Currently I am reading The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can’t be Jammed for one of my DMin courses. What follows below is a reflection on one aspect of their critique of countercultural thinking.
In the countercultural movement often rules are seen as oppressive and so the practice has often been to abolish rules. Heath and Potter give as example feminists who assumed that the very existence of rules was a symptom of the oppression of women. Thus they opted to abolish those rules and not to reform them. This decision by feminism to abolish those rules was influenced by the countercultural critique. “Freedom for women thus becomes equated with freedom from social norms.” (71) Heath and Potter conclude, “In the end, this was a disastrous equation. Not only did it set up a completely unobtainable state as the ideal of liberation, but it created a tendency to dismiss as ‘co-optation’ or ‘selling out’ any acceptance of reforms that might actually lead to tangible improvements in women’s lives.” (71)
With this example the questions are raised: “What are our lives so structure? Why can’t we all be free simply to do as we choose?” (72). Hunter and Heath argue that “coercion may be necessary even in the absence of evil. Perfectly free and equal individuals often have an incentive to adopt coercively enforced rules of conduct to govern their interactions. So the existence of coercion in society is not always a sign of domination, of the need to control evil or of one group imposing it’s will upon another. Often everyone is better off when everyone is governed by a set of enforced rules.” (77) This assertion then leads into a discussion of a problem that is known as “collective action problems.” In situations where ther is an absence of rules, there is no incentive to invest an optimal level of effort for a task. For example, in Hippie communes spontaneous action to do the common good does not happen on its own because people don’t have an incentive to do what is necessary to bring about a desired outcome.
Heath and Potter then apply the prisoners dilemma (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/prisoner-dilemma/) from game theory to this “collective action problems” which basically “illustrates a conflict between individual and group rationality. A group whose members pursue rational self-interest may all end up worse off than a group whose members act contrary to rational self-interest. More generally, if the payoffs are not assumed to represent self-interest, a group whose members rationally pursue any goals may all meet less success than if they had not rationally pursued their goals individually” (see website above). Thus a lot of the rules that govern our daily life have as their purpose to eliminate the “collective action problems”. Heath and Potter note, “The important point about these rules [such as queuing] is that they all represent instances in which everyone benefits from the constraints the rules impose. Thus, far from repressing our fundamental needs and desires, these rules are precisely what enable us to satisfy them.” (81) This clearly demonstrates how many forms of the countercultural rebellion are destructive and counterproductive. The countercultural actions undermine or discrediting social norms and institutions that actually serve an important function in our communities.
This is not to say that all forms of coercion are good, obviously there are times when some need to be challenged. Potter and Heath call us to learn to distinguish between dissent and deviance. “Dissent is like civil disobedience. It occurs when people are willing in principle to play by the rules but have a genuine, good-faith objection to the specific content of the prevailing set of rules. They disobey despite the consequences that these actions may incur [such as MLK]. Deviance, on the other hand, occurs when people disobey the rules for self-interested reasons.” (82) A simple rule of thumb is given to distinguish whether or not an action taken falls under the dissent or deviance category: “What if everyone did that? – would it make the world a better place to live? If the answer is no, then we have grounds to be suspicious.” (84)
I thought these insights were great. I just heard of someone who had joined a Hippie commune but was disillusioned by how it all played out. I assume the reason for this was rooted in the commune’s “collective action problems.” These insights are also interesting for Christian communities. What would the church look like if we set our self-interests aside and could be committed to the common good? Maybe we should ask ourselves more often the question, “What if everyone did that? – would it make the world a better place to live?”
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