Being Non-Transactional.

Beyond "What's in it for me?"

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Once upon a time, I used to teach a Master’s course in several countries, generally to mid-career government and international officials of various kinds. One of the areas we covered was the Law (and social rules in general) and why we obey them, if indeed we do.

Whilst I dislike the kind of thought experiments that you find in books on ethics (like the Trolley problem) because I find them too artificial, I did often use scenarios from real life as test cases. The results were often interesting, and a way into the question of why, in practical terms, we do actually obey laws and rules most of the time, and do what we think is ethically right.

The first example is a very simple one. Driving at midnight on Sunday through a quiet village with no traffic in sight, you come across a red light. Bearing in mind that you can see for hundreds of metres in each direction, and there is no traffic in sight, do you stop? Slightly to my surprise, the answer was overwhelmingly “yes” on all the occasions I asked the question. The next question, of course, was “why?”and here the reasons were much more varied: indeed, some students replied that there was no real question or debate, and of course they would stop. As far as I could see, from the limited samples I had, there were no particular cultural differences in the answers.

Some said that it was prudent to stop: a cyclist you had not seen might be approaching, there was the faint chance that a camera had been installed, if any kind of incident or accident were to happen, you could not be held accountable if the car was stationary. Others said that it was right to stop. After all, if you disobeyed such a command in those circumstances, wouldn’t you quite soon move to judgements about whether to stop in more ambiguous circumstances? And wouldn’t you eventually wind up jumping red lights whenever you thought it was safe to do so? And finally, argued some, if everybody adopted the same arguments, wouldn’t the result be chaos?

The second example finds you obeying the red light, and then driving several minutes further, until you round a bend and see, at the last moment, someone dressed in dark clothing staggering around in the middle of the road. Stamping on the brakes, you manage to reduce the speed of the collision, but the person is thrown over the car. Bringing the car to a halt, you see that nobody is around. Across the road is a pub or a bar, which the victim had presumably been patronising to excess earlier in the evening. There are no witnesses of any kind. You get out of the car and walk back to find that the victim is obviously dead, and there is a strong smell of alcohol. You are not at fault, you were driving within the speed limit and you could not possibly have seen the victim. You were perfectly sober. So far as you can see, there are no collision marks on your car. What do you do? There is nothing you can do for the victim now. If you drive on, someone else will find the body and report an accident. If you report the accident, you can expect the rest of the night to be taken up with enquiries, depending on the society you may be treated as a suspected criminal, or at least obliged to go through long interrogations, and all for nothing.

The vast majority of students thought that the right thing to do was to report the accident, even if the personal consequences risked being unpleasant. Again, there were lots of reasons for this, and it’s worth pointing out first that the students were mostly in their thirties and forties, working in the public sector, so they had an image of themselves as responsible citizens to live up to. A group of rugby-playing undergraduates might, I suppose, have answered differently. But the main argument was that there was a social and ethical obligation—irrespective of the detail of the law in any given country— to report what had happened, and to accept the consequences of what you had done, even if the incident was completely accidental. A few said that the law in their country required them to act in this way, others that there might, in practice, be witnesses, so it would be prudent not to tempt fate, and so forth. But I don’t recall anyone arguing that you should just drive away.

That’s strange, because it is the most logical and coherent option. After all, it’s not your fault, but the other person’s, nothing can bring that person back to life, and reporting the incident can only involve you in useless and pointless sacrifice of your time, with consequences which could be undeservedly negative for you. And of course there are important potential nuances. Maybe you actually had been drinking, maybe the victim was still alive though badly hurt, maybe you were exceeding the speed limit. In each case, the argument for just driving on is stronger, at least in the sense that your own personal interest is safeguarded thereby.

