Batman and Philosophy IV: Social Order in Gotham City...and New Orleans?

[Razor]

This is a new section of the Batman and Philosophy threads, moving into the Law, Justice, and Social Order side of things. Expect FTS to mention Social Contract about 500000 times a post.

For the record, the first time I mention a comic, book, or news headline I will most invariable provide a link in the italicized word. I will forgo such linkage if I deem the new event to be highly publicized, such as New Orleans/Katrina.

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We take this social order we live in today for granted. It's true. I wake up and expect my shit to be where I left it. You leave your home and expect to be able to walk to where you're going without being robbed. And if things don't work out that way, well then. Where in the hell was the government (Police) to keep the social order in check?

The question posed today is a simple one. What happens when that social order is repealed? What happens when the government can no longer be guaranteed to protect you? And, as a parallel, I'm going to use Batman to start things off.

No Man's Land is a 5 volume, many comic story book arc. It centers around Gotham after a major earthquake has ravaged her infrastructure, as evidenced in Cataclysm. The federal government, being worked by Lex Luthor, has refused aid and blocked off entry to the island city.

Things get bad, and bad fast. The people who stayed turn quickly into scavengers, reverting to primal instincts. Penguin becomes a trade czar, trading people food for all kinds of shiny devices and bullets. Which, coincidentally, becomes a massive new system of trade. The gangs, lead by various Batman villains, trade food to the civilians for bullets or anything else the civilians can find that will help the gang. Things only get worse as the Gotham City Police Department starts to lose ground in the turfs wars and Batman is no where to be seen. People fall further and further into primal, carnal, pack mentalities. Then Batman shows up, and starts a gang war of his own. Through the combined energies of Batman and Commissioner Gordon they fight for Gotham until Lex Luthor comes back to buy all of Gotham (for dirt cheap), is thwarted by Batman, and the US Government reverses it's prior order of refusal for government aid.

What we see there, in that rather elegant case study, is a refusal of the Social Contract. If you've read the Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, or Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, you should know what I'm talking about. Under Locke, we citizens have a few basic rights under the government. If these rights are not met, we have the right to rebel.

How is this a story of the refusal of the Social Contract, Razor? Well, I'm glad you asked voice in my head that acts like FTS. Locke argues for three basic human rights. These can be termed the Natural Rights of Man:

1. Life
2. Liberty
3. Estate

You'll remember the first two from something I like to call the United States Declaration of Motherfucking Independence.

When we are in a government run, social order intact society, everyone really likes these natural rights. Hey, you have the right to live! Hey, you can do whatever you want as long as you don't kill me! Hey, you can get as much wealth as you want as long as you don't kill me or impede on my right to liberty!

However, as seen in No Man's Land, this isn't the case when humans lose their higher authority. When there is no person to watch over them and make sure they are upheld to a certain standard, if it were. That isn't to say all people will descend to the levels of gang (cough*pack*cough) warfare, just as not everyone obeys the Social Contract. But enough fall victim to efficiently declare that most of humanity is one government away from descending into roaming packs of vandals.

How about the real world? I give you...New Orleans Post Katrina. While we didn't see mass gang warfare, we saw devastation. We saw mass looting, we saw random killings, we saw basic disregard for the government. We saw, basically, No Man's Land circa day 5. If FEMA had been any longer, we could have started to see some gang warfare. I'm almost sure of it.

At any rate, since I'm getting really long winded on this one, here's the question. Is the Social Contract, and all that it stands for, held intact merely because of our government? Do you agree with me that if we were left to our own devices man would descend into the bowels of primal urges? Or do you disagree with me and the people of No Man's Land, and contend that people are naturally co-habitable? Stake your claim.

 

[Dexter]

I'd like to introduce you to a philosophy called Anarcho-Capitalism.

VERY interesting philosophy. The premise is:

A) People are, by nature, good and desire order.

B) People are, by nature, predisposed to desire an economic system which, once established, will then sustain itself under the principles of capitalism.

I think there's some merit to that. Of course you're going to have a handful who will take advantage of a suddenly and violently anarchistic situation, as we saw post-Katrina, but given enough time and left in a vacuum, it's absolutely conceivable that the majority will stand up for themselves and re-establish order by force of numbers. In otherwords, those that desire order so greatly outnumber those that defy it that they'll overwhelm the looters and rioters and bring about peace through superior firepower, so to speak.

From there, it's likely that a barter system and a form of Old West justice kicks in. A volunteer police force emerges, probably supported by public donation as it's in the best interests of everyone for it to exist, with laws and punishments dictated by the circumstances.

