The Politics of Personal Space
another extract from Home: a philosophy of personal space
Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world. Martin Heidegger
Let’s hope not! But first, a bit of context…
I was mesmerised by the terrain over which we were passing. The plane was equipped with a camera under the fuselage and its view of the ground, thousands of feet below, was a slow-moving option on the little screen in front of me.
Although many years have elapsed, I shall never forget that flight, returning to the UK from Japan. We headed up through northern China and across Mongolia into Siberia. For hour after hour, there was nothing below us but wilderness – mile upon mile of mountain ranges, snow, ice sheets, and then the frozen lakes and drab vastness of the Russian tundra. It was astoundingly beautiful but hostile; a cruelly inhospitable Garden of Eden before the arrival of Adam.
Then, as we tracked westwards towards Moscow, I saw the first human traces – pipelines heading back from the Siberian waste, then the first roads, straight lines scored across the wilderness to the horizon. Far from being comforting, they only served to emphasise the remoteness of the land across which they stretched. Then the odd building appeared, outposts of the human world, then towns of increasing size, and finally the grey smear of the outskirts of Moscow itself appeared beneath us in the haze. Before long we were over the Baltic and then in slow descent across the Netherlands. The terrain over which we were now passing had been totally re-shaped by humankind: neatly ploughed fields, woods, factories, motorways and huge swathes of suburbia, spread thickly over the land. Below us were straight lines, organised junctions, the gathered pattern of cities with their unfurling sprawls of housing, water flowing in ordered channels over reclaimed land – all utterly unlike the pristine ice and low scrub of a few hours earlier.
For me, that flight recreated, over the span of a few hours, a visual representation of the warming and colonising process of human development over the last 12,000 years, from the barren northern landscape of the last ice age, through the gradual spreading of humankind, to a modern world of commodified and personalised space. Like it or not, we are part of a fine-meshed but fragile human net thrown over the planet, within which our existence is essentially communal and our lives interconnected.
On reflection, however, that interconnected web was only half the story. The other half concerns what happens when our sense of political identity loses touch with our personal space.
Where do you belong on the map of life? Our life get’s pieced together by the places that give us identity.
For many people, the idea of being defined by their home has become problematic. We may move regularly, have friends all over, commute a distance to our workplace, where we meet with other circles of friends or at least acquaintances. Some are accused of being more ‘at home’ in the office than in their own home. Some use work or hobbies to escape a home that does not provide them with the identity they need. Some just have a low boredom threshold when it comes to places to live. Some see themselves as genuinely cosmopolitan; if a better job is offered in Hong Kong or Sydney, they’ll go – and, after all, they expect to meet up with circles of like-minded people when they get there, and they can always return regularly to visit friends and relatives. It’s a small world – you can live anywhere and stay in touch!
One attraction of such cosmopolitanism is the refusal to be limited by a label. The ancient Greek thinker, Diogenes of Sinope (404–323BCE), the first Cynic philosopher, best known for living in a barrel with provocative disregard for social convention, refused to say to which city, or polis, he belonged and therefore declared himself to be a citizen of the world, a ‘cosmopolitan’.
But is that attitude emotionally and intellectually sustainable? We may defy the conventions of one place, but in doing so – emotionally, if not physically – we tend to identify ourselves with another. I may reject the narrowness of a childhood home, only to adopt the hedonistic rules of student life. Diogenes claims to be cosmopolitan because he thinks globally; his map is larger than that of most people of his day, so he can afford to become a rebel and a non-conformist.
Our thinking about the social and political world cannot be disinterested or objective; that way lies the madness of thinking we can control the uncontrollable, playing chess with independently motivated pieces. The truth we seek needs to be engaged, rather than analytic – truth for me, truth upon which I can act, truth that speaks not just to my mind, but to my emotions. But can I become cosmopolitan without also having some sense of home from which to start my journey of exploration? I love the variety of cultures, languages and styles of food and dress – uniformity (as we see too often in globalised retail offerings) would be boring – but my enjoyment of all these things, and of the sense of adventure when travelling, is based on a prior sense of who I am, on my ‘home’. To travel with no prior identity is to drift rather than to explore.
