Robert Hanna on our Sociable Sociality
= Article. Robert Hanna. Our Sociable Sociality: A Postscript to The Mind-Body Politic. Borderless Philosophy 4 (2021): 57-96
Contextual Quote
"Now helping myself to the empirical and conceptual results of a recent historico-philosophical anti-Hobbesian trilogy—by Rutger Bregman, Larissa MacFarquhar, and Rebecca Solnit3—then I can clearly and distinctly demonstrate that Hobbesians neo-Hobbesians, and also Rousseau-ians are not merely mistaken, but actually dangerously and spectacularly mistaken, not only
- (i) that all human beings are inherently egoistic and mutually antagonistic by nature or neurobiology (Hobbesians or neo-Hobbesians), but also
- (ii) that even if they are not so by nature, then all human beings are still inevitably egoistic and mutually antagonistic by virtue of culture, civilization, and society (Rousseau-ians).
These claims are simply false, given the actual empirical facts on the ground, not only the everyday facts about people’s vividly manifest true human need for sociability."
- Robert Hanna [1]
Summary
Robert Hanna:
"We’ve learned three profoundly important things about ourselves.
First, contrary to various other traditional or contemporary views about humanity, rational human animals like us are by our very nature not only social but also sociable, by virtue of our having true human needs to enter into seven different basic kinds of relationships:
(i) family relationships,
(ii) intimate relationships,
(iii) relationships with close friends,
(iv) relationships with a wider circle of friends and more-or-less-casual but still friendly acquaintances,
(v) relationships involving camaraderie-&-solidarity,
(vi) identitarian relationships, and
(vii) relationships in the social marketplace.
Second, leaving aside pathological cases, four of those basic kinds of social
relationships are internally guided by non-egoistic, non-instrumental, non-identitarian
principles, namely: family, intimacy, close friendship, and camaraderie-&-solidarity.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the true human needs that are satisfied by morally good-&-right relationships within these four basic kinds are fully in line and in broadly Kantian dignitarian synchrony with what can be regarded as the meaning of rational human life itself—the individual and collective pursuit of principled authenticity37—and therefore they’re essentially connected with what makes lives like ours worth living."
Discussion
Robert Hanna:
"Granting that, and now helping myself to the empirical and conceptual results of a recent historico-philosophical anti-Hobbesian trilogy—by Rutger Bregman, Larissa MacFarquhar, and Rebecca Solnit3—then I can clearly and distinctly demonstrate that Hobbesians neo-Hobbesians, and also Rousseau-ians are not merely mistaken, but actually dangerously and spectacularly mistaken, not only
(i) that all human beings are inherently egoistic and mutually antagonistic by nature or neurobiology (Hobbesians or neo-Hobbesians), but also
(ii) that even if they are not so by nature, then all human beings are still inevitably egoistic and mutually antagonistic by virtue of culture, civilization, and society (Rousseau-ians).
These claims are simply false, given the actual empirical facts on the ground, not
only the everyday facts about people’s vividly manifest true human need for sociability
during the 2020-2021 pandemic, but also as displayed and documented by the historicophilosophers of The Anti-Hobbesian Trilogy. As a matter of actual fact, many people not only have in the past but also nowadays really do feel, choose, and act altruistically, some
of them characteristically, and some of them under specific ranges of contextual
conditions, such as disasters, neo-utopian social experiments, progressive political
movements, religions or spirituality, and so-on. Therefore, it cannot possibly be true that
all human beings are either inherently (by nature) or inevitably (by culture) egoistic and
mutually antagonistic. At most, what could be true is that at any time, whether in the past
or currently, many people often feel, choose, and act in egoistic and mutually antagonistic
ways, and also that some people characteristically feel, choose, and act in egoistic and
mutually antagonistic ways. But those are perfectly consistent with the anti-Hobbesian
and anti-Rousseau-ian truth about rational human altruism. So even despite their
widespread currency, the Hobbesian, neo-Hobbesian, and Rousseau-ian theses alike—
not to mention popular cynicism about human nature—are simply scientific and
philosophical dead letters.
On the contrary, given the actual empirical evidence—and this will undoubtedly seem, to many, to be two claims that are either deeply “shocking” or ludicrously “utopian” in the classical millenarian, pejorative sense — not only
(i) are all human persons innately capable of altruism, but also
(ii) the capacity for altruism can be regularly activated and cultivated under specific ranges of contextual conditions."
