HUMANS SEEK PLEASURE AND TRY TO AVOID PAIN

HUMANS SEEK PLEASURE AND TRY TO AVOID PAIN

1. TO SEEK PLEASURE AND AVOID PAIN IS HUMAN INSTINCT

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist philosopher, KROPOTKIN’S REVOLUTIONARY PAMPHLETS, 1970, edited by Roger N. Baldwin, page 84-5.

it is easy to understand the astonishment of our great-grandfathers when the English philosophers, and later the Encyclopedists, began to affirm in opposition to these primitive ideas that the devil and the angel had nothing to do with human action, but that all acts of man, good or bad, useful or baneful, arise from a single motive: the lust for pleasure. The whole religious confraternity, and, above all, the numerous sects of the Pharisees shouted “immorality.” They covered the thinkers with insult, they excommunicated them. And when later on in the course of the century the same ideas were again taken up by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Tchernischevsky, and a host of others, and when these thinkers began to affirm and prove that egoism, or the lust for pleasure, is the true motive of all our actions, the maledictions redoubled. The books were banned by a conspiracy of silence; the authors were treated as dunces. And yet what can be more true than the assertion they made? Here is a man who snatches its last mouthful of bread from a child. Every one agrees in saying that he is a horrible egoist, that he is guided solely by self-love. But now here is another man, whom every one agrees to recognize as virtuous. He shares his last bit of bread with the hungry, and strips off his coat to clothe the naked. And the moralists, sticking to their religious jargon, hasten to say that this man carries the love of his neighbor to the point of self~ abnegation, that he obeys a wholly different passion from that of the egoist. And yet with a little reflection we soon discover that however great the difference between the two actions in their result for humanity, the motive has still been the same. It is the quest of pleasure.

Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist philosopher, KROPOTKIN’S REVOLUTIONARY PAMPHLETS, 1970, edited by Roger N. Baldwin, page 88.

To seek pleasure, to avoid pain, is the general line of action (some would say law) of the organic world. Without this quest of the agreeable, life itself would be impossible. Organisms would disintegrate, life cease. Thus whatever a man’s actions and line of conduct may be, he does what he does in obedience to a craving of his nature. The most repulsive actions, no less than actions which are indifferent or most attractive, are all equally dictated by a need of the individual who performs them. Let him act as he may, the individual acts as he does because he finds a pleasure in it, or avoids, or thinks he avoids, a pain. Here we have a well-established fact. Here we have the essence of what has been called the egoistic theory.
HOBBES PHILOSOPHY RESTS ON FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS
HOBBES PHILOSOPHY BASED ON FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE FAMILY Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist philosopher, MUTUAL AID: A FACTOR OF EVOLUTION, 1902, p 75-6. It has been remarked more than once that the chief error of Hobbes, and the eighteenth-century philosophers as well, was to imagine that mankind began its life in the shape of small straggling families, something like the “limited and temporary” families of the bigger carnivores, while in reality it is now positively known that such was not the case. Of course, we have no direct evidence as to the modes of life of the first man-like beings. We are not yet settled even as to the time of their first appearance, geologists being inclined at present to see their traces in the Pliocene, or even the Miocene, deposits of the Tertiary period. But we have the indirect method which permits us to throw some light even upon that remote antiquity. A most careful investigation into the social institutions of the lowest races has been carried on during the last forty years, and it has revealed among the present institutions of primitive folk some traces of still older institutions which have long disappeared, but nevertheless left unmistakable traces of their previous existence.

Legal Neutrality Responses

Introduction

Legal ‘neutrality’ and White privilege

The major proponents of CRT claim that it, “rejects the notion that law is objective, or value-neutral,” and argues instead that, “the law legitimizes the ‘perpetrator’s’ or ‘insider’s’ perspective and is constructed by the dominant group to serve its own purpose” (Brooks n62). In order to show how this is the case, we must examine the law’s claim to neutrality via blindness. The goddess of justice wears a blindfold as she weighs the scales of justice, implying that the truth will sort itself out on the scales free from her interference. Brooks writes that this blindness means that, “our judicial system does little (and sometimes nothing) to level the playing field of its litigants. In the context of federal pleading this is problematic because even though procedural rules are crafted in neutral and universal language, their applications are decidedly not neutral given the social and political context in which they are invoked. Indeed, our so called ‘objective’ procedural rules end up favoring the socially stronger party because the latter is able to carry his economical and political advantage into the halls of justice” (n209).