Yet a lot of us feel uneasy with this type of argument. Even after fifty years of incessant Liberal individualist propaganda, most of us would feel instinctively unhappy about the ethics of driving on. After all, universalised, it means that none of us can ultimately count on any other person to behave altruistuically if they are inconvenienced thereby, which means in turn that society cannot actually function. Liberalism has never been able to find an answer to this problem. The nearest it has managed is the introduction of ever more rules and laws, and ever more draconian penalties, in order to intimidate and frighten people into following certain kinds of behaviour. (Needless to say, the more wealthy and powerful you are, the less you will be intimidated, and the worse you will probably behave.)

I wrote some time ago about corruption, and the problem Liberal society has with it. Liberalism has no answer to the question of why you, individually, should be honest. Certainly, there is benefit to you in living in a generally honest society, but there is no objective reason why you should be honest and law-abiding just because everybody else is. Indeed, there are powerful game-theory reasons why you should be the only dishonest person in a society. (The problem, of course, is that there is no way in which you can be sure that you are the only dishonest person.) So Liberal societies tie themselves in knots with laws, rules and oversight mechanisms, because they have no rational argument for why you should, individually, be honest, and why you should obey the rules and social customs and behave properly, when it is in your personal economic interest not to do so.

This problem is insoluble, and indeed it is now clear, after decades of thrashing around, that constructing an honest society according to Liberal principles is actually impossible. So much the worse for Liberal principles, then. So where does that leave us?

Well, it leaves us to reflect on why honest societies actually exist, and why more generally people obey common unwritten rules when it is not in their short-term personal interest to do so. This problem applies at all levels: why clear up the rubbish in front of your property, why tell your neighbour about a potential security problem with their house, why help an obviously lost person to find their way home, why report what looks like a crime that doesn’t affect you, why stop and see if you can help when you see an accident … and a hundred other things?

The simple answer is that if we all help each other, society works better. That’s true, but it doesn’t cater for the individual, selfish argument that if the rest of you act virtuously and I don’t, I get a free ride. The answer to that is that people follow norms and customs, and that we do what we do primarily out of habit, as John Dewey noted, rather than through individual reflection on what is good for us. Yet such habits themselves arise from certain interpretations of the world and of right conduct, that change over time, and are very difficult to inculcate artificially. Totalitarian states from that of Plato to that of the Kim Dynasty in Korea can propose, or even try to enforce, certain behavioural and ideological norms, but all the evidence is that in real life they last only as long as the repressive apparatus is still in force. Moreover, it seems unfortunately to be the case that altruistic behaviour is much more difficult to promote and enforce than selfish behaviour: it was observed that in Nazi concentration camps, everyday altruism and collective solidarity broke down very quickly, and was replaced by the ruthless struggle for survival that the camp authorities actually wanted. Jorge Semprún, imprisoned in Auschwitz for his resistance activities, noted that only his fellow Communists seemed to have retained any collective ethic or moral structure at all, and because of this they effectively ran the daily affairs of the camp.

There is, of course, a massive literature on ethics, dating back at least to Aristotle, and much of it is fascinating. It’s well summarised in Alasdair MacIntyre’s book, or at a more popular level by Michael Sandel, although his book is intended for Harvard undergraduates and so takes its examples from US popular culture. But from Aristotle onwards this literature has been concerned to instruct the ethical seeker who wants to know “the right thing to do.” Aristotle’s argument that happiness as an end could only be achieved by virtuous conduct seemingly failed to convince some people even in his own day, and attempts to lecture uninterested people into goodness by promising happiness as a result have been generally unsuccessful ever since.

Surprisingly, to some at least, this also applies to organised religion. Neither the hortatory sermons of preachers, nor their threats of eternal punishment, seem to have had much effect on the lives of ordinary people in the ages of religious domination, except where they reflected norms that were widely shared. Some historians naively thought that it was enough to read sermons by popular preachers to know what ordinary people thought. Thus, sermons condemning popular drunkenness or dishonest behaviour by merchants were thought to be reflective of general opinion at the time, and by extension of the actual behaviour of drunks and merchants. But a little reflection showed that, if the actual behaviour of drunks and merchants had in fact been irreproachable, there would have been no need for such sermons—often very violent in tone—in the first place. On the other hand, if you’ve ever lived in, or visited, a small community where everybody knows everybody, you know that there are powerful, purely social pressures towards commercial honesty. (Likewise, for what it’s worth, we can track the popularity of various types of heresy by the number and vehemence of the sermons and publications directed against them.)

