quote: Reason: You gave a speech at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference a few years back in which you suggested that the focus on issues like encryption was too narrow, and that we should give more attention to what theologian Walter Wink calls “domination systems.” This surprised some of the attendees, partly because it reached outside the usual privacy/free speech issue set and partly because, hey, you were citing a theologian. What brought you to Walter Wink, and what other light do you think theologians can shed on our approaches to government?
Stephenson: This probably won’t do anything to endear me or Wink to thE typical reason reader, but I was made aware of him by a Jesuit priest of leftish tendencies who had been reading his stuff.
It’s almost always a disaster when a novelist decides to become political. So let me just make a few observations here on a human level—which is within my comfort zone as a novelist—and leave it at that.
It’s clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood.
We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work. For example, nailing up plague houses tended to limit the spread of plague. But even the smart doctors tended to fall under the sway of pet theories that were wrong, such as the idea that diseases were caused by imbalanced humors or bad air. Once that happened, they ignored evidence that contradicted their theory. They became so invested in that theory that they treated any new ideas as threats. But from time to time you’d see someone like John Snow, who would point out, “Look, everyone who draws water from Well X is getting cholera.” Then he went and removed the pump handle from Well X and people stopped getting cholera. They still didn’t understand germ theory, but they were getting closer.
We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of power disorders. We don’t really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the rule of law and separation of powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you’ll get perfectly intelligent people saying, “All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production,” or what have you. Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions.
Wink’s interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire. Mind you, Wink is no fan of violence either, and he devotes a lot of ink to attacking what he calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he sees as a meme by which domination systems are perpetuated. But he is clearly all in favor of people standing up against oppressive power systems of all stripes.
Carrying that forward to the present day, Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will. (Of course he doesn’t call it shaftology; that’s just my name for it.) He goes all over the world and looks at different kinds of people who are obviously getting the shaft, be they blacks in apartheid South Africa, South American peasants, or residents of inner-city neighborhoods dominated by gangs. He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of domination systems. It’s not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders. And even people who can’t stomach the religious content of his work might take a few cues from this epidemiological, as opposed to theoretical/ideological, approach.
posted
It's an interesting idea, Storm....but it sounds like comparing this to plagues and germ theory is already risking falling under the sway of an idea. Namely, that there is some single cause underlying "power disorders". I'm not saying an empirical study is a bad idea, but I have a gut feeling that no one cause is going to be prevalent enough to produce good data.
Then again, I should know better than to trust my gut feelings by now.
Addit: Now that I think of it, the criticisms leveled at Maslow over humanistic psychology also come to mind. Wink clearly has some idea of what "getting the shaft" means, but if he can't clearly define it he risks making his whole argument a tautology. By selecting the kind of people he already thinks are "getting the shaft", he may be predefining his data to fit what he already thinks is the matter. (I'm sleepy and having trouble saying this right...)
posted
Sorry. I didn't quote that portion of the interview to say that I necessarily agreed with it so much as putting it up as an example of the rest of the interview.
quote: Then again, I should know better than to trust my gut feelings by now.
That's the taco talking.
I would hesitate on criticizing Wink's ideas just from an interview where he is being paraphrased in the context of a response to another question.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
quote:It’s clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood.
We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work.
I disagree with this assessment. The dynamics of power acretion and abuse are pretty well known. Ignorance of the processes by which these occur (and the cosensequent oppression of groups lacking power) is not a particularly big problem.
The central problem is that the type of people who foster power abuse are the type of people who are particularly good at and invested in gaining power for themselves. Left to their own devices, these are the people who are going to obssessively and effectively pursue power and, once they have it, alter the system so that they and people like them find it easier to obtain it and abuse it. It's like, everyone believes in market competition for other people, but as soon as they get a hold of something, they try very hard to insulate themselves from any sort of competition.
In the current era of faceless, beauracratic big business and big government and the trillions of dollars a year PR industry, the anti-power-elite counterbalance of populistic political and economic control has lost a lot of the revolutionary power that it had when it was first conceived and implemented. You can't fight city hall, not as before because they have the guns, but instead because their is so damn many of them and they've all got forms that they want you to fill out. It's very hard to get out of the trap of one man fighting against this gigantic blob.
As to system design, the biggest problem comes in with the conflict of the limiting, monitoring, and hampering the powerful versus the fact that some things need to be done quickly and sometimes secretly, and in some cases outside of the established limits. You can't trust the bastards, but at some point and on at least a subsistence level you have to trust the bastards or you get the trainwreck of the Articles of Confederation.
None of this is new thought. Some of it is over 2 centuries old. The human condition has generally been to be ruled by some of the most flawed people in a given society. The introduction of populist checks on this alleviated the situation some, but the power of populism is being constantly eroded by internal and external forces.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