Human beings are by necessity social animals
Robert Hanna:
"In Meditation XVII of his “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” John Donne poetically and correctly described a fundamental aspect of the human condition:
- No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Donne 1624, Meditation XVII).
In other words, human beings are, necessarily, social beings. They both influence, and are influenced by, other people as well as social institutions more generally. But as C. Wright Mills so aptly noted in his breakthrough 1956 study of institutional structures and powerrelations in the USA, The Power Elite: The kind of moral and psychological beings men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to play…. Although men sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form men. (Mills 1956/2000, pp. 15 and 123, texts joined)
And as Jan Slaby and Shaun Gallagher have recently noted:
- [T]he notion of a cognitive institution is itself a helpful tool for developing a critical stance that allows us to scrutinize current institutional practices. Critique here takes the form of assessments of an institution’s modes of operation and de facto impacts, analyzed against the background of its official and unofficial aims, purpose and directions. How does the operational reality of an institution and its specific effectiveness measure up to the ideas and principles that have led to its creation? On a more general level, critique also implies asking whether some given institutional procedures improve (or impede, or distort) our understanding, our communicative practices, our possibilities for action, our recognition of others, our shared and circumscribed freedoms, and so forth. (Slaby and Gallagher 2014, p. 6).
- So, in a nutshell: human beings are, necessarily, social animals (Donne); but although people “sometimes shape institutions, institutions always select and form” people (Mills); and “the notion of a cognitive institution is itself a helpful tool for developing a critical stance that allows us to scrutinize current institutional practices” (Slaby and Gallagher 2014, p. 6).
Starting out with those basic ideas, and then adding some of our own, we do two things
in The Mind-Body Politic. First, we work out a new critique of contemporary social
institutions, by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind, and in
particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what we call essentially embodied
minds. And second, we make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing
both these social institutions and our essentially embodied lives, for the better.7
In this essay, I’m going to make the simplifying assumption, for the purposes of
my argument, that Maiese and I have already adequately done what we set out to do in
that earlier book. What I want to do now is to add a postscript—in the sense of elaborating
and extending, but not in any way contradicting—to the theory of social institutions that
Maiese and I worked out in The Mind-Body Politic, by further postulating the possession
of something I call sociality by all healthy, sane rational human animals, simply by virtue
of their being, necessarily, social animals.
And I’ll also call this, in diametric opposition to Kant’s notion of “unsociable sociability,” our [[Sociable Sociality.
Our sociable sociality, in turn, consists in a set of innate dispositions that naturally manifest themselves as needs for social relationships of a certain fixed number of distinct types. Moreover, these needs naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts.
And in this way, the theory of sociality I’m proposing is finegrained: not only does it apply directly to individuals and to a fixed number of distinct types of social relationships, but it also allows me to distinguish in various systematic ways between different individuals and their corresponding personal lives, based on the levels of intensity and scopes of their needs for precisely these types of social relationships.
More specifically, then, what I’m claiming—leaving aside the immensely complicating factors of ideology, especially including mores, that is, moralistic normative expectations, and pathological cases, for the moment, although I’ll come back to them later in the essay — is
(i) that all healthy, sane rational human animals are, necessarily, social animals
(although that is not all that we are),
(ii) that all healthy, sane rational human animals thereby possess sociality, and
(iii) that sociality naturally manifests itself as needs that naturally vary in level of intensity and broadness or narrowness of scope across individuals, over time, and in different contexts, for seven distinct types of social relationships, as follows:
(iii1) family relationships, (iii2) intimate relationships, that is, romantic (especially including erotic) relationships, (iii3) relationships with close friends, (iii4) relationships with a wider circle of friends and more-or-less-casual but still friendly acquaintances, (iii5) relationships involving camaraderie and solidarity, or what the Brazilians call concordar
or “shared heart,” that is, non-instrumental group projects of various kinds with like-minded comrades who are working or playing together towards shared goals—for example, collective intellectual projects such as co-authorship, collective artistic endeavors, team-sports, clubs of all various kinds, and especially certain kinds of political movements,
(iii6) identitarian relationships,
that is, relationships with other people defined solely by the sharing of some more-or-less adventitious, more-or less involuntary physical, mental, or social attributes, that I’ll call identity attributes: namely, human attributes that pick out various non-essential features of people (non-essential to their rational human agency or human personhood, that is), over whose original possession they had little or no freely-chosen control, for example, race, biological sex, birth-order, height, weight, body shape, specific abilities/ disabilities, living in the same region or neighborhood, common language, nationality, ethnicity, economic class, religious upbringing, etc., etc.., and finally
(iii7) relationships in the social marketplace, that is, instrumental relationships of all sorts.