This gives us a clue to at least part of the origins of collective social ethics: a subject that isn’t studied nearly as much as it should be. As I always tell students, the Greek word ethos originally just meant “behaviour,” and ethics is really just the study of how people behave and why. It has acquired a secondary meaning of “behaving well,” that has actually created confusion, or rather, perhaps, “well” in this context just means conduct that “I” personally approve of. Historically, after all, there were societies where the elderly and infirm would go into the hills to die when they became a burden to their society, or where sickly children were left out to perish. There were societies permanently on the edge of starvation where the penalty for hoarding was death. Even today, in the suburbs of many European cities, the “virtuous” woman does not leave the house unless accompanied by a male relative, and the “virtuous” male would not enter a lift if there were an unaccompanied woman already present.

In fact, self-policing of established habits, whether for good or bad purposes, is probably the basis of most collective ethics, even when (as in the above examples) they can be traced back to texts that nobody involved has probably ever read. This can be irritating for philosophers and social reformers, but it also suggests that the artificial creation of new norms of behaviour, no matter how strongly they are pushed and how widely they are accepted by elites, is extremely difficult, and may be impossible, unless they are anchored in some coherent relationship with the lives of ordinary people. Attempts to proactively alter, and promote self-policing of, the norms concerning relations between the sexes in many western countries, for example, have disrupted much, but actually produced little of lasting value, and much unhappiness.

Take, by way of contrast, roles traditionally attributed to men and women in times of crisis and war. From the earliest times, men were expected to fight, and if necessary die, whilst women encouraged them to do so. (The “women as peacemakers” meme was commercially successful for a while, but as the example of Frau von der Leyen shows, nature generally reverts to type.) Men were biologically more dispensable than women, and indeed, once they had fathered the replacement number of surviving children, their future was of less importance anyway.

In certain societies, this modulated into a chivalric belief in the duty of men to protect the weak: essentially women and children. Although the reality of life in the European Middle Ages was often as distant from the chivalric literature of the era as the reality of life today is from Hollywood, that literature did provide, like Hollywood, role models and aspirational images which deeply influenced popular culture over centuries. One of the principal reasons why men enlisted and fought in both the World Wars of the twentieth century was precisely the sense of bearing personal responsibility for protecting their wives and families, when much of war was hand-to-hand combat. Indeed, the Wehrmacht fought as long as it did partly to enable civilians to flee westwards to escape the advancing Russians, from whom the Germans, understandably, feared the worst after what they themselves had done. (It’s striking that such a discourse would have no resonance today, in our changed society, for all that unscrupulous politicians seeking “remilitarisation” will probably try to employ it.)

Much the same logic applied in more mundane areas. Take, for example, the so-called “Birkenhead rule.” In the nineteenth century, considerations of space and weight meant that it was impossible for ships to carry lifeboats for every person on board passenger ships. The Birkenhead was a military transport that sank in 1852, and the women and children on board were all placed in the one cutter the ship carried and launched to safety, whilst all of the soldiers and crew died. This rule (colloquially “women and children first”) was widely, if unevenly, applied in the nineteenth century and after, most notably in the case of the Titanic disaster of 1912, where 75% of the women were saved, but only 20% of the men.

Such a rule seems far more distant from us socially today than it does temporally. It’s hard to conceive of anything like it being implemented, or even understood, in today’s world of gender equality, except as some kind of patriarchal ideological fossil. But what would replace it? How would you even decide how to replace it, in the absence of any generally-agreed ethical system for weighing the relative importance of lives? A genuinely useful thought experiment is to imagine that you are the captain of an aeroplane which has had to ditch in the open ocean, with life rafts for only half the crew and passengers. Who would you choose to save? On what basis could you even decide? And if you could decide, could you enforce your decision? The answer to the last question is, almost certainly not: can you imagine groups of males today stoically awaiting certain death while the women were saved? By what possible generally-accepted ethical standard could you require that of them? In fact, it’s likely that the normal rules of a Liberal society would apply, and the strongest and most ruthless would survive.

