Machines and Games

 

        My recent reflections about "saintly institutions" got me recalling some old ideas from my sociology teaching days.

        The intro soc textbooks typically said that there were three or four lines of theory in sociology: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory (Marxism), and rational choice theory. I thought that the last two could be considered sub-forms of the first two, which is not something that I want to go into here. I want to focus on the first two.

        Functionalist theory uses a living organism as the metaphor for how societies should function. Living organisms have structures like skeletons and circulatory systems, and each structure has a function. For example, the skeleton helps the organism  hold together, and the circulatory system nourishes the cells in the organism.

        An organism is just a highly developed machine. It is deterministic. When it is stimulated in a certain way, it responds in a certain way. If something from outside disrupts one of its functions, it corrects the disruption (homeostasis).

        The organic metaphor sees society as a set of structures (rules and laws). Each rule has a function. If we design the rules well, the organism will function well. When things aren’t going well, we revise the law. Our law library shelves get longer and longer, and we need more and more lawyers to navigate what we have created. Even behaviors that are not covered in the law books can lead to lawsuits, which means more lawyers and more restrictions on what we can do.

        The second line of theory is labeled "symbolic interactionism." Its defining metaphor is the game. The people playing the game make the rules, and most players obey the rules. When a lot of them don't obey, the players change the rules or create handicaps. This theory says that there are no divinely-sanctioned rules for living--all moral rules are arrived at by group consensus. This goes against my Catholic tradition, but I point to areas where my Catholic tradition has had to change what it considered "natural." For centuries the church forbade "usury," taking interest on loans. Somewhere around the 1500s it abandoned that moral principle. Somewhat later it quit accepting slavery as a permissible moral practice. Recently a top church authority (Pope St. John Paul II) said that capital punishment is immoral, a judgment echoed by most church authorities these days, in spite of widespread U.S. Catholic belief that it is still permissible.

        In other words, the Catholic community has changed its rules.

        An institution such as "the economy" is a set of games. When I said that no institution is saintly, I was saying that no institution operates like a machine. We cannot design an economy so that it will always operate with justice. When we try to do that, we can change the rules, and in the back of our mind we can hope that one more tinkering with the rules will make the machine automatically produce justice. But it won't. We are in a game, and there will always be some people who will break the rules. We can punish the rule-breakers (sinners), or we can hold back on the punishment (forgiveness) and consider modifying the rules to make the playing field more fair.

        In practice, both theories appear similar, but they differ in how we make moral judgments on their basis. If we believe that there are divinely authorized rules (natural law), then we see rule-breakers as worthy of punishment, and if punishment does not work, worthy of exclusion from society. ("Lock 'em up and throw away the key.") We tell ourselves that our punishment (prison) is remedial--we want prisoners to be rehabilitated so they can return to society as fully-functioning participants, but in most places we cannot find the resources needed to practice rehabilitation alongside punishment. Prisons in most places are designed for punishment, period. If there is rehabilitation, somebody is going beyond what the "correctional" institution is capable of. Such people are to be applauded, but the correction system cannot do more than punish.

        If we see our institutions as games, we are more open to modifying the rules without excluding rule-breakers from future play. We punish rule-breakers, but always with the assumption that the rulebreakers are just like us, and forgiving their violation may be better than punishing them. They may even be prophets calling us to make the game more fair. They are part of "us," not a cancer on the body politic.

        Our economic rules do need serious modifying. Most of us admit that the middle class has been shrinking, and that it is getting harder and harder to find decent housing, and affordable food and transportation. This is why we elected Donald Trump.

        Mr. Trump's backers are not likely to be open to changing any rules that will make the game more fair for people below them on the economic scale. They will say that the economy is a machine, and is working just fine. Rising tides lift all boats. Except that they don't. They will resist the idea that the game is set up so that more and more people cannot win. If they do not adjust the rules, the players will take their marbles and go home. They will abandon the game. They could vote Mr. Trump and his allies out in the next election, or they might decide that democracy will never work and turn to violent ways to get what they think is fairness. 

        In fairness to Mr. Trump, the Democrats have been no more likely to welcome changing the rules than backers of Mr. Trump. Voters have recognized this, and have punished the Democrats.

        To recap: our institutions are not saintly; people keep breaking the rules. There is no perfect structure that will prevent that. We should look at our institutions as games that require fair rules if we want people to keep playing them. Rule-breakers are not all evil, worthy of hell-fire. They are people like us, who want to play in our games. We should welcome them and listen to them. There will always be some people who will push the limits and break the rules, but when we decide that there are too many such people, we will change the rules of the game.