Correspondingly, I’ll say that a social relationship is instrumental if and only if it is entered into for the purposes of furthering, as a means, the self-interested (egoistic) ends of rational human animals.
It’s especially to be noted that when I say that each one of the seven types of social relationships is “distinct” from the others, I don’t mean that they are mutually exclusive types. Instead, what we mean is that they’re non-equivalent, although sometimes or even often partially overlapping, classes of social relationships, each of which has its own characteristic phenomenology and guiding principle(s). Thus it’s quite possible to enter into a social relationship with someone who is, at one and the same time (although not in the same respect): your lover, your life-partner and co-parent of your children, your closest friend, a comrade, a member of (many of) the same identity-group(s), someone with whom you have an instrumental relationship involving, for example, mutual aid, and someone with whom you have an instrumental economic relationship, for example, a shared bank account. And so-on and so forth, with many possible variations for partial overlap. Nevertheless, even allowing for that multiplicity of possible variations, some of the types are mutually exclusive. For example, someone couldn’t be, at one and the same time, your lover and also someone who belonged to your wider circle of friends and more-or-less casual but still friendly acquaintances.
Another claim I’m making about the seven distinct types, is that they are all both ontologically and explanatorily irreducible to any single further factor or collection of further factors, hence that their existence and differences are basic. If this claim is correct, then, for example, social relations are not all or ultimately about human psychological or ethical egoism and mutual antagonism, as classical Hobbesians and neo-Hobbesians like Kant (at least in his exoteric political philosophy) claim. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human gender and sexual orientation, or race and ethnicity, as various kinds of identitarians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about subconscious or unconscious (mostly sexual) urges in human animals, as Freudians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human social and political power-relations backed up by coercion or threats of coercion, and overdetermined by hegemonic ideology, and their oppressive application to people who are defined by such identityclassifications as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, as Foucauldians hold.
Social relations are not all or ultimately about deterministic human evolutionary biology, as various kinds of Darwinians hold. Social relations are not all or ultimately about human psychological or ethical egoism and rational choice, as many contemporary economists (and, more generally, decision-theorists) hold. And social relations are not all or ultimately about deterministic capitalist economic relations, class antagonism, and hegemonic ideology, as classical or orthodox Marxists think. Above all, we are not machines, whether (neo)Hobbesian moist robots, Freudian moist robots, Foucauldian moist robots, Darwinian moist robots, or Marxist moist robots. This in turn allows me not only to provide explanations that do not oversimplify or explain-away the manifestly real facts and phenomena that constitute our sociality and our social lives, but also resolutely to refuse all such reductive explanations, whether asserted by philosophers or non-philosophers, for example, social media pundits or politicians. And the final claim I’m making in this connection is that any kind of social relationship under any of the seven types is rationally justifiable, morally permissible, or morally obligatory only if it’s also guided by sufficient respect for the human dignity of others and oneself, and by never treating oneself or others merely as means or as mere things, and, more specifically, never coercing other people.
That’s of course a broadly Kantian dignitarian moral thesis.
And this broadly Kantian dignitarian moral thesis, in turn, entails that for social relationships under each of the types, there will be good and right instances, and also bad and wrong instances, to consider when looking at the total set of instances falling under that type, depending on whether they meet that ethical/moral standard of sufficient respect for human dignity and more specifically noncoercion, or not. Correspondingly, one of the most important sources of bad and wrong instances is to impose egoistic, identitarian, or purely instrumental principles, especially when they’re backed up by coercion or threats of coercion, on social relationships whose guiding principles are, other things being equal, inherently non-egoistic, non-instrumental, and non-identitarian, such as family, intimacy, close friendship, and relationships involving camaraderie - & - solidarity.
Does the broadly Kantian dignitarian finegrained theory of sociality I’m proposing have empirical and intuitive force?"
Two Theses on Solidarity vs Identitarian-Based Relationships
Robert Hanna:
" I’ll assert two theses, each of which has several sub-parts.