And this is the point, I think: the absence today of any common ethical standard, even a bad one. It’s obviously possible to imagine societies where men take priority over women and children because they are “warriors.” The Nazis unashamedly placed the interests of the Aryan population absolutely above all others, the Soviet Communist Party sought to create “New People” with a new code of ethics, various societies throughout history have ruthlessly suppressed the individual good in favour of some self-generated collective ideology. But there is no comparable general system of ethics today, whether natural or imposed.

This is not to say that there aren’t ethical systems offered for emulation in this kind of case, as in others, in modern western Liberal societies. But they are competing systems, seldom worked out with any rigour, and often employed by the same people for different purposes depending on their transient political objectives. Returning to my aeroplane example, it is supposed to be the case these days that women are inherently as strong and capable as men, and so can do anything men can do. Likewise, the role of women as mothers is being increasingly de-emphasised socially, and undermined by modern scientific developments, The traditional arguments for preferential protection of women thus fall away. On the other hand, there are also powerful lobbies in many countries today arguing that preferential attention needs to be given to violence against women, and calls for bloody “intervention” around the world seldom fail to highlight the alleged suffering of women: in Afghanistan, for example. It all depends on your political objective, and in our society ethical consistency is no longer possible.

The result is a kind of moral anarchy, or if you prefer a market economy in ethics, where decisions are taken according to who can impose an ethical vision of the world on others that suits their immediate political objectives. As in the cases mentioned above, no consensus or compromise is in fact possible, only incessant violent struggle, with ethical discourses, however crude and undeveloped, used as weapons. And this illustrates a much wider problem: that without a common ethical underpinning, good, bad or indifferent, it is difficult to take important ethical decisions at a large scale, and impossible to enforce them. More than that, it becomes impossible even to argue about what needs to be done except against a background of common ethical assumptions. In the past, for example, arguments for an ethical duty for the relief of the poor or the abolition of slavery could be couched in understood terms drawn from Christian theology, and even opponents would have to recognise the ethical framework in which they were made. The medieval Church burned heretics because it believed that belief in heretical ideas condemned souls to everlasting damnation, and so even the most terrible deterrent measures were ultimately justified. (The theological debates in Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which some readers are tempted to skip, illustrate very well how a society with a completely closed set of ethical norms seeks to deal with such issues.)

More modern ideologies have argued for communal effort and sacrifice to “build a better future,” with more or less conviction. It is clear, for example, that the massive effort made by ordinary people in the Soviet Union in the Second World War owed relatively little to fear, as was believed in the Cold War, but much more to patriotism and belief in the possibility of a better future. Indeed, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in many other countries, low-level unpaid Communist cadres, often volunteers, acted as a kind of secular clergy. Forty years ago, for example, a French citizen in difficulty with the local authorities or the revenue service would go to see a local PCF official, often a teacher or bureaucrat, to try to get things sorted out. The most extreme example of ethical commitment (possibly entirely fictional, but indicative nonetheless) is that of Rubashov, the Old Bolshevik hero of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, who eventually agrees to confess to crimes he has not committed, in order to provide the Soviet population with figures to fear and hate, and strengthen the rule of the Party. One day, he is promised, he will be exonerated and his sacrifice acknowledged.

Obviously, Liberalism has gone beyond this. No-one is going to die to preserve the economic independence of others. In fact, nobody gives a damn about anyone else and their interests: why should they? What’s in it for me? I see this as very bad news for our society, whose leaders and whose official propagandists are no longer capable of coherently explaining and justifying the need for collective action, and are obsessed with trying to motivate the individual, usually by fear.

