Democracy - The Right to Fail and Responsibility to Correct it

A couple of years ago, I was asked, on Quora, the question, "Is order or freedom more valuable to society?" Today, this is the question that we, in America, are asking ourselves. It is the irony fueling our political system and our individual responses to it. I had forgotten about the question and the answer until this morning when I received an email. It said that I had received an UP vote for my answer. I followed the links back to see what question and how I had answered it.

The email came from Quora and said "Jack Rogers up voted your answer to: Is order or freedom more valuable to society?" I had forgotten about it. Quora is a website where individuals, usually students can ask questions on any subject they wish. The questions are organized under major headings (or interest groups) and the questioner then waits for others to answer. The quality of the answers and questions is fairly open and varied from amateur opinions to expert professionals. To get an UP vote is generally rare but very ego satisfying when you get one. 

Quora.com defines itself as "A place to share knowledge and better understand the world." One is free to join and to become active in areas of mutual interest. I joined out of curiosity some years ago as an Adjunct Professor in Business. Over the years, my participation has been sporadic. So today's email was a pleasant surprise. More so today, because the question and my answer seem so timely.

The question hits at the heart of the debate going on today within our democracy. "Which is more valuable to our society, order or freedom?" 

This question faced the representatives from the colonies who came to the Continental Congress. They gather to decide the reasons for forming a NEW and Independent nation in the New World and separate from the Britain. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence investing the power in “We, the People” and not a King appointed by God. Today, we are facing a similar problem 250 years later. Are we to remain E Pluribus Unum or devolve into a set of fiefdoms controlled by a privileged minority. As a nation and society, we are breaking along two different lines.

 

Some of us see the USA as a Society of the human beings who are citizens gathered around the light of freedom creating order. This view is the one favored by the Democrats and the Left. They look to free People to produce an orderly society. It is an order that comes from the freedom to express one's views and decided by a vote of all of the people. In its most basic form, the question is -- who or what is a "person"?

Others of us see the USA as the land of opportunity, where individualism is tested and measured by achievement. This is the one favored by The Republicans and the Right. They look to the Institutional leaders who have to impose the order on chaos that made opportunity possible. The successful industrious individual who achieve his\her goals proves his/her worth. Industry is defined by results that is measured in terms of one's power over nature and other humans. Power is the individual's reward for the insight and effort invested in the opportunities.The Freedom comes from the power that leaders have to impose Order on the other people. 

I was not thinking about this actual division in America at the time I answered the question. But as a child growing up during the Cold War I was aware of the difference. By the 1960's, I began to realize that the high moral positions taken by groups were made up of different premises: part reality, part desire, part privilege and part desperation. America was a divided nation, despite a mythology that said different. Yet there was common denominator -- POWER. Who had it and when was it used?

It has been my goal, as an anthropologist, to understand how and where power in a society is determined and exercised. Did it come from the personality of the individual, or the individual's status (achieved or assigned) in the Society and what is it about the Cultural values shared by each that can create the divide.

When I saw the UP vote announcement to the question -- Order or Freedom I was curious. What did I say? And Do I still believe it? So I took a look and here is what I said in 2018.

Both when in balance. When order breaks down the freedom is also lost. Disorder limits your freedom because it makes life more unpredictable. Unpredictability limits your freedom. Your freedom increases with your ability to predict your options and your chances of success/failure. From a social perspective, manners, etiquette, morals, laws, and rules that “limit” freedom make life more predictable for individuals and therefore gives the individual “choice.” Your degree of Choice is the true measure of freedom.

The answer I found then and today more than ever leads me to believe that the ability and opportunity to choose one's fate is the Key. Choice is the measure of freedom for an individual to take a risk or not. Choice gives the individual a voice in their own destiny. In a society, the individual's personal choice gets lost if the individual does not have the power to exercise or register their choice.

So today I want to share the answer that I found, that confirms the answer that our Founding Fathers found in those hot, sweltering days in Philadelphia as they hammered out their gift to the future -- the Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution is the business plan of a group of radicals who were charged with designing a new product founded on the NEEDS of those radicals spelled out in their DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 

That product, a new NATION, based on a simple set of assumptions. Those assumptions, have come the basis, for the new nation and are 

Those assumptions are:

1. If you are born, you have been given the "Right to Life". Jefferson, in his period, referred to it as a GOD given right to LIFE. Today we fight over the source of that right. Is it GOD, the Mother, or the State that gives us that RIGHT?

2. "The Right to Liberty" which I have come to see as the INDIVIDUAL's right to make a CHOICE when presented with the alternatives available at the particular time and place. Today that would mean that choices are made by individuals and based on the individual's sense of values.

3. "The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness" which I have come to accept as the RIGHT to fail. Today, we have, as a species, advanced technologically so that the core of Modern Society, has many different solutions to its basic animal problem. It is our RIGHT to try these and find or create a solution that produces HAPPINESS. But what brings me happiness, may not bring you happiness. 

The question those radicals meeting in Philadelphia was how to create a plan, a business plan, that would satisfy the basic principles or rational for a Declaration of Independence and still insure the both the rights of the individual and the demands of conformity of a society?

