Basic Human Dignity Conclusion

It would seem, in short, that the redemptive value of labor, and the mythologies that support it, are being challenged on a number of fronts.  This may still be the land of opportunity, but it is a land of significantly diminished opportunity.  For some, of course, diminished opportunity means no opportunity, at least not within the legitimate economy, and this is particularly true of uneducated males, those who would have performed unskilled or semi-skilled labor in the past.  It is not surprising that an economy lagging the population in the creation of jobs with decent wages and benefits conversely, and perversely, creates greater and greater opportunity for the sorts of moral decay that Murray and others point out.  If the need for basic human dignity cannot be satisfied in one context, it is likely to be satisfied within another, and it is perhaps not surprising that those who populate the drug gangs of Detroit and the militias of the upper peninsula are largely under-educated, marginalized males.

The problem, such as it is, will not be solved with the repatriation of factory jobs.  The factory is not your grandfather's factory, which demanded and paid reasonably well for unskilled and semi-skilled labor of the sort that could be learned on the job. It worth reminding ourselves that life on the factory floor was not peaches and roses.  Inter-generational upward mobility, in the pop culture mythologies, was often about escaping the mind numbing, soul destroying work on the factory floor.  As someone has said (I forget who) Marx was wrong about communism and the sweeping imperatives of history, but he was right in his observations about the industrialized capitalism that exploited labor.  If the factory jobs requiring unskilled and semi-skilled labor were repatriated from China and India, it is quite likely that we would need to import labor for exploitation, as we do now for those farm jobs that cannot be mechanized, in part because few Americans would submit to the conditions of life required by those jobs.  The factories today do provide good jobs, but they are jobs that require education, and rather sophisticated education at that.  When someone like Nicholas Kristof writes that "eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn't pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill," the economic pressures that sent the glove factory elsewhere is only half the picture.  The eighty percent made a choice that may well mask another reality.  For them, the immediate opportunities of "glove work" was preferable to the deferred opportunities of "school-work," but why?

The answers to that question are varied, and complex, and structural, and difficult, and that is part of the problem.  If Kristof and others are correct, if we are "facing a crisis in which a chunk of working class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility," then we also need more, not less social policy.  While there is reason to avoid discussion of an "underclass," there is also a mounting body of evidence to suggest that war zone trauma is real, and many of our children are being raised in the equivalent of a war zone where the damage done is perhaps more real, more extensive, and more permanent than we might want to imagine.  As Kristof put it, "the pathologies are achingly real," and for many those pathologies may put jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility, the intellectual and cultural skills necessary to pursue jobs and education, as permanently out of reach as the escalators to the third floor of Tiffanys.  Moral disapprobation will not solve their problems, and may well exacerbate them, though again I hardly need to point out that, within our political discourse, there is an ever greater tendency to assign blame, not to structural deficiencies within within our economic systems and social structures, but to the moral failings of those individuals trapped in violent neighborhoods, with decaying schools, and fewer and fewer opportunities of escape.  When Kristof counsels us to "get real" and suggests that "the solution isn't finger wagging, or averting our eyes -- but opportunity," he points to a crises of faith, of liberal faith.  It is the faith that has animated American secular life and provided a center that allowed various religious and cultural backgrounds to flourish under the same flag.  If our gods were disparate, we could all believe and seek some measure of redemption in the eyes of others from meaningful and productive labor.  If there is a crises of faith in America today, it is not that we have fallen away from "traditional Christian values" or anything of the sort.  It is rather the growing realization that a growing number of Americans have no path to redemption -- the way has been permanently closed -- and it is easier and more satisfying to blame them than find solutions.            