First, all healthy, sane rational human animals need relationships of camaraderie-
&-solidarity, insofar as these involve
(i) groups of people collectively organized for the pursuit of non-instrumental ends, that is, ends which have their value intrinsically and are pursued for their own sake, and not extrinsically and for the sake of other ends, especially including egoistic or self-interested ends,
(ii) who share not only these specifically non-instrumental ends in common, but also a larger set of closely-related and mutually-supporting strong value-commitments, strong emotional attitudes (both proattitudes and anti-attitudes), and other strong affects (including desires and feelings) in common, that the Brazilians call concordar or “shared heart” (aka “team spirit,” etc.), and
(iii) whose strong value-commitments, strong emotional attitudes, and other strong
affects, as members of the these organized collectives, are generally non-egoistic.
It’s extremely important to note in this connection that it is entirely possible to be
engaged in non-instrumental, non-egoistic relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity for
the pursuit of ends that are non-moral and non-political in character, for example, purely
artistic or aesthetic groups, non-athletic clubs of various sorts (say, for the pursuit of
stamp-collecting, playing chess, trainspotting, bird-watching, etc.), athletic clubs and
sports teams, etc. And it’s even more important to note that it’s also possible to be
engaged in non-instrumental, non-egoistic relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity for
the pursuit of ends that are inherently bad and/or wrong, hence not necessarily ends that
are inherently good and/or right. For example, massively most men in the Nazi
Wehrmacht during World War II fought relentlessly, and continued to fight on relentlessly
even after the Nazis were clearly going to be defeated, not because of hegemonic
ideology, but instead because of Kameradschaft, i.e., camaraderie-&-solidarity.
Second, all healthy, sane rational human animals need identitarian relationships, insofar as these involve (i) our sharing some identity-attributes with people who are otherwise unique individual persons, and correspondingly, who are otherwise different both from us and also from one another, and (ii) in context, our abstracting away from, tolerating, and/or overlooking, those individual characteristics and differences, so that we’re able to cooperate with these people for purposes of our mutual aid and mutual benefit, and more generally, for our collective or public benefit.
Here it’s also extremely important to remember that identity-attributes are moreor-less adventitious, more-or-less involuntary physical, mental, or social human attributes that pick out various non-essential features of people (non-essential to their rational human agency or human personhood, that is), over whose original possession they had little or no freely-chosen control, for example, race, biological sex, birth-order, height, weight, body shape, specific abilities/disabilities, living in the same region or neighborhood, common language, nationality, ethnicity, economic class, religious upbringing, and so-on. Therefore, identitarian relationships are normally based on brute contingent, involuntary, unchosen facts about ourselves and other people: normally, we simply cannot help the facts about our having various identity-attributes and sharing them with others (for example, I can simply cannot help being white, male, and slightlymore-than-60-years-old, with a certain negativity of hair on the top of my head, and also sharing these adventitious, more-or-less involuntary attributes with a great many other old-ish white guys also called “Bob” who were also born in 1957), so we must just make the best of that for our mutual aid and mutual benefit. This is sometimes called “making a virtue of necessity,” but that’s an important misnomer: it is actually making a virtue of brute contingency. For example, normally we simply cannot help our having the nextdoor neighbors we do actually have, so we must just make the best of that, and get along with them as well as we can: that what is called “being neighborly.” Indeed, being neighborly is a highly everyday and humble, but also—since virtually everyone has nextdoor neighbors—virtually universal example of identitarian social relationships.
One fundamental difference between relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity and identitarian relationships is that because identitarian relationships are entered into for purposes of mutual aid and mutual benefit, and more generally for our collective or public benefit, whereas relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity are entered into for the pursuit of non-instrumental ends that are valuable for their own sake, then even when relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity fail to deliver any collective or public benefits whatsoever, they can still continue unaffected. For example, it is one thing to be a member of a sports team (a relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity) and a sharply different thing to identify with that sports team as a fan (an identitarian relationship). Normally, when sports teams fail to win—and especially when it is in a losing-streak—their fans are deeply disappointed and unhappy; but if the members of that sports team are properly committed to their athletic project, then their relationship of camaraderie-&-solidarity will continue unaffected by losses and losing-streaks, and in fact their “team spirit” might even be strengthened by their encountering such adversity and working through it together.
Moreover, the widespread popular confusion between on the one hand,
(i) relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity on the one hand, and on the other hand,
(ii) identitarian social relationships on the other, is greatly abetted and primed by the fact that the systematically ambiguous term “empathy” — meaning the affective and imaginative bonds we share with people with whom we enter into relationships of either camaraderie-&-solidarity or identity—is indiscriminately applied to both kinds of relationships, by ordinary people and social scientists alike.