I did not discover anything new. But, I finally understood what and why I am proud to be an American; and why I feel that everyone has the RIGHT to Fail. In the long run what really matters is, What one (the individual and/or society) does with the failure. The American Experiment is defines how those ideals could be achieved. By insuring the right of the individual to fail and try again.

Rules, or laws, created by society to govern and legitimate individual behavior provided society's standards to define the person and social responsibility for doing so. And provides the opportunity to try again if one fails. The question facing the radicals was: How do we balance the desires of the individual and the needs of society?  The answer is a Constitution that defines the powers of society and how they will be managed -- a business plan for a New Nation.

The only why one learns is through failure. It allows you to see were you and your country need to direct your attention and resources to improve your skills. The problem with Success is, over time, it becomes routine and the assumed normal. Success breeds a sense of privilege that is a beginning of the decline of freedom and the beginnings of an obsession for order, an order to maintain the status quo. Or, as the song goes, “Stop the World I want to get off.”

The proper balance of order and freedom is determined, I feel, by RIGHT of all people to CHOOSE and adjust the balance. Choice is a function of the person's power to make a choice. Society functions when everyone has the opportunity to express their opinion, agrees on the rules of the group or society, votes according to the roles, and accepts the result of the vote as the has legitimate choice of the whole group. The result is Order freely agreed upon and freely accepted.

Statues and Players

 I have been a Structural/Functionalist most of my professional career. I know that anthropology has advanced in its methodologies and theory since the mid-20th century. But Structural/Functionalism is at the very foundation of understanding of any event. It is the difference between Science and Religion.

Structure is the statue, the photograph, the paragraph. Structure is freezing time so that one can examine the situation, the context, the inter-relations of the parts, and the emotional response to an event. On the one hand, it is the player rooster, the theater program, the blueprint, etc. Put simply, structure is the picture of human activity without TIME. It is Culture as represented by a particular artifact.

Function is the players, the organization, the history, the novel. Function opens up the structure by adding Time to the analysis of the whole. It not only shows us the inter-relation of parts, but it illustrates how these parts operate in relation to the structure as a whole. Function describes the How? Where structure describes What? 

Together, these TWO perspectives tell us that life is not static. Culture is NOT static. They are cyclical and evolutionary. If there is one basic concept that describes both, it is TIME. They are cyclical when the process is repeated over and over again. And it is evolutionary when it responds to the context (environment) and adjusts to the longer cycle of an immediate context. Structure is based on duration of a process, where TIME is held constant. Function is based on the process cycle, where Time is to change. They may be studied independently, or in conjunction with one another.

Structure and Function, together, are the basis of scientific anthropology. 

Traditional, early, anthropology assumed a fixed Culture could be found in different societies. The traditional anthropologist went off to the field and spent a year or a few years studying the same group. The assumption that cultures were fixed in time comes from the context. 

The annual cycle of group was studied (funding permitting) and written up as a monograph describing the Culture of the people. Sometimes this was done by the anthropologist acting conservatively and describing the study of the  group, or the village. Other times it was done liberally with an extrapolation that the observations applied to the inhabitants of a physical area. The ethnography, or site report for archaeology, lead to a static description. It froze time. 

But this strategy can be forgiven because early anthropologist were attempting to salvage cultures that were threatened by the spread of Western Civilization. Archaeologist were also attempting to salvage stages of development before human prehistory was lost to modernization of the environment and natural decay of time on physical artifacts. In a way these are our baseline for the development of our discipline, much like the arbitrary laying of the datum line in an archaeological site. It provides  a statute --- a frame of reference -- as a reminder of where we started in our history of discovery of CULTURE.

Archaeology gave us a time perspective through the stratigraphic context of the salvage effort. It also provided a warning about the destructive nature of the science. Field archaeology evolved from art history to a science with the imposition of scientific methodologies for preservation of both the artifact, its context, and the site. This has lead to an evolution in the size and methods of archaeological anthropology. From a function to salvage art artifacts to the function of salvaging the context and "time".

Field ethnology attempts to salvage the material and behavioral aspects of people's actions in TIME by determining the context of time -- "the ethnological present." The original tradition recognized the difference between the aboriginal behavior and "contact" behavior and attempted to "salvage" the former from the older, surviving members of the earliest generation available. Further, because these older subjects generally represented a smaller sample of the target population and relied on memory, the field anthropologist was faced with an editorial decision as to who and what is the more authoritative evidence. Here "authority" is a issue since it reflects the "present" [the specific time of the research] "official" cultural values that the members hold "today."

As the ethnological record has expanded, in part due to the evolution of the profession and part to the size of the sample, the salvage issue has devolved into a broader range of detailed study of the specific cultural practices on one hand, and acculturation at the other end. In the former, the salvage concern becomes a more specific attempt to determine the differences between "cultural" and "social" practices. On the other, it is the focus on the processes of resistance and acceptance of  socio-cultural differences between social groups.

The Structural/Functional perspective unifies these two perspective by isolating TIME as a variable to the context of the analysis. Structure holds "TIME" as constant. Function focuses specifically on change in the structure over TIME.  Together the supply a complete picture, while individually they provide a contextual uniformity.