State of the Union
Ethics Without Tradition, or Why We Need Liberal Education
The New York Times Magazine includes a regular advice column under the title “The Ethicist”. Readers submit accounts of their dilemmas, to which the Ethicist proposes solutions. The founding Ethicist was the comedy writer Randy Cohen. In 2011, Cohen was replaced by the novelist Chuck Klosterman.
Cohen’s version of ethics was little more than the application of liberal politics to matters of lost wallets or unintentional eavesdropping. For Cohen, persons were neither good nor evil and acts neither right nor wrong, at least in any categorical sense. Rather, society was to blame for putting people in uncomfortable situations.
Cohen’s politicized version of situational ethics resembled a BoBo version of the Eichmann defense. Even so, it was preferable to Klosterman’s rudderless speculations. Last week, Klosterman advised a reader that it was ethical to submit the same paper to two college classes, even though this was likely against the academic integrity policies of the student’s university. The reason: “I can’t isolate anything about this practice that harms other people, provides you with an unfair advantage or engenders an unjustified reward.”
As a number of commenters observed, this argument is mind-bogglingly stupid. To mention only the most obvious objection, it ignores the probability that the student had already committed to not doing things like turning in the same paper for different classes. Many universities make observance of an academic integrity policy a condition of enrollment, and sometimes for the submission of specific assignments.
So the very first thing the student should have done was check the standards he had either expressly or tacitly accepted. At the colleges where I’ve taught, students are informed early and often of the policies for this sort of thing, and sometimes have to sign documents indicating their understanding.
Moreover, it’s pretty clear that the turning in the same paper for different classes does provide an unfair advantage over students who follow the rules. After all, they have to do much more work to complete their courses. In addition to his refusal to consider the ethical significance of the student’s voluntary commitments, Klosterman didn’t think very hard about the way college works.
Stop Talking About Meritocracy
In an old piece making the rounds on Twitter, the British sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy”, urges its removal from the public lexicon. Although a lifelong man of the Left, Young sounds remarkably like Charles Murray:
Underpinning my argument [in The Rise of the Meritocracy] was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society for more than a century before 1958, and most emphatically since the 1870s, when schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule.
Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people’s birth, status has gradually become more achievable.
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.
A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values.
With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.
The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
Young’s diagnosis of pretensions of the modern elite seems unimpeachable to me. As I and others have argued on this site, the current system of educational credentialing has the function of preserving and transmitting privilege, even though it was designed for much the opposite end. The conceptual hinge of this transformation is the ambiguity of the term “merit”. If we’re not careful to specify what we mean by merit, the (strong) instrumental argument for distributing tasks and responsibilities to those best able to fulfill them tend to slips into the (weak) moral argument that the most capable few deserve greater power and wealth.
What’s more, the close association of merit with educational achievement tends to depreciate abilities and dispositions that may be more suited to many positions. Consider what happened when bankers learned to consider themselves the smartest guys in the room.
It’s too late to get rid of meritocracy: both the word and the ideal it represents have been too deeply ingrained in our ethical culture. What we can do is insist that its ambiguities and disadvantages be acknowledged, particularly by those who claim to act in the public interest. As Young’s example indicates, this is a task in which many socialists, libertarians, and traditionalist conservatives can cooperate. As much as we disagree on other matters, we know that meritocracy is a dangerous illusion.
The Federal Leviathan Is as Weak as It Is Strong
Reason’s Nick Gillespie flags Gallup polling data showing 54 percent of Americans believe the “federal government has too much power.” Of all things, this put me in mind of St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, in which the apostle presented us with a lovely paradox: “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Don’t get me wrong; I know Paul meant this in the sense that Christians should rely less on their own devices and recognize their spiritual impoverishment outside of Christ.
But I find Paul’s paradox useful when thinking about the size and scope of the federal government. On the one hand, yes: you can look at the overreach at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice and see a central government unaccountably trampling on civil liberties.
