Knowledge And Decisions

One measure of purely social or moral sanctions is that they have effects even in circumstances where there is no formal power at all. Among slaves, for example, the mores of the group affected individual behavior. In the antebellum South, when a male and female slave were caught out in violation of curfew, the mores of the slave community called for him to volunteer to take her lashes in addition to his own.²² More generally, there was group solidarity which forbade betrayal to slave owners,²³ and encouraged actions to aid and shield one another,²⁴ and kept alive family ties,²⁵ despite a total absence of legal sanctions for the slave families and in the face of hostility toward slave family ties by the white community.

Purely social controls are effective only to the extent that personal emotional ties give value to the goodwill of others and credence to their norms. If social possibilities, like economic possibilities, are inherently constrained, then the question is only which particular institutional mechanisms or processes best convey these constraints to individuals. Even if the prospect of total individual freedom under anarchy were institutionally permitted, it could not be substantively realized, since the free acts of one would constrain the free acts of another, leading to less freedom in general — in the same way that an uncontrolled crowd pushing toward a fire exit has less chance of achieving its goal than if they were evacuated in some orderly manner.

Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducements. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement. The “conformity” so lamented among Britons and Americans may be related to the freedom which has survived for centuries in both societies, while much of the world has gone from one form of despotism to another. In any event, the harder it is to persuade or induce, the more it is necessary to force, given that people must mutually accommodate in some way if life is to go on in an interdependent society. The celebration of unbounded individualism means, beyond some point, the acceptance of force — either private (crime, riot, vigilanteism) or public (authoritarianism). Terrorists or rioters who say that they want to force a democratic government to “reveal” its “true” authoritarian or “fascist” nature are in fact simply revealing one of the fundamental trade-offs in all forms of society, however democratic or humane. It may even have been a toleration or a romanticizing of runaway individualism that created the terrorist mentality and environment in which it could flourish — up to some inherent limit of toleration. Fascism, in fact, began in Italy in response to unchecked public disorders.

Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as “individualistic” those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.