I’ll take the Covid epidemic as an example. Now, understand that I am not going to address questions of the epidemic’s origins, possible conspiracy theories, potential dangers of vaccines etc, about which I can claim no special knowledge. (So please don’t try to raise such questions in comments.) I am concerned here with something I do know about, which is politics, and how governments respond to crises. The basic requirement in such circumstances is for a coherent discourse that a government can use, and that the population can understand and accept. In the case of Covid, governments faced a situation where the only effective response was a collective altruistic one, but where they no longer knew how to ask for such a thing, and had indeed belittled and dismissed altruistic behaviour for decades. (I wonder sometimes whether some evil spirit from another dimension didn’t organise Covid as a kind of experiment: a stress test to see which societies and political systems would be capable of responding properly, and comparing results. And of course the results make extremely sobering reading: why did Vietnam do so much better than the United States, for example?)

The way in which western governments responded to the crisis followed a well-known and historically established pattern: briefly, denial, panic and forgetting. At first sight this seems odd, since Covid was a public health problem of a type that was well understood, and that governments had been obliged to cope with for generations. After all, when I was a child we had epidemics of diseases like measles, and in the absence of vaccines several million people, mostly children, died around the world each year of that disease alone. So children were kept at home until they were symptom-free, as I and my siblings were: happily we all survived.

The key, of course, is the word “public,” and Covid is just one example of how public health issues have been privatised into personal health “choices,” most of which involve paying for things. Thus, governments allow highly-processed food and drinks to be freely sold, which encourage diseases and obesity, and then seek to culpabilise those who consume such things (often from the poorer parts of society) with injunctions to eat fruit and vegetables and exercise more, a well as feeding them medicines to tackle the medical problems that result. Now it’s all well and good that people are encouraged to look after the health and do everything they can to avoid illness and disease. But it would be even better if we had societies where governments acted to prevent health problems arising in the first place, as far as possible.

We did once. There’s probably no greater benefit to mankind than the introduction of clean drinking water and proper sewage disposal, especially in towns and cities. If you’ve ever spent an extended period in a country without these things, then you don’t need convincing. But societies were different then, and it was accepted that pubic health was a duty of government, and that ultimately such investments were for the good of all. A Liberal society today, of course, would not build water and sewerage systems: people would be encouraged to “take responsibility” for their health by buying bottled water, or more probably boiling it, installing personal sanitation systems and dosing themselves with antibiotics. Meanwhile, the poor would die of infectious diseases and shit in the streets as they do in many parts of the world today.

Effectively, what happened in 2020 was the privatisation and medicalisation of a public health problem, where by definition “personal risk assessments” are impossible to make, and anyway pointless because there was very little individuals could do to protect themselves apart from staying away from likely infection, and many poorer people could not do that, or indeed afford to. But governments, blinded by decades of hyper-individualist Liberal propaganda, had lost the ability to even talk about collective responses and the need for a society to protect itself. At some level, perhaps, they realised that action had to be taken to stop people infecting others with a disease which you transmit just by breathing, but they had no way of expressing the idea. Even to say “please wear a mask to avoid infecting others, and please stay at home if you think you are infected, and think of other people” would have been more than most people could have understood, let alone accepted. After all, would have been the reply, why should I inconvenience myself just to avoid threatening the lives of others? Anyway, I’ve just had a negative Covid test, so what’s in it for me? So the only other recourse governments had was to fear.

The other feature of a Liberal society, of course, is that not just individuals, but also groups, are engaged in a constant and pitiless struggle for power and money: thus the contortions that civil rights and human rights groups managed to work themselves into. Not even a Professor of Human Rights Law was actually going to say that infecting others was a human right, but many such individuals and groups, in complaining incessantly about limitations on My Freedom to do What the Hell I Like, came preciously close to it, and of course felt obliged to downplay the seriousness of the situation to make their position seem more reasonable, and safeguard their business model.

