your actions. The positive version seems to express something proactive. It appears to advance a clearer advocacy for stepping up and helping others in need and supporting their good, because that is what you would want them to do for you. It is not limited to the negative impact that your choices might have for others.
I am not clear whether the verbal difference speaks to any deeper moral difference. People from cultures expressing the negative version appear no less willing or likely to step up, and we could always apply another negative. We could say “do not neglect the suffering of others, as you would not have them neglect yours”.
But here, we will work with the positive version. The Golden Rule is a principle of reciprocity and equality, dependent on equal intrinsic worth. The advantage of the positive version is that it is proactive. We should have an active interest in the good of others (which is, indeed, consistent with valuing them as human beings equally with ourselves), and not just have a care not to harm them in the event that our interests bump into theirs. The idea that we can “do whatever we like so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else” usually depends upon a simplistic underestimate of the extent to which we are mutually dependent and bound up together. We need the proactive version, because we are so heavily implicated in a social world.
The proactive possibilities of the positive version mean that it is more vividly capable of motivating, as well as regulating, our social arrangements and institutions; the setting up of public and political institutions and entering into all kinds of agreements and conventions for our mutual benefit. Before we see how that works to justify an educational concern across all our arrangements, however, we should spend a moment dissolving a misinterpretation of how the rule is to be applied. It does not mean that I should do unto you exactly as I would like you to do unto me. It needs to be interpreted with the relativity of human interests and desires carefully in mind.
That is, it would be a mistake to use it to impose on you the satisfaction of my peculiar wants and desires, or the avoidance of my peculiar fears. If I like chocolate cake, and you don’t, but you do like carrot cake, then it is no interpretation of the Golden Rule that, because I would want you to give me chocolate cake, not carrot cake, it is chocolate cake, rather than carrot cake that you get from me.
As in the “love” model, the application of the Golden Rule involves personal insight and understanding to appreciate the relevant aspects of the life-plans of the other participants when applying it. It requires an avoidance of paternalistic judgments in which we presume to know the best interests of others, regardless of their views. It involves a willingness to engage in enquiry into their life plans to avoid the risks of deciding for them out of ignorance. And it involves the same concern that psychological manipulation, coercion, or the presence of indoctrination does not subvert or by-pass their right to determine their own good for themselves. These italics are important.
This awareness of the role of the relativity of interests across people is interesting. As seems to happen in almost every expression of principle having to do with the reconciliation of interests, or respect for our right to develop and live our own lives, there always appears to be this gaping conceptual hole in our thinking. We readily acknowledge that people have a fundamental right to develop and live their own life in their own way, but the “hole” that is lying there, darkly, is that there is not even the smallest of question-mark hanging over this fundamental right as to the opportunity that the person had to conceive of, or develop, interests or aversions that are freely and truly their own.
This crucial question about the foundation of our interests – the ethics of the conditions under which they are formed – is rendered invisible in the equation, even though we know the many ways in which such things can be manipulated or even defeated through the control of, or indifference to, the conditions of learning; just as effectively as if we did so by applying or threatening physical force. That is why I put the piece above in italics; the piece about our need to be alert to the psychological ways in which the freedom of a person’s life-plan, of their conception of their good, can be bypassed or compromised. Again and again in the conventions of our thought, the key educational question lies buried.
Yet that is a key consideration that must ever lie behind the application of the Golden Rule, for it goes to the question of whether or not we are treating each other as of equal value, and what that value is – how much it matters. I certainly would not want you to pursue an agreement with me that took advantage of my naivety, or my lack of knowledge and understanding, or my susceptibility to manipulation to the extent that, with reasonable effort on your part, you could have foreseen it, when I may not. I would have you look out for my interests here as well as your own, as I for yours as well as for mine. I vow, in my agreements with you, to exercise that equal diligence on your behalf.
In our social lives we are parties to the whole raft of institutional agreements, conventions, rules and laws that bind together the community in which we are self-conscious and have our identities. The ethical integrity of all of these agreements lies in how freely they are made.