As the term “identitarian social relationships” indicates, these social relationships are closely related to the psychological, moral, and sociopolitical doctrine of identitarianism, which says
(i) that people are defined primarily in terms of their falling under a certain social group-type and/or their social group-allegiance (for example, race, ethnicity, gender-&/or-sex, sexual preference, national origin or citizenship, language, economic class, social roles of all kinds, social institutions of all kinds especially including religions, etc., etc.),
(ii) that special moral virtues and special positive moral value, or goodness, are attributed to all members of that social group and to that social group itself, call it The WE, aka The US, and
(iii) that special moral vices and special negative moral disvalue, or badness, are attributed to members of certain other social groups and to those groups themselves, who are then collectively intensely distrusted, or even excoriatedand-vilified, as The OTHER, aka The THEM.
As everyone knows, identitarianism is a very widely-held doctrine.
Nevertheless, from a broadly Kantian dignitarian point of view, it’s self-evidently a violation of sufficient respect for human dignity to regard and treat yourself and others as individual tokens under group-types, since you thereby regard and treat persons as mere things under that group-type. Moreover, especially in its contemporary liberal-progressive, nationalist, religious, and neo-fascist versions, identitarianism is also a hegemonic ideology. In that connection, a fundamental pathology of identitarianism occurs when the creation of the OTHER/THEM leads to intense or even obsessive fears that the WE/US will be corrupted, infiltrated, and miscegenated by the OTHER/THEM culture, members of which are then perceived to exist both covertly inside (as potential or actual carriers of disease, impurities, or sedition) and also overtly outside (as potential or actual invasive threats) the WE/US culture. Relatedly, identitarian social relationships are often originally created, and can also be especially strengthened, by the actions of people belonging to a WE/US-group who systematically discriminate against and oppress innocent people who belong to an OTHER/THEM-group, simply by virtue of the latter’s possessing more-or-less adventitious, more-or-less involuntary physical, mental, or social identity-attributes such as sex, gender, sexual preference, skin pigmentation, ethnicity or national origin, language, religious affiliation, class origins, and so-on and so forth, almost ad infinitum.
But although such identity-attribute-based discrimination and oppression is always and inherently bad and wrong, and always and inherently a direct violation of sufficient respect for universal human dignity, nevertheless it doesn’t follow that the innocent identitarian victims of such discrimination and oppression possess any special moral value or special moral virtues merely because of their being discriminated against and oppressed—although, of course, not only are they to be pitied by us, but also they fully deserve our moral protection and sufficient respect for their human dignity. In a contemporary context, this fallacious attribution of special moral value and special moral virtues to innocent identitarian victims of discrimination and oppression, in turn, leads to what Anthony Appiah has correctly identified as a fallacious source of identitarian moral authority,34
which, again in turn, can easily turn into a coercive moralism that’s
also a special case of coercive authoritarianism. And in this way, paradoxically but also tragically, the fallacious belief that the victims of identity-attribute-based discrimination and oppression possess special moral value or special moral virtues merely because of their victimhood, inevitably contributes non-trivially to a spiralling increase in conflict, tension, and coercive authoritarian/ moralist violence between members of the WE/US- group and members of the OTHER/THEM-group (and sometimes also members of different sub-groups of the larger WE/US group). Race relations in the USA, from the collective original sin of slavery, through the John Brown Rebellion, the Civil War, and Emancipation, through the Jim Crow era, through the two World Wars, the new Jim Crow era, and the Civil Rights era, through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century, via “structural racism,” “mass incarceration,” and “White rage,” right up to the latest brutal police homicide/lynching and its righteous Black Lives Matter pushback protest— i.e., right up to 6am this morning—are not only an exceptionally immoral history of virulent racist oppression and violence against Black people, but also a particularly tragic example of this identitarian paradox. They fuck you up, your identity politics.
Third, all healthy, sane rational human animals need relationships of utility, insofar as these involve
(i) various kinds of transactions with others that satisfy various kinds of egoistic or self-interested ends, and
(ii) are freely-chosen, or at least rationally consented-to (whether explicitly or implicitly) by all parties to the transactions.