This is all highly theoretical of course, and to buy into it, you have to take a few things on faith. First and foremost, you have to believe in the goodness of mankind. I, for one, do. I strongly believe that the vast majority of us, deep down, are good people who would rather help our fellow man in times of crisis rather than sabotage him. Once you accept that, it simply becomes a matter of accepting that an exchange of goods and services will develop out of necessity, and that exchange naturally takes the form of a capitalist system. That's perhaps the harder one to buy into, but I think history bears this out in the vast majority of circumstances.

 

[FromTheSouth]

Ok.......

The first thing we must remember is that man enters into a social contract directly from the state of nature. Ordered society is formed by men who were previously savages. The consent to be governed is tacit, meaning that under social contract theory, Dexter is right. Man does desire order. This is evidenced when comparing the first world to the third world. Societies with plentiful resources are both ordered and charitable. Undeveloped nations are rules by clans, gangs, and warlords. Ordered society has a regulated economy and tax system designed to prop the worst off. Developing nations exist on barter and any rudimentary economy that develops is likely to be overrun by those with the guns.

In the Batman example, the first thing you realize is that once order collapses in the economy, it collapses amongst the people. Once resources start being horded, people fight to get what they can. These are rational men acting irrationally. I think it's important to establish that once an economy breaks down, the government is not far behind. The local authorities are incapable of properly allocating resources, and the problem is access. The Batman series is a cry to open up the markets. An isolated body deals with finite resources, however, an open market allows for surpluses to be traded for another nations surpluses. Here is where the social contract steps in.

Individuals cede power to a united body in order to maintain those surpluses and foreign markets. A government must do this to maintain order. A government can only provide for life, liberty, and property if it takes appropriate measures to maintain the three. The maintenance of our natural rights is seen through police, armies, courts, infrastructure, and an open market. Once any one of these entities break down, man will revolt. It is not an evil nature, but as Dexter noted, it is a survival instinct.

When infrastructure broke down in New Orleans, government had not provided an avenue for people to fulfill their needs. The people of New Orleans were failed by the government at every level. When government fails man, man must maintain his own life, which according to Emerson, is a moral obligation. This is why we saw such savage activity by those left in the city. There were murders that will never be solved, looting, vandalism, rape, and any crime imaginable. These were not the actions of irrational men. They were the actions of rational men doing what was necessary to solve.

New Orleans paints a bleak picture of the idea of man's good nature. When left alone, the people in New Orleans did not act well, according to the news. However, the stories that were left afterward were of people helping people, sharing rations, and trying to survive as a whole. The news would have you believe that the Superdome became the Thunderdome, and while it was bad, 100,000 people helped each other to survive when everyone charged with protecting them had abandoned them.

 

[The Mark of Zur-En-Arrh]

Well i'd have to agree with FTS personally. Once governing bodies break down and all supplies are exhausted, society will inevitably crumble soon after. To quote the Clown Prince of Crime, 'when the chips are down, these people will eat each other.'

Imagine for a moment that you are facing the same situation as depicted in No Man's Land. An earthquake hits your town, just about everything is destroyed, and rather than assist in repairs and rescue operations, the government decides to cut your town off from the rest of the country, and leave you to rot. Fast forward say, 3 months down the line, until there is no more fresh food. Forget fresh, there's no food. Hell even all the domestic animals have been eaten AND the stuff you used to feed them as well. You're starving, your family is starving, you're considering jumping off whatever building is left standing in the wasteland that is now your home, and then.....

..... you happen a cross a leg of lamb, freshly wrapped and perfectly edible. Hell, it might even stretch a couple of days with proper rationing. You rush up, saliva gushing from your mouth and just as you reach to claim your prize......

.....another hand grabs it at the same time, and you realise that someone else has their eyes on this delicious miracle.

Ask yourself this, and answer truthfully. Would you politely and fairly suggest splitting it in half, or would you immediately start shouting 'It's mine! I saw it first!'? Once such an argument began would you then think of splitting it in half, or would you just bash the guy until he let go of the food? Anyone who claims they'd follow the civil route is either lying, or they're a fool who'd end up dead in the first week of the quarantine.

At the end of the day, we are still little more than animals. Yeah, we've developed culture and technology blah blah blah, but the essential things, i.e. eating, sleeping, exercise, sex etc are basic animal traits that all creatures share. It's just life, and when someone starts fucking around with the important parts of your life, you'd do whatever you could to protect it and keep it. When it's a choice between beating some one to death and certified starvation, you'd choose to give a swift beating just about every time.