Social contracts and the Golden Rule
I am going to suggest that underneath all ethical contracts – all Golden Rule contracts – is the primary contract that would make them free. This is the educational social contract.
At the beginning of this chapter, when I introduced the idea of social contracts, I noted that the history of the idea of these contracts is heavily laden by hypotheses of historical contracts – that there must have been some point at which people got together and agreed to our fundamental social arrangements.
I pointed out that such an idea was not merely in the realm of myth – we have no record of any such original contracts – but also in the realm of fantasy. Contracting would have required language, and people could not have come together and made the agreements of language without first having had language. It is better, I suggested, to think of the contracts as virtual.
Wherever we find a convention or practice, we can put it up for inspection as something that should require our free consent, and see whether that agreement would respect the people who would be parties to it, or affected by it. Since the convention or practice is cultural, we know that, in its detail at least, it could always have been different, which means that we are likely to be in a position to re-negotiate it, if that seems necessary.
But I am suggesting that the “educational contract” has some priority over all other contracts, and I think that the best way of illustrating this is to play around with the idea of an historical set of conventions – as a thought experiment.
If we imagine that there was some way of beginning at the beginning, and making the first contracts, we can imagine that they would be about language, and this allows us to ask ourselves what language we might look to first. Language evolves to meet our purposes, and so we can make a good guess at the most critical areas of language that we have would come to initially. As the language we need for the essentials of sheer, raw survival is achieved, we can no doubt build others upon this initial foundation.
Philosophers sometimes suggest that there are two great philosophical questions: what is the universe such that we may know it, and what is the Good Life, such that we can live it? But I think that “what is the universe such that we may know it” would probably have evolved out of the question “what is the universe such that we may survive in it?”
And the initial language would be an expression of that in very immediate, very practical and day-to-day concerns, together with the roots of enquiring – questioning and doubting. We can see the acute purposes of survival in this, even if, eventually, it might lead to specialized languages of high technology, and enable questions about the universe that might arise just from intrinsic curiosity.
Quickly on the heels of acute survivability, however, in the minimal spaces that this effectiveness would create, would, very likely come the linguistic conventions of good living. Again, these would, in the first instance, be very practical and day-today. Comfort, pleasure, relationship, social organisation. The ideas of “first” and “second” are probably misleading: they no doubt evolved together, but with survival having priority. We also need to recognize the likelihood of a connection between survival and perceptions of well-being – “hope”, and “faith”, for instance.
It is interesting that the speculations that thinkers mostly engaged in about those hypothetical, historical contracts didn’t so much deal with these things, except for some very specialized questions about social organisation, and with quite advanced agendas. My reading is that they began with two questions. How were the rules of property very likely settled upon, and who gets to be in charge? These questions were even asked as if, at the constitutional convention, people were already living in communities of some sort.
These were the kinds of hypothetical contracts that preoccupied the ruling elites much further down the evolutionary track, when they were trying to justify their possession of property, and to ensure that their accumulated power could be legitimated in some form of authority. They wanted to clarify the rules of the game that they had come to play, and that largely benefited them.
These same two questions continued to dominate, even as the ruling elites came to be challenged by the rising influence of those beneath them. They continued because these groups began to question property as well as the conventional answers to “who has the right to be in charge?”
The questions also come to seem to be primary, despite being located in layers somewhat above our more primary and primitive questions of social agreement or contract, because by the time that they are being asked, the other initial and primary contracts of language have already evolved and specialised. Sheer survivability has differentiated into crafts and artisanships, and even the military. People are probably living in cities by now, and would entertain the idea of “citizenship”. Good living is roped in with “who is in charge”, and with a specialisation of the priesthood.
But in our contemporary circumstances, though we may be more comfortable with the specialisation and expertise in the area of physical survivability and its technological heirs, the situation is entirely different with that primary area of good living, and those conventional and traditional questions of the hypothetical, historical contract should not be our first ones.