On the other hand, look at Apple’s illustrative case of tax avoidance. Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski write in the New York Times:
Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
Call me crazy if you like, but I think Robert Reich is exactly right: “global capital, in the form of multinational corporations as well as very wealthy individuals, is gaining enormous bargaining power over nation states.”
Wouldn’t you know it, Gallup polling (from 2011) also shows that an even bigger majority of Americans believe that lobbyists, major corporations, and banks and financial institutions have too much power, along with the federal government.
What this means is that many Americans often feel dwarfed by big institutions and concentrated power, no matter whether those institutions are in the public or private sector. I understand and appreciate the libertarian solution to break up “bigness” wherever it’s found—to sever the bonds between corporate lobbyists, lawmakers, and bureaucrats. However, I think it’s reductive to look at those bonds as having been forged by years of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” corporatist conspiracy. There will always be unseemly stories to be found on the money-in-politics beat. But as a theory of government, I find it less satisfying.
The truth is, as figures from Teddy Roosevelt to John Kenneth Galbraith recognized, government institutions grew larger as a means of “countervailing” private-sector power that grew endogenously in a free economy.
There is very little that can be done about this, it seems to me. Ideally, as individuals and as private citizens, we like to think we can bring this complex postmodern economy to heel. The reality is that we’re going to have to learn to muddle through it.
Conservatism’s Generational Shift, ‘Swivel-Eyed Loons’ Edition
As Prime Minister David Cameron was visiting the U.S. last week, his party stumbled into another public-relations pit when an unnamed high-ranking associate of the prime minister’s was quoted characterizing the party’s activists as “mad, swivel-eyed loons.” (The comment was made in private, but within earshot of journalists.) That followed on UKIP’s impressive showing in local elections and a Tory backbench revolt against Cameron’s push for same-sex marriage, which passed with more members of the prime minister’s party voting against it than for it.
Hugo Rifkind in the Spectator traces these troubles to a generational divide:
Speaking almost factually, it’s pretty unlikely that the Tory grass roots are ‘swivel-eyed loons’. By most estimates, their average age is somewhere between 65 and 70, and swivelling your eyes behind bifocals rather defeats the purpose. Meanwhile, according to a poll by Survation this week, 33 per cent of those over 65 would vote Ukip tomorrow, and 13.4 per cent of everybody else would. Similarly, according to an ICM poll earlier this year, 37 per cent of over-65s fancy the idea of gay marriage, compared with 72 per cent of those below. This is glaring stuff.
… let us recognise Mr Cameron’s difficulty for what it is. Which is, essentially, that he faces a concerted fightback from an older generation that feels the world slipping from its fingers, and has had enough.
Or if you prefer, we can put the bellicosity on the other side, and identify an aggressive move … by a younger generation — or, to be more accurate, a couple of younger generations — who realise the world is finally theirs and wish to brand it with their stamp. This is why equal marriage, in particular, has become such a big deal, despite affecting relatively few people. It’s not just a symbol. It’s an early skirmish, between those who feel it is time to stop just living in their country and start owning it, and those who have owned it until now and don’t want to let it go.
It’s not just a matter of assertiveness, though. In the UK as well as the U.S., the cultural backdrops against which the older and the younger cohorts have grown up have been so different as to lead quite naturally to widely divergent views—indeed, opposite views of what constitutes stability and crisis, or who is aggressing against whom.
The Republican Party is in the same boat as Cameron’s Conservatives: however “grand” the GOP may or may not be, it is certainly the Old Party. National Journal‘s Charlie Cook observed earlier this year: Read More…
The Spiritual Crisis of the Bourgeois Bohemians
The New Yorker‘s George Packer can’t decide what to think about 21st-century America.
