Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them(experimental-history.com) |
Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them(experimental-history.com) |
Separation of power.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-scali...
In the above clip, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia mentioned the exact same example that the article mentions. That the Soviet Union’s constitution guaranteed many rights that the Soviet Union never actually gave to the people. He says this is because the Soviet Union had no mechanism to prevent the centralization of power. And when power was centralized into one man (Stalin) or one committee (the Politburo) then the true constitution was really whatever that man said or what that committee said.
So a good mechanism to guarantee freedom, liberty, human rights…is to ensure power remains decentralized and separated into various different groups
That Soviet constitution (like all communist movements that I know of) sounds utopian and unrealistic.
The American Framers, many coming from a worldview that saw humans as inherently sinful and corruptable, built as many safeguards into the system as possible to prevent that human nature from running unchecked.
Whereas the mis-use of shame just turns the child against the teacher and their whole system of values, even if momentarily 'corrects' the behavior. It would have worked if the child already shared Mr L's values, but they didn't, and shaming someone on the basis of a value they don't hold themselves doesn't work at all. And I think that usually the way ones learns values from others is by seeing them exemplified, since they can naturally identify the value of those values and how they benefit everyone. Being threatened does not work. Being admonished because you're hurting someone you didn't mean to hurt does.
There are some epicycles, also. The appeal to respect only works if the child is actually concerned with the teacher's feelings; it won't work if it takes place in an ambient culture of disrespect or apathy. And if the community insists that people be respectful to each other, then if the child continues to mistreat the flag, Mr L now has the legitimate grievance that the child is being disrespectful after knowing better, which is now personal, not in terms of an abstract and un-shared value, and is fair grounds for admonishment. I imagine that this always works a lot better for actually changing behavior and inducing people to treat each other well.
[^1]: I anticipate some people to react that this doesn't work at all in practice and is how we got to a culture of polarization, e.g. progressives moralized about being respected a lot and instead made enemies out of a lot of people who now don't want to respect them at all. I see this as different, because it was often actually using shame but under the trappings of asking for respect: instead of saying "please respect me because I am asking you to" it says "shame on you for not respecting me the way I demand", which is more like what Mr. L said in the story; the feeling that this is an unjust use of power triggers the recipient to turn against it. And anyway it would only work if you're in a respect-based society along with your counterpart; it's not going to work in anonymous unmoderated online discourse.
The project was... For the most part unsuccessful.
I don't think there is a cure. A society will be largely stuck in the rut that it's in.
What that means in practice is that truth is the opinion of powerful.
And so we find it.
Consequently in the practical judgment of conscience, which imposes on the person the obligation to perform a given act, the link between freedom and truth is made manifest. Precisely for this reason conscience expresses itself in acts of "judgment" which reflect the truth about the good, and not in arbitrary "decisions". The maturity and responsibility of these judgments — and, when all is said and done, of the individual who is their subject — are not measured by the liberation of the conscience from objective truth, in favour of an alleged autonomy in personal decisions, but, on the contrary, by an insistent search for truth and by allowing oneself to be guided by that truth in one's actions.
— Veritatis splendor, 61, John Paul II, 6 Aug 1993, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
Domestically, even with the threat of state violence (imprisonment), most offenders are repeat offenders, so how effective is violence really?
"No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."
It's a long-standing trait of adulthood to be able to reflect and integrate the sometimes painful training of childhood as being necessary for producing the mindsets and behaviors of to function in society.
Anyway both are self-evident: prosocial enforcement exists because we see it around us every day and stable prosocial systems are good because people pick them, given the choice.