Too Many People

 

Friend Xerxes notes that he finds individuals almost invariably kind, while society as a whole is systemically at least nearsighted.

I am completely in agreement with his claim that individuals are more trustworthy than people in groups. What he presumably does not see is that this, if true, is a powerful argument for free markets and individual liberty, as opposed to government control and group identity. In other words, for the right and not the left.

Xerxes, on the other hand, is probably trying to argue for original blessedness; for the idea that people are innately, naturally good, and will always do good if they just follow their instincts—a romantic notion, in the proper sense of the word. Therefore, impositions on instinct from “society”—formal ethics—are the source of all evil.

But the basic claim, that individuals are usually more trustworthy than groups, is in accord with what we all can observe: mobs are irresponsible and dangerous. 

The problem is with identifying the mechanism to explain this. If you assume that people are all individually good, yet corrupted by society, you have a classic “problem of evil.” Society is a human creation. If people are good, yet society is evil, where did the evil come from?

Xerxes’s theory is that people are good only in moderation. The evil comes somehow from there being too many in one place. He uses, among others, the analogy of a campfire versus a forest fire. Too much fire is bad; too many people are bad.

But the difference between a campfire and a forest fire is not quite that. It is that the campfire is under control, and the forest fire is not. A fire in a waste paper basket is probably smaller than a campfire, but it is still bad. A controlled burnoff of a field is a common agricultural practice, and it might easily be larger than a forest fire. A nuclear reactor is a rather bigger fire in a sense than a forest fire, but can be useful.

So with people. The problem is not more or fewer of them, but whether they are controlling their animal instincts and their selfishness. As individuals, we are obliged to take responsibility for our acts, so our conscience is engaged. If we pass our individual responsibility over to the group, we can more easily shirk our conscience. We can let our sinister tendencies “run riot,” to use the familiar phrase. This is most evident in a mob, but a clear danger in any group. “I was only following orders.”

This is because, like fire, we already have those sinister tendencies. This cannot support a romantic idea of original blessedness. The bad tendency must already exist at the individual level; but be held in check.

Trying to find an analogy that might work better to justify Xerxes’s concept of innate human goodness, I thought of locusts. According to at least some theories, they change from relatively benign to humans to a plague due to overcrowding—due, then, to sheer numbers, more or less. But again, this does not really work in support of his concept of humans, because each individual locust also transforms in nature. In Xerxes’s human model, the individual remains good even as the society in which he or she participates misbehaves.

I have read that lab rats, if overcrowded, begin to bite one another. Perhaps this is more apt, but it still does not work. Each bite is an individual, not a group, action. The individual does not remain moral while the group imposes immorality.

Given the correct observation that people behave better individually than in groups, we are left needing to acknowledge the concept of original sin. The tendency to evil as well as good must be innate at the level of the individual.

There is also something troublesome, surely, in the very concept of “too many” humans. Too many for what? If your measure is what is good for humans, surely existing is the most fundamental of goods. If your standard is not what is good for humans, what is your standard? The obvious suspicion is that it is what is good for yourself…

Lynch Mobs

Laura Nelson, lynched 1911.

Xerxes my leftist columnist friend has raised the dire spectre of right wing lynch mobs in the street. He suggests they are to be expected due to the rise of the right wing and “white supremacy.”

But lynch mobs are not a “right-wing” phenomenon. Historically, they are more often found on the left. The term itself seems to have been invented by the American left during and after the US War of Independence to suggest the proper treatment of Tory Loyalists—the political wing of their day. The same term and techniques were then used against blacks (and Catholics, and immigrants, and Republicans) in the US South by the KKK—which was, in its day, when it was a real force (1860 to 1870, then 1915 to 1925), a leftist organization, or at least ambiguously either left or right. They were one of the pillars of Woodrow Wilson's “Progressive” administration.

Will Brown being tortured and killed in Omaha, Nebraska, during "Red Summer," 1919.

The French Revolution was a golden era of lynch mobs—virtually always on the left. The same is true of the Spanish Civil War. The Cultural Revolution in China was probably the great global heyday for lynchings and mob rule. 

It makes sense: the right is generally for “law and order.” The left is generally for “taking it to the streets.” Lynch mobs are almost necessarily on the left. A right-wing lynch mob is almost a contradiction in terms.

There have certainly been, of late, no lynchings in the name of “white supremacy.” But then, there do not seem to have been any white supremacists.

The number of actual “white supremacists” In the US is probably vanishingly small. Even the notorious Robert Spencer, who is always trotted out as prime example, with his perhaps several hundred followers, is not really a white supremacist, and would never use the term for himself. Instead, the term “white supremacist” seems to have been invented by parties on the left in order to justify lynch mobs and vigilante justice against anyone to whom they assign this label.

So far, any recent vigilante “justice” of a literal sort has almost all been coming from the organizations “Antifa” and “Black Lives Matter,” who are on the left. Of a less literal sort, the threat has also been coming, and increasingly, from the left. Extrajudicial proceedings and punishments without due process from the various “Title IX” enforcement structures in US colleges; from the Human Rights panels in Canada. Granted, these are not mob rule; these are things set up by an elite holding power. It is not quite the same problem as a lynch mob. More like a Star Chamber.