On the one hand, Packer likes developments that enhance the lifestyles of the educated upper middle class: “marriage equality, Lipitor, a black President, Google searches, airbags, novelistic TV shows, the opportunity for women to be as singlemindedly driven as their male colleagues, good coffee, safer cities, cleaner air, photographs of the kids on my phone, anti-bullying, Daniel Day Lewis, cheap communications, smoke-free airplanes, wheelchair parking, and I could go on.” On the other hand, he’s sorry that these benefits aren’t more broadly shared. Life is pretty good in brownstone Brooklyn and its spiritual counterparts. But it’s gotten harder and harder in “urban cores like Youngstown, Ohio; rural backwaters like Rockingham County, North Carolina; and the exurban slums outside Tampa…”
So how can this be the best of times for gays, sufferers from cardiovascular disease, African American politicians, TV fans, ambitious women, and so on, but among the worst for the urban poor, agricultural workers, and overleveraged homeowners? Packer can’t quite figure it out:
We usually think of greater inclusiveness as a blow struck for equality. But in our time, the stories of greater social equality and economic inequality are unrelated. The fortunes of middle-class Americans have declined while prospects for many women and minorities have risen. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have improved together—this is what appeared to be happening in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Since then, many women and minorities have done better than in any previous generations, but many others in both groups have seen their lives and communities squeezed by the economic contractions of the past generation.
Although his economic generalizations are accurate, Packer’s remark is historically and politically obtuse. Rather than shedding light on the profound divergence in Americans’ fortunes and expectations over the last few decades, it reflects a spiritual crisis of the BoBo elite, which is unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that its commitments to individual autonomy and expressive consumerism are incompatible with the egalitarianism that it pretends to favor.
Corey Robin on Nietzsche and Austrian Economics
As Jordan Bloom mentioned yesterday, Corey Robin has a provocative essay on the connection between between Nietzsche and the “Austrian” economists in The Nation. The piece is titled “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children”, as if Menger, Mises, Hayek and Schumpeter were Nietzsche’s direct heirs. The actual argument is more subtle: “the relationship between Nietzsche and the free-market right…is thus one of elective affinity rather than direct influence, at the level of idiom rather than policy.”
According to Robin, both Nietzsche and the Austrians saw value as a subjective commitment under conditions of constraint rather than an objective contribution by labor. For this reason, they endorsed agonistic social relations in which individuals struggle to express and impose valuations to the limits of their differential strength, while rejecting egalitarian arrangements that attempt to give producers a fair share of the value they have generated. Although he was most interested in philosophy and art, Nietzsche also described the conditions necessary for cultural renewal as “great politics”. For the Austrians, by contrast, the marketplace was the setting for contestation over value.
Like Robin’s argument in The Reactionary Mind, this interpretation is bound to appeal to leftists who are already convinced that there’s something sinister about conservative and libertarian thought (see the comments at Crooked Timber here). But it has serious problems, which Brian Doherty and Kevin Vallier have already begun to point out.
For one thing, there’s nothing unique to Austrian economics about the subjective theory of value. As Robin acknowledges, the foundations of the so-called marginal revolution were laid by the Frenchman Walras and the Englishman Jevons, as well as the Austrian Menger. That wouldn’t matter if the influence of these writers had been especially strong in the milieu that eventually produced Mises and Hayek. But in fact, almost all modern economists, whatever their theoretical or political orientation, accept some descendant of Walras, Jevons, and Mengers’ arguments. What’s more, Robin generally ignores the technical mathematical background of the marginal revolution, which he presents primarily as debate in moral philosophy. That decision obscures the most important cause of the transformation of economic thought in the 19th century: the demand that economics become a science on the model of physics.
Robin is also evasive in his chronology. He acknowledges that “[a]round the time—almost to the year—that Nietzsche was launching his revolution of metaphysics and morals, a trio of economists [Walras, Jevons, and Menger], working separately across three countries, were starting their own.” But he doesn’t deal explicitly with the possibility that this temporal coincidence makes any connection between Nietzsche and marginal economics circumstantial.