One crucial point about to recognize about relationships of utility is that because they are inherently instrumental and therefore inherently egoistic or self-interested, they are essentially distinct from relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, which are inherently non-instrumental and non-egoistic. At the same time, however, just because relationships of utility are inherently egoistic or self-interested, it does not follow that they are always morally bad-&-wrong. Here we can help ourselves to Kant’s profound moral insight that although regarding or treating people as mere means to our egoistic ends is inherently morally bad and wrong (hence it’s morally impermissible), nevertheless there is nothing inherently morally bad or wrong about our pursuing or satisfying egoistic ends (hence it is morally permissible) if at the same time they also inherently involve regarding and treating people as ends-in-themselves, i.e., if at the same time they inherently involve sufficiently respecting their human dignity. Or in other words, there’s nothing inherently morally bad or wrong with intrinsically receiving egoistic or self-interested benefits via our instrumental transactions with other people (i.e., it is at least sometimes perfectly morally OK to feel and act in a self-interested way), provided that these transactions also intrinsically express our sufficiently respecting their human dignity. For example, in order to have a tidy lawn while you spend your time on other activities that you value far more than lawn-mowing, you can at the same time intrinsically regard and treat the person you pay to mow your lawn with sufficient respect for his human dignity—but I’ll leave it as an “exercise for the reader” to fill in the details as to how a world of sufficiently dignity-respecting social institutions and social relations could actually be created and sustained.
In a slightly different way, relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity can also be relationships in which we extrinsically receive egoistic or self-interested benefits from our comrades, provided that these relationships also intrinsically express non-egoistic motivations. Indeed, it is a necessary condition of such relationships of camaraderie-&- solidarity from which we are extrinsically receiving egoistic benefits, that even if, counterfactually, the egoistic benefits were to stop, then the relationship of camadaraderie-&-solidarity would still continue unaffected. Similarly, even if, counterfactually, collective or public benefits yielded by the relationship of camadaderie- &-solidarity were to stop, then the relationship would still continue unaffected—as we saw above in the example of the sports team that is in a losing streak yet fully retains or even strengthens its “team spirit.”
By contrast, in relationships of utility, if the egoistic or self-interested benefits were ever to stop and/or turn into disbenefits, then necessarily either that instrumental relationship in the proper sense would thereby go all pear-shaped and dissolve, fail, or lapse, or at least it would be morally bad-&-wrong. And if such pseudo-instrumental or messed-up instrumental relationships were to be continued, or compelled to continue, under conditions of actual symmetric or asymmetric non-utility, then they would count as either pathological or morally bad-&-wrong cases under relationships of utility. A perfect example of this is the widespread phenomenon of wage-slavery in a contemporary world filled with neoliberal democratic or undemocratic nation-States and dominated by advanced/big capitalism, scientism, and technocracy, all operating under the demonstrably false, dogmatic, and seemingly unshakeable belief that this catastrophic and essentially interconnected set of social conditions is eternal and immutable.
Similarly, since identitarian relationships all inherently involve purposes of mutual aid and mutual benefit, then if that mutual aid and those mutual benefits also intrinsically or extrinsically happened to be egoistic in nature, as of course is very often actually the case, whenever such pseudo-identitarian or messed-up identitarian relationships were to be continued, or compelled to continue, under conditions of actual symmetric or asymmetric disutility, then it would be either a pathological case or a morally bad-&-wrong case under identitarian relationships. For example, if your next door neighbors are constantly making a terrible racket at night, so that you can’t sleep and it’s making you feel sick-unto-death, but you never even ask them politely to stop making all that noise at night, and never even try to improve matters by reasonable negotiation with them, but instead simply suffer, just because they are your neighbors and you think it is “neighborly” to put up with their outrageously disrepectful behavior, or even worse, just because you live in the contemporary USA, and they own semiautomatic weapons, and mass-shootings are happening virtually every single day, all year-around, so you are scared shitless about how they might react, then those would be pathological or morally bad-&-wrong cases under identitarian relationships.
Generalizing now, we can also see that
- imposing the guiding principles or normative structures of either identitarian relationships or relationships of utility onto relationships of camaraderie-&-solidarity, will naturally yield pathologies or cases of morally bad-&-wrong social engagement."
More information
The Anti-Hobbesian Trilogy
a recent historico-philosophical anti-Hobbesian trilogy—by Rutger Bregman, Larissa MacFarquhar, and Rebecca Solnit
- Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History;
- MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help; and
- R. Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster