Sacchamandering
Monday, September 23rd, 2024
Does rape count as genuine sex? Was Othello’s smothering of Desdemona truly an act of love?
If you are inclined to answer No to questions like these, you are probably guilty of the conceptual crime of sacchamandering. You think sex and love should be unambiguously good things, but rape and murder are bad things. So you set about adjusting the boundaries of the classes of things the concepts apply to — that is, you alter the concepts themselves — to get a more agreeable result.
With your altered concepts now in place, what ought to be the case now appears indeed to actually be the case. Now you can make simple, unqualified, essentialist claims like “all genuine sex is good”, “all true love is good”, and so on.
It is remarkable that we humans do have some leeway to adjust our own concepts like this, even if we initially learnt them from other language users. The “meanings” of words in language aren’t as precise as philosophical tradition has taken them to be, and anyway, even if the given categories of our native tongue were very clear-cut, we needn’t rigidly adhere to them. We can re-classify whales as fish, if we like, or bees as birds. But doing so has a price: we may end up with disfigured categories that lack integrity, analogous to gerrymandered constituencies. They may contain items that aren’t similar enough to each other, or are similar to each other in ways that aren’t relevant (e.g. as the colour of white swans is a poor criterion of swanhood). This creates pragmatic tensions in, and further disruption to, our larger belief system.
I use the word ‘sacchamandering’ for the practice of altering the boundaries of a concept of a good/desirable thing so we can make sweeping generalisations or exaggerated declarations of praise or condemnation. Pretty much the same thing is the mirror-image of sacchamandering: altering the conceptual boundaries of something bad — such as violence — to include other sorts of bad things. Artificially altering the boundaries of the concept of violence allows us to stretch linguistic usage and say things like “misogynistic speech is exceedingly bad, because it is a form of violence”. Do you see how it works? — Now we can condemn misogynistic speech with a petulant stamp of the foot! This sort of thing is not really different from the more familiar sacchamandering, because there is a figure-ground relationship between bad and good things whose boundaries are altered: annexing some new kind of bad act to the category we call “violence” amounts to the same thing as excluding it from the category of good acts we call “non-violence”.
All such pleasantly agreeable results are achieved by means of artificial sweetening. Although the supposed truths we can utter with newly-sculpted concepts may appear simple and universal, we have disfigured the concepts themselves to achieve it. The superficial simplicity of the sentences we can newly utter disguises the complexity and artificiality of the reference of the words they contain. The reference of these words is no longer shaped by the way the world actually is, but by the way we would like it to be — shaped not by the reality the words purport to describe, but by our own moral commitments.
The concepts of sex and love are actually relatively simple: sex is typical reproductive activity, even if actual reproduction is not intended or even possible. Love is pair-bonding between monogamous animals, even if the bond is not successful. If we allow our moral commitments to re-shape transparent facts of life about sex and love — or “gender”, for that matter — we pollute our biological sciences with saccharine.
I deplore it. Just as democracy is corrupted when bent politicians re-draw constituency borders in artificial, self-serving ways, philosophy is corrupted when “sophisticated” types re-draw conceptual boundaries in artificial ways that promote their moral or political agenda.
One of the simplest concepts in politics and philosophy is that of freedom. According to the simplest concept of freedom, to be free is to be able to get what you want, because others do not prevent you from getting what you want. It could hardly be simpler. It’s a good thing that it’s as simple as that, because the concept of freedom is similar to, and easily confused with, the concept of power. If freedom is like the absence of prison bars outside your body, power is like the presence of muscles inside your body. With power comes freedom — because with strong enough muscles you can bend weak enough prison bars — but there is much more to power than freedom. Power always involves the ability to force others to do what you want them to do, rather than letting them do what they want to do themselves. In other words, having power entails encroaching upon the freedom of others. Having mere freedom need not entail encroaching upon the freedom of others.
Freedom is a good thing for the free person, but when it does encroach upon the freedom of others, it’s a bad thing for them. “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows”: this is bad for the minnows, obviously, but let us honestly admit that it is good for the pike. There are many who want to say that it isn’t even good for the pike, because freedom must be considered an unalloyed good. Many people who think about and comment on politics are gripped by an urge to sacchamander the concept of freedom so as to make freedom per se a good. In doing so, they disfigure the concept and corrupt the political discourse in which it occurs.
It’s not uncommon for philosophers with essentialist leanings to treat highly contextual aspects of human interaction as entities with their own immutable properties, which can supposedly be characterised in isolation from the context in which they arise. From this perspective, freedom can look like an unalloyed good. The hope of protecting its status as such a good is often a motive for sacchamandering, ruling out apparent freedoms that are harmful, and ruling in apparent non-freedoms that are beneficial. Sacchamanderers might call the former “mere licence”, the latter “self-discipline”…
If we insist that freedom must be an unalloyed good as above, we are obliged to depart from our simplest, “form-only” concept of freedom as being able to do what we want, and add “content” with the proviso: as long as we want the right sort of thing. The “right sort of thing” might be as straightforward as not encroaching on the freedom of others, but in reality it is more often a shared goal of communal empowerment, such as “national self-determination” or “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Once we cut our concepts’ moorings to the real world loose and set them adrift amid the currents of moral and political agendas, they are liable to end up anywhere. To give up the simple-and-clear-but-ambivalent in favour of the complex-and-murky-but-agreeable is to embrace mysticism and arbitrariness. If our time and place happens to be aflame with nationalist fervour, our “positive” concept of freedom will be impregnated with the goals of nationalism. If it happens to be aflame with communist revolutionary fervour, or national socialist fervour, or whatever, our concept of freedom will contain the corresponding current communal craze. Very often, such crazes are paternalistic: in other words, they are aimed at forcing people to do things “for their own good” such as giving up smoking, or reducing consumption of food or alcohol. If they would do such things if left to their own devices, forcing them not to is clearly an exercise of power.
Some defenders of the positive concept of freedom seem to be aware of its spongelike ability to absorb the current trend, and hence its vulnerability to infection with historical arbitrariness and the yearning for power. So they try to cast it in a simpler terms: positive freedom, they tell us, is “freedom to”, a human need that goes beyond the simplistic (mean-spirited, capitalistic) “freedom from”.
This way of putting things tends to ring a bell, because it seems to echo the distinction mentioned earlier between freedom and power. It’s true that all free people do need some power. But they need not have any more power than is required by the demand for freedom, expressed in terms of the simplest, “negative”, form-only concept of freedom.
JS Mill remarked that “All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people.” If we demand that everyone has at least a modicum of freedom, understood in the simplest negative sense, then we demand that some restraints be imposed on others. It makes little difference whether these restraints are enforced via legal powers of the state, such as policing or taxation, or via personal measures such as carrying a gun or a rape alarm. To be free of interference by others is to have some control over them, which is to wield some power. This is emphatically not to say that a free person needs to have anything more than freedom understood in its simplest “negative” sense: it is merely to acknowledge that in order for a person to be free, other people have to be restrained.
Beyond appealing to the everyday fact that to be free entails having some power over others, the distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to” is an empty verbal one. Every claim that can be made about freedom using the word ‘to’ can be re-phrased using the word ‘from’ instead, and vice versa. For example, pedestrians are free “to” cross the road at zebra crossings. In other words, pedestrians are free “from” being run over at zebra crossings. Conversely, drivers are not free “to” drive through zebra crossings when pedestrians are present. In other words, drivers are not free “from” being obliged to stop at zebra crossings. Or again, Afghan women are not free “to” show their hair in public. In other words, Afghan women are not free “from” the Taliban’s prohibition of public hair. And so on.
Decent politics requires an honest admission that social goods like freedom are ambivalent. Only then can decent politics go about its complicated and delicate business of balancing claims of freedom between individuals, always making compromises. These compromises generally involve choosing the lesser of many evils. Such choices are dangerous, but they are least dangerous when the people making them use the clearest and simplest concepts available.