However, I disagree with the quotation from Heidegger that stands at the head of this post. Seeing the world as increasingly mechanised and globalised, he feared that this would inevitably lead to a kind of homelessness. As we shall see, that is indeed the threat of the globalising and impersonal tendency in the world today, but I sense that its threat will always be countered by a resurgence of commitment to what is particular and local, with results that may be either beneficial or seriously damaging. Heidegger saw what was coming, but not our reaction to it, which has already set its dangerous stamp upon the twenty-first century.
However, in order to appreciate the personal implications of this, we need to step back and consider a fundamental moral issue that threatens to destabilise our political sense of home, an issue that originated almost two and a half thousand years ago in China.
The challenge of Mo Tzu
Mo Tzu, a Confucian philosopher born in the fifth century BCE, challenged the established view of the society of his day. Confucius had placed great emphasis on respect and family loyalty. Although he proposed a version of the ‘Golden Rule’, namely that you should avoid doing to others what you would not wish them to do to you, he believed that one should give priority to one’s own family and also show respect to those in authority. For Confucius, society formed a natural hierarchy, so that, although he saw the need for courtesy and correct behaviour towards everyone, it was first of all necessary for people to know their place and to act accordingly. The implication of his social hierarchy and culture of respect, was that it was both unreasonable and unnatural to attempt to treat everyone in the same way.
Mo Tzu, however, claimed that particular concern for one’s own family, at the expense of equal goodwill towards all, was at the root of all social evils. Whereas Confucius’ version of the Golden Rule was essentially negative, avoiding harm, Mo Tzu wanted to make it positive, treating everyone equally. Forgetting any prior commitment to kinship or rank, every action should be judged on the basis of whether or not it helped society as a whole. He agued that people should live more frugally, rather than waste their resources on lavish ceremonies, particularly on funeral rites.
In effect, Mo Tzu was a utilitarian, more than two thousand years before Jeremy Bentham set down his principle of utility. He sought a society based on the greatest good for the greatest number, rather than one based on hierarchy and family loyalty.
But is it realistic to expect us to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Is it not more natural for us to care most for people who are like ourselves, particularly our close friends and family?
To take the most obvious example; suppose you see a group of children struggling in deep water and in immediate danger of drowning. You have a chance to save only one of them. Would it really be a matter of indifference to you which of them you tried to save, if one of them was your own child? Could you, in that moment of crisis, really opt to pluck another child from the water and leave your own to drown? Could you look back, seeing your own child pleading for help, and not feel utterly torn? Would you not, in that fearful moment, see flashing before your mind’s eye all those precious times that you shared with that child since his or her birth? Does your own child not occupy a unique place on your personal map, unlike the other children in distress? From a utilitarian perspective, it would require great moral courage to opt to save the child of a stranger, but could you live with yourself if you did so?
Rationally, you might applaud the idea of treating all alike, reducing your own goods to the level of the poorest, and behaving towards complete strangers as you would your own family and friends, but could you actually do it? That is the challenge human nature poses both to Mo Tzu and to modern utilitarianism. Whatever reason may say, our natural instinct is to prioritise care for our own family and friends.
Observe other species and we see the willingness of parents to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their offspring, with whom they have a unique relationship. Penguins, returning to their colony after feeding out at sea, can detect the particular cry of their own chick among thousands of – to human eyes – apparently identical ones. Does that indicate that they are insufficiently evolved, and that eventually they will maximise the number who can survive, by sharing their regurgitated fish equally among all the chicks in the colony? However agonisingly painful it is to watch some young animals die while others are flourishing, we have to accept that such kinship priority is deeply embedded in the survival mechanism of many species, humans included.
Common sense suggests that, without particular commitments and variations in the value we give to things, we have no basis for choice or action. How do we decide anything, if all options are equally important and appealing? It is precisely because I value some things and people more than others, that I can choose what to do. We therefore need to strike a balance between the universal and the particular, between being a citizen of the world and one of a particular culture, nation and city.