We all know that one’s chances of getting cleared by a judicial system are increased substantially by the quality of one’s lawyer. Whites on balance are more often rich than Black Americans and are, not surprisingly, found innocent of crimes much more often. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that most Blacks and Whites have different perspectives on the law and justice. Litowitz writes that, “whites tend to favor an absolute position on freedom of speech because they see free speech as a safeguard for the maximum flow of information, whereas blacks are dubious of absolute freedom of speech because they bear the brunt of offensive speech. Similarly, Peggy Davis points out that black jurors are more likely to see the criminal justice system as biased according to race and class, and Sheri Lynn Johnson shows that this perception of bias is rooted in a legacy of racism at the hands of white judges and juries. It stands to reason that if judges and lawyers see minorities in stereotypical and distorted ways (for example, that blacks are violent and overly sexual), then they will misjudge, for example, the degree of force that is ‘reasonable’ when the police arrest a black male” (n20). It is easy for Whites to not object to law because

they are so often not touched by it coercively, as Blacks may be. There is clearly little grounds for thinking that there is racial agreement on the neutrality of the law. Blacks, more often condemned by the law than Whites, are thus more likely to take the perspective that our legal system privileges Whites.

Our legal system, which brought us Dred Scot and Plessy, is still propping up White privilege. Some suggest that minority law students have a higher dropout rate than Whites because minorities were less up to the task, or that they had less merit. McGinley refutes this directly, pointing out a sort of good ol’ boy system still at work in which, “One can see how the privilege operates in law school hiring. White males who have had special access to relationships with other white males at prestigious universities and law schools are promoted by their mentors to white male judges, who hire them to serve as law clerks. Both the judges and the law school professors recommend their mentees to hiring committees who are composed mostly of white males who have the same attributes as the persons applying for the job. The hiring committee tends to define the candidate as meritorious because the candidate has conformed to the societal norm. Privilege, as Wildman demonstrates, is often mistaken for individual merit” (n298). One legal scholar complains about how difficult it was for her as a Black woman to find mentors in legal institutions filled with White men. It is clear that neither the law, nor the scholars that create it, could possibly be neutral given their historically privileged status as Whites.
The American legal system’s attempt to veil itself in neutrality and stay out of the lives of its citizens sanctions types of oppression that occur outside the scope of the law. Law often “reflects dominant interests and fosters structural ‘oppression less by coercion than by offering people identities contingent upon their acceptance of oppression as defining characteristics of their very selves.’ Law is experienced in this fashion by racial minorities as injustice, not because of any particular hostile legislative enactment or court ruling, but because of the systemic oppression it legitimates” (Yamamoto 843). This principle was especially clear in a situation where some Black Americans opposed the desegregation of schools on the grounds that states would just shut the schools down entirely, leaving Black students without education and Black teachers out of work. The law’s blind eye toward systemic forms of oppression, such as through economics, allows racism to continue to damage its victims. Derrick Bell goes so far as to argue that, “History not only teaches, but also warns that in periods of severe economic distress, the rights of Black people are eroded and their lives endangered. A century ago, American Blacks were already hated by large segments of White society, particularly hard-pressed farmers in the South, and factory workers- many of them recent immigrants – in the North. Black people were made a target for the wrath and frustration of the millions of White Americans being squeezed by that change in job patterns” (Bell Rutgers 348). Bell thinks that these setbacks are not things only of the past, and that they will recur again and again in our future due to failures to turn back inequalities in socioeconomics and status. He writes that, “Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary ‘peaks of progress,’ short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance” (Bell Howard 79). The major reason Bell can be so pessimistic is that the law’s neutrality on issues of oppression always leaves open a new door for racial patterns to shift into.
One of the most modern manifestations of racial oppression through legal neutrality is colorblindness, part of the rallying cry of White males claiming to be victimized by such oppression correctives as affirmative action programs. The trouble with the colorblindness argument is that legal neutrality is effectually biased against the unprivileged, or, as Hernandez puts it, “Colorblindness puts the burden on blacks to change; to receive ‘equal’ treatment, they must be seen by whites as ‘white.’ Hence, the ‘compliment’ that some whites pay to blacks: ‘I don’t think of you as black.’ Colorblindness is, in essence, not the absence of color, but rather monochromatism: whites can be colorblind when there is only one race- when blacks become white” (n300). Just as Bell predicts, programs for Black equality such as affirmative action are threatened just as the economic privilege of Whites begins to slip, like during the early 90s recession. Hernandez tells us that, “At the same time that Whites wanted to become color-blind, Blacks were demanding separate admission standards to schools and jobs. Thus, the ideology of universalism must be viewed in the proper context. It is mostly an attempt by Whites to maintain institutional arrangements which embody the residual results of past overt racism” (305). The neutrality claims are usually bolstered by White men with references to correctives as ‘reverse-discrimination.’ When White men complain that they weren’t responsible for racial oppression and should not be ‘victims’ of its correctives, they are missing the point entirely. The point is that White men are still benefiting from systems of oppression in place for over 400 years, and they continue to benefit from systems, like slavery, long since dead.

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