Functional and normative order

Humans require order for basic cognitive processing, for psychic security, and for group cohesion. Indeed, a fundamental good provided by membership in a collective body is order. Order can be defined first of all as a simple functional arrangement of objects in a specified and reproducible set of relationships to one another.15 A precedes B that precedes C; or A occupies a space to B's right, and C a space below B. We grasp what A, B, and C are in part through their location vis-à-vis one another and the repetition of the patterns through time, which provides comprehension and predictability. Furthermore, order establishes the parameters for common perception and through cognizance of it, the basis of communication.

A foundational need for order is a basic human imperative, yet the prevalence of ordering is often taken for granted. Not by Hobbes, however, who writing in the middle of the English Civil War, drove home the unlivability of an orderless world, in which human existence degenerated into survival in a state of war, with no possibility for language, industry, arts, or other features of civilization. Those studying the origins of working institutions in failed regimes are acutely aware of the difficulty of bringing together the elements that solidify a reproducible functioning order. Such an order must be replicated through persons aligned into groups and roles, and marked on the basis of territory, power, status, and norms of treatment. The reproducibility of a system of order over time provides stability and predictability. We care about order at the most fundamental level because it provides the conditions without which we could not have access to safety, stability, resources, and recognition. Functional classification is a good in and of itself, providing the necessary conditions for tolerable existence.

In human communities, however, functional order must be carried out through persons living in cultures, institutions, and values constitutive of particular meaning for them. Human mindedness requires that order involve the assent of agents. As Hobbes also noted, no stable arrangement of relationships could be sustained that required a ruler to hold the population at gunpoint in perpetuity. For him, achieving basic functional social order depended on convincing the people to agree to obey a political sovereign; that is, there had to be normative agreement to the sovereign's legitimacy to maintain the peace necessary for worthwhile existence, and the resulting benefits of civilization justified the absolute sovereignty upon which it depended. Hobbes’ basic insight underscores the importance of normative order for functional order itself.16

So far, I have made the following observations: human life at its most elemental requires order in collectivities, and order in collectivities requires normative justification. Important regularized patterns of behavior rest on beliefs about the acceptability and rightness of those patterns. For instance, the highly restrained and scripted roles of woman in traditional societies rests upon a set of beliefs about women's proper place in the natural and human order and the protection of virtue. And for some political bodies, the role of women serves as a central tenet of cultural and social order. To call for civil and political rights for women would be to indict and dislocate a framework of normative ordering, and would be especially threatening if women themselves were to lead the charge. Their public support for new normative beliefs would indicate a disruption of the prevailing (functional) normative order. To understand the concept of normative threat, we need to be clearer about the relationship between normative order and normative beliefs.

A distinction between two types of ordering beliefs will be helpful. Beliefs may be of the form of prosaic norms of behavior. For instance, ‘I am a longshoreman who works for wages set by the union’ or ‘My faith requires that I attend a religious service weekly; or that I give 10% of my salary to the church’. Prosaic norms are beliefs contributing to a functioning order but they are not normative beliefs about defining features of the body politic. Therefore, I use the term normative belief to refer to norms about right, justice, and the nature of the good. These types of beliefs glue together a collective body at a more explicitly legitimating and politically mobilizable level; one self-consciously and emotionally commits oneself to their constraints. Popular language also refers to them as ‘values’, ‘a way of life’, or a ‘world view’ – components of these will qualify as normative beliefs if they are sufficiently important to anchor the political body's conception of what it is committed to. Examples of beliefs about normative order are the following:

• • religious community and doctrines of religious truth (Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc.)

• • political freedoms and self-determination

• • free market and property rights

• • superiority of the white race (or Japanese race; western civilization)

• • ethnic independence (autonomy/separatism)

• • Shariah law

• • individual liberties – Bill of Rights

• • human rights

• • Marxism–Leninism

• • conceptions of family and sexuality.