But, if a genuinely personal cosmopolitan vision is problematic, so also is the alternative. To limit our sense of ‘home’ to one particular place, makes us equally vulnerable, because everything – whether a locality, a religion or a political creed – will eventually change beyond recognition and finally disappear. That is a fact of life, and any philosophy that pretends it is not the case is delusional and probably pathological. Hitler’s Third Reich, destined at its launch to last a thousand years, managed to survive just twelve. Most projects touted as ‘world beating’ end up as failures. Tomorrow’s promised bestseller will one day be remaindered. I knew, as soon as my publisher started to describe me as a ‘bestselling author’ on the back cover of my books, that I was doomed to decline. Linking our supposed eternal destiny to a particular person, place or idea is a recipe for disappointment, if not disaster.
Stoic mapping
One answer to Mo Tzu’s challenge can be found in the writings of the Stoics of ancient Greece. They considered the whole world to be rationally ordered, and therefore recommended that human beings should consider their place within it and act accordingly. Hence, they believed that everyone belonged to the family of humankind and should be treated with equal justice, giving rational underpinning to the Cynic Diogenes’ view that he was ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than committed only to one particular polis. Zeno of Citium (c 334–262 BCE), founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, used the term oikeiôsis to describe something that belongs to you, or to which you are committed. The word derives from oikos, meaning a house or a domestic setting, and therefore refers to the sense of ‘home’ in the things with which we identify. But how can we move beyond such personal commitments to treat all equally? The clue lies in a development of this idea of oikeiôsis.
In the second century, the Stoic philosopher Hierocles took up the idea of oikeiôsis, arguing that ‘each of us is … circumscribed by many circles’.40 The closest of these concentric circles is that of one’s own mind and body, but surrounding it comes the circle of brothers and sisters, parents and other close relatives, and then, in a third, he places grandparents and cousins. Beyond these comes the circle of the people who belong to your own city, then your own province, until, finally, there is the circle representing the whole human race.
So far; so Confucius. But, for Hierocles, the ethical implication of this is that we should train ourselves to care about those in the outer circles as though they were in the inner ones. We should try to be as morally committed to the welfare of someone on the other side of the world, as we would be to a near neighbour.
In this way, he gives practical expression to the ‘mapping’ process we outlined earlier. He recognises the way in which we construct the concentric circles of awareness, and then applies ethical logic to say how this should lead us to treat others, allowing our natural commitments to spread outwards, from our own family and friends, through our neighbourhood and nation, towards the global community.
This Stoic approach gives a practical way of overcoming our present dilemma. The leap from emotional particularity to utilitarian globalism is just too great, and appears to pit the immediate and local against the universal. If it’s either/or, we know that, for all but the utilitarian hero, the immediate and local tends to win. But if we gradually work our way outwards through the circles of things with which we identify, we take the personal element with us as we approach global issues.
In other words, following Stoic advice, we should train ourselves to think globally without negating our commitment to those near to us. It should not be an either/or calculation, but a both/and enlargement of the circles with which we identify.
There is an ethical parallel to this in the Buddhist tradition. In a meditation that aims to develop compassion, Buddhists are encouraged to think of every creature as if it were their own mother. That may prove a bit of a stretch of the meditative imagination, and it rather depends on our relationship with our own mother, but the end result is exactly that encouraged by Hierocles. Both traditions seek to enlarge the awareness of our commitments to others based on our own sense of belonging, whether that is through perception, logical reflection or meditation.
So our idea of home can expand outwards, through concentric circles of personal space, each populated by those people, things and ideas that give shape to who we are. It provides a starting point for politics and ethics, without falling into the utilitarian trap of assuming we can simply legislate for equality and hope that human nature will fall into line. The Stoic/Buddhist approach here may avoid the social and political equivalent of ‘the breath of empty space’, namely the atomisation of society.