It’s true that Hayek and his Austrian contemporaries received the new theories of value in economics in a cultural context influenced by Nietzsche. But that tells us nothing about those theories’ original inspiration—let alone their truth. In any case, the fact that marginal economics became dominant in a setting where Nietzsche had little or no influence, such as the British academy, suggests that the heroic individualism he so brilliantly articulated was by no means a necessary condition of the transformation of economics. And given the variety of reactions to Nietzsche in the 20th century, it’s clearly not a sufficient one.
It’s also crucial to remember that Nietzsche was not the only 19th century thinker who challenged the leveling tendencies of democracy and socialism. On the contrary, this concern is among the major themes of Tocqueville, Carlyle, Mill, Kierkegaard, Burkhardt, Freud, Dostoyevksy, and Pareto, to name only a few. Robin knows too much to ignore these names, some of which occur in the piece. But Robin’s focus suggests that they served, at most, as adjuncts or supplements to Nietzsche.
Robin’s central error, in other words, is an uncritical acceptance of Nietzsche’s evaluation of himself as a “fate” rather than an articulator, however brilliant, of ideas that were very much in the air of the 19th century. In this respect, Robin shows an odd affinity for Leo Strauss, who tended to reduce intellectual history to a decontextualized dialogue among great thinkers.
Can There Be Capitalism Without the Bourgeois Family?
Noah Millman takes issue with some of the excerpts I’ve given from Schumpeter. But Schumpeter’s full view of the relationship between family, individualism, and capitalism can’t be captured in a brief quotation. If I had to give a close approximation of it, though, this is probably the most apt passage from Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy:
In the preceding chapter it was observed that the capitalist order entrusts the long-run interests of society to the upper strata of the bourgeoisie. They are really entrusted to the family motive operative in those strata. The bourgeoisie worked primarily in order to invest, and it was not so much a standard of consumption as a standard of accumulation that the bourgeoisie struggled for and tried to defend against governments that took the short-run view. With the decline of the driving power supplied by the family motive, the businessman’s time-horizon shrinks, roughly, to his life expectation. And he might now be less willing than he was to fulfill that function of earning, saving and investing even if he saw no reason to fear that the results would but swell his tax bills. He drifts into an anti-saving frame of mind and accepts with an increasing readiness anti-saving theories that are indicative of a short-run philosophy.
People once accumulated capital largely for the sake of their progeny. Now that they are less inclined to think about progeny, that is one more reason (among others Schumpeter gives in his book) for greater concern with immediate satisfactions rather than long-term capital development. The motive for defending accumulation against redistribution by the state has also been weakened. These are not only changes that affect actual economic practices, but they also condition the public’s receptivity to ideas that promise to solve short-run problems such as, say, unemployment by means of some sacrifice of capital. (To what extent unemployment actually is a short-run problem is something to think about, but this is where Schumpeter is coming from.) Read More…
The Blind Spot of Conservatism
About a third of the way through The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, Rod Dreher paints a moving portrait of a community tending to one of its own:
The news hit the West Feliciana community like a cyclone. As the day wore on a hundred or more friends mobbed the hospital. Some offered to move in with the Lemings to care for the children while Ruthie fought [her cancer]. John Bickham told Paw that he would sell everything he had to pay for Ruthie’s medical bills if it came to that. At the middle school the teachers did their best to get through the day, but kept breaking down. All over town people prepared food and took it by the Leming house, which, this being Starhill, sat unlocked.
“We were surrounded by so much love,” Mam recalls. “It was the most horrible day of our lives, but we could feel the love of all these good people. There was nothing we could have wanted or needed that wasn’t done before we asked. And they were there. Do you know what that means? People were there.”
The inspiring collective response of this small Louisiana town seems to me a paradigmatic real-life example of the kind of civil society that Yuval Levin (as well as TAC’s Samuel Goldman) champions here as a Burkean rebuke to harsh conservative rhetoric about the “culture of dependency”:
We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.
