As is so often the case with my posts I’m writing the end result of a chain of thoughts that has been brewing for quite some time. Without references (unless I can find some) I tend to argue on a wide variety of subjects. At some point soon I’m going to write up a few words about my recent time in Romania, which was quite an experience but at the moment my thoughts seem to be boiling around the concept of trust in the public sphere.
This all stems from conversations I have, either with people face to face, or via various boards, e-mails and whatnot. When I speak of trust I’m not really thinking in terms of politicians, who can never be trusted, but in terms of cultures and ideologies. Movements. Recently a small debate about the Tea Party movement in the states lead someone to proclaim that their links with the John Birch society demonstrated they were obviously crazy.
Links?
Well, a few people who move within the tea party movement are also associated with the Birchers. The logic becomes tenuous when you move past the headlines, of course. It’s the sort of linkage that allows for conspiracy to appear everywhere, but it did provoke me to think a little on the matter of the treatment of cultures and movements verses the individual.
Someone proclaims, my opponent is a Bircher, he’s nuts. Someone claims, you hate Islam, therefore you hate all muslims, therefore you are wrong. You will actually find both these arguments coming from the same mouth if you ask… the contradiction doesn’t seem to register. Of the two positions the first is actually somewhat logical as a starting point. Somewhat. It is logical for a member of one cultural group to expect certain things of another cultural group; stereotypes of other groups are a basic starting point for assessing members of that group, so long as the stereotype doesn’t become overwhelming. I, being broadly of the right wing, Christian and so on would be assessed by others by those basic cultural markers, and they’d form an initial impression of how I might behave based on that. They’d be in for a shock, of course, but that’s life.
The John Birch society is a culture. Islam is a culture. Marxism is a culture. Judging members of these cultures initially by the fact that they are members of those cultures does fall into the area of “prejudice” (being Latin for “judgement before”) and this is good, as far as it goes. Judging members of those cultures by their membership once subsequent facts about them are known becomes something else, but even then one has to make some allowances for the culture involved. I, personally, would be much less likely to accept members of Islamic culture as trustworthy even after getting to know them as individuals, just because the culture they’re imbued in is one of mistrust and deception.
However that’s a digression. So far I haven’t addressed the problem we face today, namely that we are expected to treat all cultures equally. I tend to think of this as the Windows Security Model, which reflects my background in that whole IT thing. A security model is a set of rules for dealing with agents in a system, where agents can be anything from pieces of software to users (in software terms it’s difficult to tell the difference most of the time). The Windows security mode was initially non-existence, in that everything could access just about everything else, except for a few spots where the software equivalent of OSB had been hastily screwed down over the top of important bits to stop direct access. This attitude was one of the reasons Windows became so easy to crack and infect with viruses. It was like punching through a wet cardboard box.
The best way to understand this is to recall the dictum “Trust but Verify”, popular in American Republican circles for a while, or at least in the more media-facing ones. Trust but Verify is the Windows security model in a nutshell. It started out from a position of assuming benign intent, and then tried to check whether the opposite was the case. When you are operating in a domain where all cultures are equal and equally good, this is a reasonable assumption to make.
It assumes, however, that all cultures are equal and equally good. This is not the case. Some cultures are simply better than others. Some are bad. This flies right in the face of the cultural relativist argument that states all cultures are equally valid (avoiding such patriarchally judgemental and outmoded tribalistic ideas as “good” and “bad” by resorting to personal validity as the only marker is a sign you’ve gone wrong somewhere, I reckon). The Windows security model still operates from a “trust but verify” position but, in the internet era, now has to contain lots of caveats and default behaviours created by previous verifications of behaviour. It is logically inconsistent, but it remains nevertheless, and forces people to constantly suffer the predations of other agents on their personal computers until they have verified that those agents are “bad”. Yet it carries on trusting every new agent it comes across. In a hostile world this is an evolutionary dead end.
Then comes the Unix security model, in use on various Unixen and Unix-like operating systems such as the rather infamous Linux-based systems. The default behaviour for this model is that agents are not trusted, except as far as the system allows them to be trusted. There are rules to follow and those rules are quite simple, but the basic assumption is that unless someone has been given rights to access a particular function, they cannot access it. This is the near-precise opposite of the Windows model and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good model to follow when assessing members of other cultures. Individual users can be granted rights, and groups can be granted rights, which filter down to individual users, but unless they are granted access, they don’t have it.
I may trust a Muslim (an individual), but I will never trust Islam. If I grant an individual Muslim access to myself, I don’t grant Islam access. But there I go with islam again.
Windows does have a similar system but it starts from the assumption that agents have access and then progressively denies it to them. his can create problems, as you have to constantly monitor your system to be sure that things that shouldn’t be access are still secured.
Here’s the irony: if you apply these models as a political system, they actually work backwards. The Windows security model applied by the state to the individual is preferable as it provides the most freedom to the most agents. The state is the guarantor of rights, and in the idects as little as possible to restrict those rights, as it must operate entirely by the consent of the agents in question. The Unix model is tyranny, when applied by the state, as it assumes that the state is the source of all rights.
So why do I like it so much? It’s actually reversed. When the individual applies the Windows model to the state, you have a tyranny – the state now has access to all things and the individual can only lash up temporary cover to hide things from the all-seeing state. The unix model applied from the bottom up is freedom. The individual denies the state access to all things and allows it access only to that which it desires the state to see. It’s all a matter of perspective and, from the perspective of interacting with cultures that are not your own, the Unix model is preferable as it allows you to verify first, then trust, and only as far as you want to do so.
You have to assume two things. First, that cultures are not equal; some are better than others. Second, that you have the right to judge before you trust, and that your judgement includes the right to deny trust – that is, prevent access. To discriminate. To prefer. The very act of making this assumptions places you in a different culture to others and they will automatically judge you by that, yet immediately dismiss you as bad because you are not judging everyone as good.
Fortunately you are now able to tell them to bugger off.