The night sky; Nietzsche’s ‘breath of empty space’. If there is horror at being lost in the universe, there may be equal horror at being lost in an impersonal world of standardised and commodified human beings. We fight against it in our quest for ‘home’.
Social atomism
Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Newton and others transformed the older view of the world, introducing modern science based on reason and observation. That shift started a process that led to the clash between our personal need to be ‘at home’ in our world, and the threat of an impersonal universe.
But the seventeenth century saw an equally radical shift in the view of society and the individual, highlighted in a shift in ideas between those of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1637–1704), a shift towards the introduction of what was to become representative democracy.
Before the spread of modern democracy, most societies – even when they operated under direct democratic control, as in ancient Athens – were organised as a hierarchy. Typically, at the summit was the king, emperor, tribal chief or whatever, whose authority was given by God, and below him (or, rarely, her) came nobles, landowners and so on down to the common people. In such a world, your life opportunities were largely inherited and determined by your rank. You had relatively little prospect of changing your social status, although of course there were always exceptions. Whether maintained by divine will or raw secular power, it was broadly speaking a society based on tradition and imposed values. Your personal space in that society was given rather than chosen.
At the very bottom of that hierarchy, in many societies, came the slaves. Deprived of rights, owned and used as human tools, they were effectively dehumanised. The act of returning freedom to a slave was not just a matter of restoring dignity or social status, but fundamental humanity. It was a restoration of personal space – the right to self-chosen values and relationships, and hopefully also a place to call home.
Hobbes believed that, in the absence of law, humankind would descend into chaos, and life would become ‘nasty, brutish and short’. He therefore saw the value of having a ruler who was to be given authority to maintain and enforce law and order over everyone within his or her jurisdiction. In this, his view was closer to the earlier dispensation, where rules were imposed from top down.
For John Locke, however, authority was to be established through the will of the people. A ruler is therefore answerable to parliament, which in turn represents – in theory, if not in practice – all citizens. Individuals were seen as equal and deserving of rights, each motivated by his or her own self-interest. Government and the law were established by consent and, by and large, were to interfere with people’s individual freedoms as little as possible. That pattern established social atomism, the view that society is an aggregate of individuals who make it up. It has persisted to the present day, in spite of all the social changes and wars that have intervened over the centuries. It underlies debates about how much a government should or should not interfere in the lives of individual citizens.
At one extreme, totalitarian regimes have tried to control every aspect of an atomised society, at the other, government regulation is minimised. But in both cases, the structure of society is not organic, but comprises an atomised base of equal individuals, with a legal and political structure imposed over it. The question dividing the traditional left and right of political debate is the extent to which the aggregate base is seen as completely atomised, or as representing a compound entity called ‘society’.
Here, for example, is the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, speaking in 1987:
And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.41
In an attempt to be fair, I have extended the quotation a little, rather than give just the first two sentences here, as is often the case, in order to show that, in her view, there was indeed some responsibility to help others, but only after looking after ourselves, and she goes on to speak about rights being balanced against responsibilities.
But notice the background assumption here. In a personalised world, as in my view of the network of human relationships as my plane descended over Europe, what comes to the fore is the essentially interconnected nature of society. Individuals have their place within it, and receive their identity from it. Removed from society, the individual is impoverished, and eventually becomes sub-human, deprived of language. But in this atomised view, individuals, with their own agenda and aspirations, their personal choices and freedoms, are the starting point. Social cohesion is to be maintained, because it is needed for survival, but only by light-touch regulation.
When this atomised view of society is extended into the sphere of economics, you have the phenomenon that is generally labelled ‘neo-liberalism’ – maximum freedom for the individual to pursue his or her own desired goals, with minimal tax and minimal intervention by government, beyond what is required to maintain law and order.
An atomised society expressed in concrete?
I see this as the social and economic equivalent of the impersonal world revealed by science. We are essentially atoms in a void, collaborating practically and morally on the basis of enlightened self-interest. It is reflected in the twin poles of a broad western consensus about political and economic life – democracy and capitalism.