Social scientists, philosophers, and historians study the genesis of particular normative beliefs; the sources of these conceptions cannot be the subject of this paper. My argument rather takes such conceptions as primary elements for collective self-definition and in terms of which people will feel danger and can be mobilized to fight. Political scientists like Hurwitz and Peffley (1987) also emphasize the importance of abstract normative beliefs for the body politic when they argue that ‘core values anchor the general orientations people develop to guide their foreign-policy thinking’.17 My contention is not that these beliefs constitute a precisely articulated set of propositions agreed to by members of a body politic. Nor can I offer conclusive observations about exactly how these beliefs are ‘held’ at the collective level; in any one society or group, persons will not all share the same beliefs, though some must gain a group's collective assent. Rather, normative beliefs stand as part of the background political culture, shaping basic perceptions, motivations, sentiments, and public discussion. Members and leaders appeal to them explicitly when controversies of basic order are raised in a public forum. Most importantly, they can play an intensifying and combustible role in confrontations with other groups; because of their crucial role in sustaining order and identity, they act as lightening rods for argumentation and conceptions of threat. Simmel observes their power in this remark: ‘The violence of the fight … has become more pointed, concentrated, and at the same time more comprehensive, owing to the consciousness of the individual involved that he fights not only for himself, and often not for himself at all, but for a great super-personal aim’ (Simmel 1955, 40).

My description of normative order then emphasizes its dual nature: a functional level and the more abstract ideational level – the latter indeed distinctly characterizes normative orders as a subject of threat. Beliefs about specific right or just ways to order life deepen commitments to and engrain the ordering of a particular group of people. We might compare my notion with that of ‘ontological security’ developed by Jennifer Mitzen (2006).18 Mitzen and I share a concern with non-physical sources of threat but focus on different imperatives of a body politic. She convincingly develops the argument that states need more than physical security and also strive for security of identity: ‘Ontological security is security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice’ (p. 344); ‘the need for ontological security is extrapolated from the individual level. Ontological security refers to the need to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time – as being rather than constantly changing – in order to realize a sense of agency” (p. 342). She argues that we can conceive of states as persons to the extent that like individuals they seek both physical and ontological security – a distinct and stable identity vis-à-vis other states in the international system. People fear chaos, and state identity provides one means of staving off the abyss of no order. The novel application to which she puts her theory comes in explaining the entrenchment of conflicts: ‘states take on the identity that is embodied in the competitive routines and therefore become attached to the competition as an end in itself’ (p. 360). Where Mitzen accepts for purposes of theorizing identity, a basic equivalence between individual and collective agency, I emphasize a distinct logic to collective perception and the problem of creating a collective entity. I also stress a need for more than ‘identity’ insofar as political bodies care about objective rules and states of order in the larger world. Furthermore, political bodies care about and fight for particular orders, not simply in fear of no order.

The reason particularity (or specificity) is important is because collective feelings and articulation of harm must be accessible and observable in a shared forum. A specific set of beliefs enables divergently located people to coalesce and become a sustainable unity. Recall the Gilbert concept of a plural subject. A virtue of this idea, one that she did not dwell on in her book, is that the project of coming together into a unitary point of view takes place because that unified point of view cannot be assumed to be the salient feature of a body politic. In a political body, citizens partake of an overall project of unity and accept a common fate, doing so from various paths to the common orientation. If the divergences within the boundaries of the political order are too large or the attractions of an alternative order so great, the conception of a common life will come apart. Because a political body consists not in a simple unitary point of view but exists always as a continuous work in progress involving a complex web of different groups, members’ interdependence relies on shared, but not identical beliefs about the good provided by their institutions and basic norms of life.19 The particularity of the normative beliefs helps overcome too great a plurality (and therefore entropy). We can see how this gets into highly complicated questions about ideological legitimation. Grossly unequal orderings have been stable over long periods of time, and we would not want to conclude that this longevity makes such orderings inherently legitimate. But does it indicate an element of normativity relative to that system? Perhaps. In the Indian caste system, the fact of hierarchical ordering which relegated vast numbers of people to the dregs of society nevertheless contained within it an ideological rationality for interdependent roles. The existence of normative justification does not mean we as observers normatively accept the terms, but it does point to the need to justify.20 Political bodies, as internally diverse and shadowed by the complicating factor of inequality within order, will need a set of specific normative beliefs to bring together the various parts of the population.21 Normative beliefs accomplish a great deal of work. Margaret Gilbert quotes H.L.A. Hart on his description of laws in human society: ‘Whether laws are morally good or evil, just or unjust, these are focal points demanding attention as of supreme importance to human beings constituted as they are’ (2007, 290; emphasis added). We might likewise say that normative beliefs are focal points demanding attention that people as members of political entities bring to assessing the world in which they must act together.