It is not just that we don’t accept the authority of experts on good living, in contrast to the way we surrender to the technocrats who build our cell phones, cars or solar panels. The authority of good living has been put firmly in the hands of each and every one of us. We are obliged to take responsibility, both for the language of good living and for the knowledge that the language was developed to create. There is no priesthood – or to the extent that there is, we are each responsible for conferring authority upon them.
This is because of the way in which the European Enlightenment turned everything on its head where responsibility is concerned. We each are responsible for what we make of our own lives, for our actions, and for our beliefs, to the point that our responsibility is an everyday expectation, and is tested in court. A whole raft of human rights have been established – the freedoms of thought and speech, the freedom of assembly and labour; of religion and conscience. These shift the burden of the good on to each of us, not merely as a right, but as a responsibility, a duty that we owe to our human worth.
This places us in a new relation to those very primary contracts – that purpose of language itself that has to do with good living, and to the knowledge of good living that the language made possible. It displaces the older kinds of questions that were asked of the mythical contracts, becoming prior to them in importance.
This language of good living, and the knowledge it enables, is prior to the resolution of property, because it is the language that has to exist in order for the question of property to emerge. Equally, it is prior to questions of who is in charge, because of the prior question: in charge of what? Me? I come now as a being with rights and a value, and a responsibility for self-determination. Who is in charge is a question that can only be answered, in our world, in the light of that, and with my consent.
Before I can properly enter into an agreement about property, or who should be in charge, or how they should be in charge, or in charge of what, I now need the language, the knowledge and understanding, and the skill to maintain my responsibility and my self-determination, according to my equal value as a person. Lacking this, my participation cannot be free, and any attempt to settle who is in charge, or what powers they have, or what government is, or what it may do, can only be achieved by trading on my ignorance, and opening the process of agreement up to unreasonable coercion and manipulation. My participation in the society, as a free and responsible person, is compromised at source. The only alternative to this would be to create a new and believable ethic that abandons self-determination and personal responsibility. I don’t think we want to do that.
Thus education – true education – is a right prior to other constitutional considerations. Our contemporary acknowledgement of a “right to education” is a mockery of such an education, and not worthy of the name, for it is merely a right to access opportunity in the marketplace of the workforce, and the consumerism that the creation of wealth in capitalist societies require. It is a late addition to human rights, and this is why.
It isn’t even up there with those primary rights of democracies – freedom of thought, speech and conscience, of assembly, of rights over the body, because it cannot and does not speak to those things. Yet true education is an essential pre-requisite to the possibility of those rights and the responsibilities that accompany them.
We might cast this primary contract in Golden Rule terms:
I must stand for and require of my society educational arrangements that enable for others the ability to exercise their duty to themselves to develop a worthwhile life freely and without coercion or manipulation, and to exercise their responsibility as self-determining people, just as I would have them stand for educational arrangements that will enable me to acquire the knowledge, skill and understanding to do the same.
Proper democracy (rather than the sort of thing we call “democracy” today) would be arranged in such a way that political leaders and civil servants would firstly be bound by some such principle, whatever else they were bound by, and there would be processes and mechanisms to hold them accountable to it. Every serious and effective effort that we could make to advance in this direction would be a move towards the minimisation of so many of the ills of “democracy” that we face today, from “fake news”, to the rise of anti-democratic parties, to the destructive physical soiling of our own nest, to social and political apathy and indifference, to many of the social/psychological ills that we now wrestle with so ineffectually.
This is because the population at large would have been able to arrive at a much more sophisticated understanding of their own good, and the harm that could be done to it, and this is the education that should be a basic human right. It would be interesting to see such a right recognized through international institutions, and for there to be international agencies that catalogued and publicised its absence or limitation.
The difficulties of moving in this direction are not practical ones. With commitment, it would become obvious that points of positive action and development abound in every direction.
The root of the practical problem lies in seeing, with sufficient clarity, just what is wrong with our educational taken-for-granted, and the price that we are all paying for that, in terms of our valuing of human beings – ourselves and each other. A new kind of “seeing” that would bring us alive as human beings with the potential to be free.
© R. Graham Oliver, 2018