For many, those poles become the unquestioned good and the endpoint of any social or political journey. In The End of History and the Last Man the American economist Francis Fukuyama argued that the west had effectively ended any debate about the best way to organise society. Coming in 1992, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, his judgement seemed unchallengeable.
Within political debate, there is a range of views, from individualistic liberalism on the one hand to more communitarian and socialist ideals on the other, and the balance of these is beyond our concern here. However, throughout that range, the justification of political action is generally based on the will of the people, whether real or falsely invoked. Even those who wish to impose control from the top down at least pretend to justify their actions on the basis of an aggregate of individual needs. Things are done for the good of the people, even if the people do not necessarily appear to feel the benefit!
When, in an atomised society, people complain about their situation, the government response is to parade all the steps that they have already taken to provide what is needed. In effect, they say ‘How can you possibly complain? We have invested millions of dollars or pounds in your area!’ What they are less keen to ask is, ‘Why has this existing expenditure not provided what you think you need?’ And the reason they do not ask that question is because they fear the answer might be beyond their power to address.
In an atomised society, government tends to assume that every problem can be solved by an injection of cash or new legislation. It does not generally take into account the fact that, beyond the presenting problem, people’s real complaint may relate to their collective loss of personal space, home and identity.
Most political issues are complex, and it would be pointless to attempt a simplistic analysis, but I would raise just one tentative question: is it possible that one component in a range of recent political phenomena – from Donald Trump’s presidency, to the Brexit vote or the unrest in Hong Kong – may be a perceived loss of personal space and identity on the part of people who do not feel adequately represented?
For the purpose of examining the political implications of personal space, we need to take from this discussion one thing only: that the way in which most political decisions are justified is based on an atomisation of society, which is very different from the personalised and value-orientated perceptions and choices of individuals. Let us take an example from the Covid-19 pandemic. Rules about social distancing, imposed to minimise the spread of the virus, were justified by the aggregate need of society as a whole – we all benefit if transmission is stopped – but for individuals, their personal values and personal commitments may lead them to break the rules, not because they want to disobey on principle, but simply because their personal commitments override the potential benefit to society as a whole.
The ultimate horror: atomised lives, sacrificed at Verdun in 1916. The battle, in a process of mechanised slaughter unlike any before it, saw 377,000 French casualties and 337,000 German. Troops were thrown into battle in the hope that the sheer number of casualties they inflicted would eventually sap the other side of the strength or willingness to continue fighting. Yet each cross marks a personal tragedy and a family bereaved.
In an atomised society, people belong to classes or socio-economic groups. They are targeted by the media, based on their perceived shopping preferences, and are surveyed by those who want to know their net worth as consumers. In an atomised world, I represent a group, before I represent myself; I am expected to wear a social mask and act accordingly, and if I rebel, I am simply playing at being an eccentric and am therefore put in just another atomised pigeonhole.
From a capitalist point of view, it is easy to reduce people to an atomised role, as either a producer or consumer. The danger is that people may eventually come to see themselves in terms that are defined by their shopping. In an atomised world, democracy becomes the opportunity to manipulate the majority and then claim their mandate.
In such a society, companies that present themselves as ‘global’ are, of course, not concerned with global wellbeing at all; they create their own particular networks and spread them around the globe, which is quite another matter. Global capitalism is as narrowly focused in its loyalties as any local business empire, only more successful and widespread.
Atomisation thus promotes (or at least allows) rootlessness. You are seen as an individual with rights, but without taking into account your unique position and home. In an atomised world, the individual counts as one among millions, of infinitesimal value and influence. In a communitarian world, by contrast, the individual is part of a network, and his or her significance and value is given in terms of that larger but identifiable group.
Taken to its logical conclusion, social atomism might indeed have led to the global homelessness of which Heidegger warned. That it has not yet happened is down to another factor related to home: nationalism. But that will be the topic for my next Substack…
[This post is an extract from Home: a philosophy of personal space. For further information about this and my other publications, along with free notes and articles, take a look at: essexthinker.com ]