Social Contract III

Well, I might as well have a go…

A big issue in twentieth century philosophy was the “private language argument”. It is frequently considered that Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was not a beery swine) disproved the existence of private languages in his Philosphical Investigations.

Now I always thought that iffy but could never quite say why until the mid ’90s when I saw the movie Strange Days. The protagonist played by Ralph Fiennes is a bent copper on the eve of the new millenium in a dystopian Los Angeles. His surname is Nero. You gotta hand it to Katherine Bigelow she is a subtle one on the allusions. Anyway Nero sells illegal playback. Basically experiences. Someone wears a head set and it records their experience onto minidisc (remember those!) and then anyone else can don a similar headset and experience it just as if it was happening to them. Now Nero is in this bar and he’s chatting to a middle-aged Japanese businessman and he’s selling his wares and he says the guy can have basically anything he wants. He mentions he can have the experience of an eighteen year old girl taking a shower which seemed to greatly pique the Japanese fella’s interest.

Well, it was a reasonable SF movie I guess but the premise is nonsense. The only way to really experience what it’s like to be an eighteen year old girl in the shower is to be that girl. Either it plays devilment with the users brain and as far as they are concerned they are the person whose experiences they are supposedly vicarously enjoying or - as was suggested very strongly by other scenes in this movie - they experience it with a sort of part of themselves sitting in the stalls eating popcorn. In the first case it is not experiencing what it’s like to be someone else because it is actually being that person and in the second it’s just a more immersive passive entertainment experience like a sort of IMAX on steroids.

For me this train of thought demolished Wittgenstein’s objections to private languages. Our entire inner self is essentially private. There are of course moments of intimacy and empathy but they only ever approximate. There is a spectrum from the caress of a long-term lover to the likes of Jeremy Kyle telling some knocked-up chavette he “feels their pain” but it’s never quite the real thing or more accurately the whole and total thing. It cannot be because the only way I can really experience what it is like to be someone else is to be them and that of course means not being me and therefore I am not experiencing it.

And that for me is where a heck of a lot of social contract stuff falls down. Because practically what social contract stuff means is providing a one size fits all solution to healthcare or education or whatever. Now obviously there is a spectrum here as well but the very idea that stuff as personal as the above mentioned services can be determined by some God-like technocracy is absurd. Very soon the school exam results are out in my country and the government will base their own level of succcess on statistics and percentages and the like which is absurd because what really matters is what the individual kids learned from their own educational experience.

It’s a sort of perverted physics envy which drives the social-contractors. As Einstein once put it, it’s like writing about a Beethoven symphony in terms of air-pressure waves. It is missing the point and the point is this: we are all irreducibly individuals. Any kind of social contractism ignores that. It is crude demagogueish popularism, hidden by “facts” and (especially) “figures” which gives it a sort of pseudo-scientific veneer of being “truth”.

At best it is an attempt to describe extraordinarily complicated phenomena (aka “us”) with a scant few numbers and at worst it is an opportunity for chicanery of the highest level.