The greatest achievement for me of Roderick and Charles' papers is their demonstration,
not just in theory but in practice, of the usefulness of spontaneous order explanations.
They I think show how things become clear when you use this mechanism of explanation.
But I have two challenges for both Roderick and Charles.
I'll begin with Charles' discussion of the disagreement between Brownmiller and her critics.
I'm not familiar with the literature he discusses, but I believe that he might be missing the
depth of the disagreement between Brownmiller and her critics, namely on whether there is
such a social order as Brownmiller describes in the first place.
Not the reality of male dominance, that's a given, but the connection she makes between
In that and what in the paper he quotes, the discovery that gentilia could serve as weapons.
The reason I think there might be such a disagreement is that when I read about Brown Miller's views
for the first time, my first reaction was an embarrassed giggle.
The world Brown Miller describes just seemed to me like a caricature of the world I know.
My first challenge concerns that giggle.
There is then a distance and misunderstanding between Brown-Miller and her critics. There
is also a distance between adherence and non-adherence of invisible hand explanations and I think
it's instructive to take them together. Take the second distance between adherence and
non-adherence of invisible hand explanations. Johnson, Charles takes Brown-Miller's critics
to assume erroneously that the social order she describes has to be the product of some
Some Planning.
They do so, perhaps as Roderick says, because order is one of the cues whereby we recognize
the presence of intention.
More generally though, there is here in the background an idea about what it is to explain
social orders, the phenomena of social order in principle.
And this idea of Brownmiller's critics about social order as something planned is competing
with Roderick's and Charles' ideas.
Social order can be the result of spontaneous developments.
So let me briefly overview this competition.
Social order is a weird thing.
It is a category between, I think, the mechanical and the intentional.
Let me explain.
When I do something intentional, for example, raise my hand, you can ask me why.
But if my hand simply jerks, goes up as a result of some electrical imbalance in my
muscles, this sort of why question doesn't apply.
It would be like complaining to me that I'm still digesting lunch. It's nonsense. Now,
when it comes to social order, we have, I think, conflicting intuitions. Sometimes we
think about social orders as mechanical, for it has no mastermind, or no obvious mastermind
at least, possibly none at all, and sometimes we think about it as intentional, for it is
is more than an anthill. This is the competition and I believe that we are genuinely conflicted.
We are tempted to amalgamate the two languages. But when we start doing that, things get murky
and talking about different degrees of intentionality, for example, or of subconscious mechanisms
is often no more than wavering and equivocating. We have to decide which language we want to
This is why I think the very idea of invisible hand explanations is so important.
It gives us a non-conflicted language.
To give invisible hand explanations of social phenomena, then, is both unlike explaining
how machines work and unlike justifying intentional actions.
To explain social phenomena on the invisible hand model is rather to identify patterns
of intentions.
I'll explain. In large groups, different people have different intentions and ways of thinking and act in different ways, but there is no chaos.
We can identify patterns among those groups, resemblances and differences, strands and currents of thoughts and actions.
According to the invisible hand theories, then these patterns are what we call social order.
Now, if this is true, adherents of invisible hand explanations, adherents of that language are faced with a complicated problem, how to convince people to learn and use this language.
But, and here I criticize Roderick and Charles, it seems that they do not recognize, or not enough at least, the task, that task that they are facing.
They seem to think that we can just offer invisible hand explanations and that merely
upon hearing them, these explanations would instantly make sense to everyone.
In his paper, Roderick writes and italicizes, nothing essential is hidden, he insists, amazed
at how blind people can be.
But even if this is true, and I take it to be true, it doesn't mean that people know
know how to see it, or that they have to see the same thing, the same patterns that Roderick
does. There is, I think, reason to be more cautious with one's expectations. A similar
argument applies to Charles' paper. There is reason to suspect, that is, not only that
Brown-Miller's critics disagree with her, but that in a sense they do not have even
understand her. If my first reaction to her claims, my giggle, is any indication, it may
It may be possible that the problem these critics have with Brown Miller's argument is that
they do not know how to connect what she says about the reality they take themselves to
be familiar with or to connect what she says to this reality.
It seems very plausible that for them she is offering a caricature, not a theory, that
she is describing something perfectly familiar and ordinary in a very bizarre and extraordinary
way.
So imagine a discussion between Brown Miller and a critic, imagine her saying all those
things about genitalia weapons and imagine the critic listening and being astounded.
He wants to laugh, that's his first reaction, but then he looks at her and notices she's
not joking.
What should he do now and what should Brown Miller do to help him see what she's after?
Possibly the best thing that could be done in such cases is to tempt people, tempt the
is a critic in this case to somehow see things in a certain light, to identify certain patterns.
But tempting people to see things in a different light, attempting people for example to see
things from the perspective of a rape victim is not an easy task.
For to begin with there is nothing tempting about that pain and humiliation.
It is much easier to be blind to it.
Like in the case of Franz Kafka, another Austrian hunger artist, the tragedy is that
what is really a cry of pain can sound to the unfamiliar crowd like a joke.
And there may not be any calm, reasoned, organized way of convincing them otherwise.
It is not impossible to convince people to start using different language and identify
new patterns, but it takes some sort of temptation work.
takes creating the motivation in them to try and see things in a new light, but it doesn't
seem that Roderick and Charles are willing to do all the work that's needed.
So this is my first challenge to them.
How do they expect their arguments to convince their opponents if in the sense I explained
their opponents do not even speak the language necessary, if they see other patterns, if
the patterns that Brown Miller is presenting, for example, strike them as funny?
My second challenge is more of a request for clarification. Both Long and Johnson support
in principle spontaneous social orders, but they make claims that make me worried about
such orders in general and anarchy in particular. If Roderic is right, the anarchy seems to
have no reason to be an adherent of spontaneous order for, as he claims, it may lead to the
and the creation of the state, spontaneous order namely.
If Charles is right, the anarchist seems to have no reason to reject the state for Charles'
claims.
The evils we are concerned with are not necessarily the evils of the state.
I suggested above that invisible hand explanations supply us with the conceptual scheme we need
in the social sciences.
If this is indeed so, then it should not be altogether surprising that as Charles and
Roderick claim, the male dominant society and the state, which are after all kinds of
social orders, will also have to be explained in those terms.
Any social order has to be explained in those terms.
But now, what is anarchy and what is the rape free society supposed to be beyond the fact
that like any other social order, they are spontaneous orders?
The source of my un-clarity I think is this. Do Roderick and Charles take spontaneous order
to be a program for implementation or do they take it to be a scheme for explanation? I
suggested it was the latter. Invisible hand explanations give us a language in which to
investigate social orders in general and this is why they are important. The question about
the good of social order, discussions in politics in general, cannot even get off the ground
without it, for to discuss something, one at least needs to have a language for discussion.
If I may take the two papers presented today as representative, it seems to me that this
is not how libertarian anarchists, like Roderick and Charles had taken them to be, understand
things.
They do indeed use the spontaneous order explanation as such a fundamental conceptual scheme, but
At the same time, they put it forward as an agenda, a suggested platform for social improvement.
In other words, they advocate spontaneity within limits, but at the same time take any social reality complicated enough to be spontaneous anyway.
So this is my second challenge to them. What is the point in fighting for what necessarily exists, namely spontaneous order?
and what's the point of fighting against what cannot exist, namely non-spontaneous order.