Still don't agree? Well, look at it this way. There's a LOT of people in this world who have no respect for the law, and refuse to behave within the confines of the law. On the other hand, the vast majority of people do respect the law, or they don't respect it but adhere to it out of fear of the consequences, yes?

Why then do people not have the same attitude to the 10 commandments for example? In some cultures, their laws are mostly derived from the 10 Commandments. So then, why did people not stop killing and stealing from one another on a regular basis, until a guy with a crown on his head said 'knock that off or you'll get the chop!'? Why is a man able to get the people to behave, but not the word of the almighty?

Because at the end of the day, the 'word of the almighty' is just that. Words. Words written on a piece of paper (or stone, whatever) with no one to enforce them. You can say 'God enforces it' if you like but i'll simply laugh at you. God doesn't enforce shit until it's waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy too late. It's no good condemning someone to hell and damnation for eternity if they aren't even going to be sent there until some 80 years after their original sin. That's another 80 years of further sinning and perhaps even worse behaviour, before any kind of punishment is administered (and of course, there's no evidence that God/Heaven/Hell even exist), so with that in mind, why would you follow those 'rules'?

In No Man's Land there's a mixture of behaviours. What needs to be stressed, as i stressed in Razor's previous threads regarding Bat's Philosophy, is that the majority of citizens in Gotham are not good people. Most are immigrants, ex-cons, lunatics and those who just aren't that smart (like i said before, why'd you want to live in Gotham with a new homicidal nut job joining the ranks every ten minutes?) You see a number of territories formed in Gotham during NML. There's literally only about 4 gangs out of 15 that actually have decent human beings as members, and those are Scarface's gang (because he has all the bullets, so in theory his is the safest gang, despite the fact he feeds the people dog food), those protected by the GCPD (which splits in half anyway, because half of them want to administer 'Cowboy justice' and ironically, they all get blown away by their own leader, one Bill Petit, after he gets duped into shooting his own men, by everyone's favourite homicidal clown), The Mad Hatter's gang (because they're brainwashed by him anyway) and the Bat clan, who spend most of it watching over the church as well as coordinating everything else. Everyone else is a low life thug who joins whatever arkham inmate who happens to walk their way, and doesn't kill them. You then see spits and spats of little gangs and how they interact, and let me tell you, it isn't nice.

One gang recruits 3 new members, the first being a mechanic who can fix up a bike the gang are using, the second is a seemstress who they allow to join so she can fix up their tattered clothes, and the third is social worker, and they kill him and impale him on the fence outside their building with a note stapled to his back as a warning to other gangs.

Then there's the street tough who stands on his own, armed with a gun. He first threatens to shoot a guy for his torch batteries. The guy responds by saying 'you blatantly don't have any bullets, because if you did, you wouldn't waste one for a couple of batteries.' and carries on. Later, the guy stood on the same corner sees a kid walking along with some food that he's found, and threatens to shoot him as well. Before the kid can even respond, two heavies appear and claim that they're recruiting the kid and he is under their protection, so the guy with the gun loses again. Finally, he meets a guy in a purple coat and hat carrying a bag (yeah, you can see where this is going) and immediately points the gun in his face and demands whatever goods the purple dressed man has on him. 30 seconds and a fork coated in Joker Venom to the shoulder later, and the gun toating refugee becomes the landmark for the border entering Joker territory.

In the second book, Batman recruits Lock-Up and the KGBeast (some how), to run Blackgate penitentiary in the guard's absence, in order to secure the people who are being purposely dangerous i.e. Arkham guys since Arkham is in ruins (and is Bat's new base of operations. He even has a Batcave underneath it). It gets to the point where the Gotham refugee's know about this and begin committing crimes on purpose in order to be provided shelter witihin the prison. One man even pretends to beat a man to death in front of Batman, so that he'll gain shelter and warmth. Thankfully, the World's Greatest Detective figures out that the corpse has in fact been dead for several weeks and the other guy was faking it.

So you do see some groups living amicably, but only because a stronger personality came along, assumed authority, and organised things to benefit himself while feeding the people. Those who are left to fend for themselves act no better than rabid dogs.

Oh, and i just want to point out, that Bat's and Gordon don't work together at all in NML, because Gordon gets super-pissed that Batman up and left after the quake (because Bruce Wayne went to Washington to plead they reconsider their decision) and spends the first 4 of the 5 books trying to make sure people forget about Batman, despite the fact that Batman's just about single-handedly restoring the city on his own.