Value, Virtue, and Character-Formation

CROCODILE VALUES VERSUS VALUES OF VIRTUE

Early in 2015, while editing articles for a book, I read striking lines written by a Japanese philosopher about the role of philosophy in Japan. In the article, Tetsuya Kono writes that Japanese children need help to establish emotional connections with others, to assert themselves, and develop a self-confidence to speak their own mind within what is generally a very authoritative (perhaps even authoritarian) system of education, which teaches young people social roles and models of behaviour founded on the value of obedience and 'fitting in' (Kono, 2015: 186). This reminded me of a conversation I had had just days beforehand, with a young Japanese philosopher from Tokyo, about the Japanese mentality. She said that she believed the main feature of Japanese mentality was to try to 'read the atmosphere' in order to fit in seamlessly and avoid sticking out at any cost. She added that it was socially unacceptable to question authority or create any kind of 'disturbance'.

This book is, of course, not about Japan, but Japan is often taken as an example of social discipline and striking practices of socialization, and the latter is one of the focal themes of the book. The desire to control people by social etiquette, as is the case in Japan, is in principle not different from the general policy of control which is based on the assumption that, if set free, the human being would automatically be prone to 'creating disturbance' or acting destructively. Such control policy is prevalent in most democratic societies and is particularly well exhibited in the liberal and neoliberal ideologies. Unless checked, people will become corrupt. Unless effectively policed, people will cheat, steal, and engage in violence. Unless aggressively surveyed, they will tend to ally themselves with problematic social causes which, ultimately, might threaten 'national security'. At least this is what the pessimistic ideology of human nature which is inherent in the liberal ideology suggests. What my friends from Japan reported — a sense of authoritarian socializing pressure within the Japanese society — was in no way unique: such pressure is generally encouraged, and in fact omnipresent, throughout the Western democratic world. The control policy in the West is perhaps less focused on socialization (although this is changing with the increasing surveillance of children at schools for any 'problematic attitudes'), and more on repressive controls threatening or actually leading to criminal or administrative sanctions. Such policy is invariably predicated upon the negative premise that people are prone to being corrupt, and institutions are there to stop them from actually engaging in corruption or deviance. The premise is rarely discussed, and, like most negative or pessimistic premises in social theory, it tends to become commonplace and 'accepted knowledge' without being adequately argued or examined. Just as the 'realist' theory for the international behaviour of states assumes a basic state of anarchy, where states tend to jockey for positions and use their resources to establish antagonistic domination over others, the prevalent understanding of the human nature which is reflected in socialization and social control practices assumes that, given the opportunity, people will act selfishly and immorally. In other words, in the absence of external imposition of values, their core values which guide them in the making of choices will tend to be those which selfishly promote one's relative position vis-à-vis the others. This view portrays man as a fundamentally competitive being, almost insatiably hungry for recognition and confirmation against and over everybody else.

One wonders where this prevalent view really comes from. In a clinical setting, when someone comes with deeply troubling and pessimistic assumptions about people in general, this typically leads to a questioning of one's self-perceptions. If one assumes that 'people are evil', the next question is usually about what one thinks of oneself: whether one is also evil, or one stands apart from everybody else as a beacon of the good against the sea of evil. In the former case, the issue often turns out to be one of lack of self-love, which is generalized to a lack of appreciation of people in general. In the latter one, a plethora of disorders might be at stake, usually involving obsessive or unrealistic self-perception, various psychological complexes of superiority, and the like (Hassim and Wagner, 2013). In a social and political setting, however, nobody asks this type of questions about the prevalent assumptions, which sometimes, in their content, closely mirror individual beliefs which would qualify any individual for serious counselling and careful observation. If an individual view of the human race as fundamentally predisposed to immoral predatory behaviour is a sign of mental disorder, or at least a cause for serious moral questioning, could it then be that the general assumption in political theory and social practice that, barred the state's capacity to inflict punishments and impose a certain order, people would use every opportunity to act in predatory and immoral ways, is also psychologically and morally problematic? Might we argue that a political system which is predicated upon the assumption that everybody will act in selfish and evil ways unless effectively discouraged from doing so by social sanctions is the result of a depressed, gloomy, pathological worldview? By extension, would this mean that the controlling practices so prevalent in modern democratic states are psychotic or at least borderline psychotic? My answer to all three questions in this book is 'yes'.

The same as the pessimistic view of human nature that stands at the core of liberal economic (and to a considerable extent political) theory is based on the idea that people are driven mainly by selfish interest and ambitions, and that institutions are there to ensure fair rules for the otherwise essentially egotistically driven competition for limited resources. Similarly, the view that people will be corrupt unless prevented to engage in corruption is commonplace in most discussions of institutional reforms and anticorruption policies today.

Despite their tacit acceptance as 'common sense', the pessimistic premises of social and political theory are far from persuasive, and some are couched in what could be considered sheer phantasm. Consider for example the theory of social contract — many would say the founding theory of modern political liberalism. The theory stipulates that society is justified on the basis of assumption that the initially totally sovereign...