That’s enough about Covid, but I think the example illustrates a wider problem for the future: it is going to be impossible for societies built for decades now on an ethic of selfishness and the primacy of My Wants to understand, let alone accept, the need for any kind of behaviour which requires them to do things that don’t bring them instant personal benefit, and may indeed cause them inconvenience. Governments will feel nervous about even suggesting that people behave altruistically and will fall back on gimmicks (which is all, really that vaccines were) and pointless political gestures.

This does not bode well, for example, for the current frothing about “remilitarisation.” Of course, politicians do have a vague recollection of the discourses of the past. They can remember “we’re all in this together,” they can remember “we must defend our way of life,” they may even vaguely recall “everybody will have to make sacrifices.” But even if they manage to say such things with a straight face, who will be able to listen to them without giggling? When did the behaviour of the political class and its media and intellectual parasites ever give us reason to believe that they cared anything about the community and the nation as a whole, or that they would recognise altruism if it kneed them in the groin?

After all, let’s assume you’re studying computer science at university, and military recruiters come to talk to you. They need technical officers desperately, the pay is good and there’s job security. But you also give up a lot of freedom, you could be sent anywhere in the world, and your chances are dying in the next war are pretty high. No thank you, I’ll get a better paying job in the private sector. What counter-arguments are there? Nation? Families? Community? Collective interest? Defending the weak and vulnerable? Sorry, no good, that’s the past, try somebody else.

And the same is true at every level. Does any sane person believe that western publics will pay higher taxes, tolerate the construction of polluting factories, allow military aircraft to fly low over their houses, play host to military garrisons, let alone encourage their sons and daughters to put on a uniform, in response to vague generalities about defence of the nation from vague threats? Indeed, western politicians seem to understand this after a fashion: rather than appealing to altruistic sentiments or concepts of national solidarity, they are once again simply trying to frighten people. It’s not going to be very effective, but it’s all they can do.

It’s been remarked a number of times that the turbo-liberalism of the last forty years has destroyed any capability for western nations to physically rearm and expand their defence forces. But I wonder if if at least as much damage has not been inflicted by the destruction of the very discourse of solidarity and altruism without which any amount of money, and even any amount of technology, is essentially pointless. Forty years of institutionalised selfishness, of contempt for those who work for the public good, of the deliberate promotion of an ethic of What’s in it for Me, can’t be abandoned overnight in a stench of burning rubber and a 180-degree turn. The system no longer even knows how to ask for things like dedication and sacrifice with a straight face.

All that governments have left are transactional measures: essentially the threats and promises by which Liberalism has always tried to control society. Do this and we’ll give you some money, do that and you will be punished. It’s a clumsy system, and one which encourages a transactional approach in return: what’s in it for me then? But as I’ve often pointed out, a Liberal society only functions at all because of the support of huge numbers of people who work in professions where they serve the public good, and where the rewards, such as they are, come mainly from knowing that they are contributing something to society. Not only is Liberalism unable to cope with such an ethic, it has been busy doing everything to undermine its very existence, either not knowing or not caring that it is thus sawing off the very branch on which it squats.

What George Orwell called the “common decency” of ordinary people, the recognition, with which this essay began, of the need to adopt a collectivist ethic and obey common unwritten rules, does seem to be surviving still, if much battered. I would trust in the essential decency of the first person I randomly encountered in the street much more than some random member of the political class and its parasites. To this extent, not all hope is lost in the face of all the sorts of nasty possibilities, from innovative epidemics to natural disasters to wars, that may be waiting impatiently to make their entrances. But what is clear is that governments now have no idea how to harness the essential decency of ordinary people to work together, and not even a language to talk about doing so. .

There are some things than in theory can be rebuilt. At least technically the machinery of government, the machinery of factories, the infrastructures of nations, could be rebuilt with enough time, effort and ingenuity. But rebuilding what you could describe as the “software” or the “operating system” of a society is a very different proposition, and unlike software, rewriting from scratch isn’t going to be possible. Then, the system itself will fail, and there will be nothing left to protect.