I don’t want to speak for Rod here. Nor do I want to superimpose on The Little Way, a deeply personal meditation on social and family bonds, a polemical or partisan quality that it in fact mercifully avoids. But I don’t think I’m misreading Rod at all in saying that technocracy is not what enabled his particular illusion of independence. That illusion stemmed from the desires of his own heart: a desire to escape the stifling atmosphere of rural America and discover the wider world; to pursue a life of the mind; to experience, as the British playwright David Hare put it in his screenplay for The Hours, the “violent jolt” of life in the metropolis.
Our culture stokes this desire, and in no small way our economy depends on it. When politicians tirelessly invoke the “American Dream,” when we celebrate social mobility and “churn,” we are encouraging millions of young Rod Drehers to leave their Starhills and become “boomers,” as the poet Wendell Berry (via Wallace Stegner) describes those whose ambition compels them to leave home.
To make the point in the context of our ongoing clash over immigration, do we not at least unwittingly celebrate the dilution of communities when we hold up as heroes those who leave behind their friends and extended families to pursue employment in America? To borrow the simple phraseology of Rod’s mother, a young man who leaves a village in Latin America or South Asia is no longer there. Read More…
Beyond Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has so thoroughly colonized our idea of education that we tend to think it’s the only kind of thinking. Tests try to measure it, and ritzy private schools all claim to teach it. Critical thinking–analysis, not mere acceptance–is a skill we can all learn. And we’ve learned it too well. We’ve learned only critical thinking skills, and not the equally challenging skills of prudent acceptance: We don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.
Misunderstanding Communitarian Conservatism
Ed Kilgore has noticed the dispute between individualists and communitarians on the Right. Name-checking Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, Kilgore observes that:
Communitarian conservatives (frequently, though not always, traditionalist Catholics; Ross Douthat is a pretty good contemporary example) often criticize libertarian types for complicity in the “atomized individual” part of the destructive dynamic Nisbet was talking about, or, more practically, for promoting a political message that repels voters who don’t view “altruism” as immoral or who may anticipate needing external help at some point in life. Indeed, you sometimes get the sense that Randians and “traditionalists” hate each other more than their common liberal enemy.
Despite these disagreements, Kilgore concludes that “if you boil off the philosophy and look at actual public policy issues, you have to wonder if this is often a distinction without a difference.” He poses two questions to communitarian conservatives:
(1) whether “private groups” (or, as Republicans often argue, state or local governments) are actually adequate to deal with inequality and poverty and illness and other social problems, even if government chips in with some tax credits or other incentives, and (2) whether empowering these “intermediating institutions” involves risks to liberty that we are all familiar with from their long reign in human history.
To put it another way, if people in need (or indeed, nations in need) can no longer turn to the most efficient means available to meet collective challenges, this thing called democratic government (ideally self-government), then does it really matter if they are then helplessly consigned to the market’s wealth-creators or to the “little platoons” that regard them as objects of pity and opportunities for good works? Isn’t that “dependence,” too?
These are good questions that deserve more extended responses than I can offer today. But here are some suggestions that might help begin the discusion:
(1) The answer to this question depends on the meaning of “we” and “deal with”. Kilgore’s restatement suggests that he thinks the main agent of political life is the nation itself, or perhaps the national government. It also indicates that we should pursue “solutions” to the problems of inequality, poverty, illness, and so on.
But communitarian conservatives dispute both claims. Our argument is that many social problems are actually local problems. As such, they are often more better dealt with by local authorities and institutions than by the national government.
Take education. If we look at aggregate statistics, there’s a serious “collective” problem here. But that’s misleading. In fact, public schools in some states, such as Massachusetts, are excellent. Schools in others, such as Mississippi, are terrible. It’s not clear to me why the low quality of public schools in Mississippi is a problem for citizens of Massachusetts. Rather, it seems to be the responsibility of Mississippians to fix their own schools.
Of course, the citizens of Mississippi may not agree that there’s a problem, or may choose not to to address it in the best way. Having never visited the state, I really have no idea. But leaving decisions to the people who know the most about the situation and are most affected by it is the essence of self-government. Put differently, Washington is not the focal point of American democracy. Read More…