The Bell Curve Revisited Conclusion

I like to think of myself as a cautious optimist, but the prognosis may be more intractable than Murray can admit to himself.  I do not want to draw too close a connection between education, money, and basic human dignity, but most would concede that they are entangled, if not causally related.  The sorts of jobs that one can do without an education are not very many, are growing fewer, and regardless are not particularly conducive to human dignity.  They do not pay well, and while money cannot buy happiness, its absence makes the pursuit of happiness altogether, shall we say, more challenging.  Nearly universal access to education, including higher education, has done little to change the basic dynamic.  That a few are up to the challenge and a growing majority are not should come as no particular surprise.  At all but the most selective institutions, any administrator at any college will tell you that a significant number of students arrive, as we like to say, under-prepared.  They lack the basic intellectual skills, the numeracy and the literacy necessary to even begin developing expert thinking and complex communication skills.  They are consigned to remedial education courses in math and English, high school and in some cases even grade school level courses, where a few find they are up to the challenge and develop the necessary skills, but most founder for a while and drift away.  The euphemism, "under-prepared," is a convenient one for those of us in higher education.  It allows us to defer responsibility to those who struggled before us -- if only the high schools had done a better job of "preparing" the students for college.  Even better, we can avoid making invidious judgments about the students themselves.  To say one lacks proper preparedness is one thing, to say one lacks intellectual capacity for full participation in the economic life of the country is quite another, and yet as technology keeps "upping the ante" for a growing number of our students that may well be the necessary judgment, and again, the question becomes, "what to do with them?"

Murray's argument seems to be deeply flawed in at least one respect.  On the one hand, he seems to credit genetics as the underlying cause of the widening gap between the poor and the wealthy.  Like is attracted to like, and under an assumption of homogamy within the marriage market, the smartest people are drawn to each other because they share similar tastes, interests, and values.  The smartest people tend to accumulate the most wealth and gather together in communities of the wealthy reflecting and reinforcing those tastes, interests and values.  The smartest people tend to have the smartest children who are socialized to those tastes, interests, and values, and because they have the means, the smartest people send their children to the best schools, where the virtuous cycle repeats itself.  On the other hand, he seems to blame the modern welfare state for a good deal of the decay in the moral and ethical standards of industriousness, honesty, family, and religiosity among the lower income Americans.   The modern welfare state has trapped the American poor and working poor in a Pavlovian cycle of dependency and entitlement, drugs and crime, and single parent (or even worse absent parent) households.  Those in the upper income tiers don't seem to share in those problems, at least not to the same degree, or in the same way.  It is the nature/nurture argument writ large.  Nature and the invisible hand of the marriage market is responsible for the virtuous cycle.  Nurture and government social engineering is responsible for the vicious cycle.  It is questionable, however, if a dismantling of the welfare state will produce anything like a great awakening of personal responsibility.  In the absence of even the most modest of alternative proposals, the welfare state seems to be wrapped in an ideological chicken and egg dispute.  Has the welfare state caused the decline in moral and ethical standards or has it emerged as a palliative answer to the pragmatic question, "what to do with those who have been intellectually and economically alienated from the modern economy?"   The answer is likely "yes."

Socially Constructed Intentionality

13.  Consider this:  intentionality not as a physiological, but a socially constructed state-of-affairs -- an intentionality game proper, chess.  In the case of chess, it begins within one-state-of-affairs -- a strictly given state-of-affairs in the starting arrangement of the chess pieces on the board -- and ends in checkmate  -- a state-of-affairs defined within certain conditions or criteria.   The desired state-of-affairs governs the utility of the instrumental acts, the moves one makes.  Moreover, the moves are bound, piece by piece, insofar as diagonal moves are permissible for the bishop, lateral moves for the rook.  Additional considerations:  it is possible, for example, to imagine two people at what appears to be chess.  Psychologically, one is making moves aimed at achieving checkmate, while the other is making random moves, going through the motions.  The other might be doing something, but it is something other than chess -- that is to say, the intentionality governing chess is given, and must be accepted as a given, if one is going to engage in chess.  Moreover, if the random moves are in fact random (or impermissible) for the various pieces, the one might stop play and ask the other, "are you cheating?"  Or more generally, "what are you doing?" The differentiation between the questions resides in the assumptions of the one.  The first, "are you cheating?" assumes the other is motivated by the desired state-of-affairs checkmate and is moving the piece to achieve a utility, but an impermissible utility under the definitional constraints on the pieces and ethical constraints of fair play.  The second, "what are you doing?" assumes the other is no longer engaged in the intentionality game of chess, that the moves are perhaps motivated, but motivated by something other than the desired state-of-affairs checkmate.  The moves, that is, no longer signify the governing intentionality and lapse into incomprehensibility.  I am suggesting, of course, that the intentionality game of "hunger" and the intentionality game of "chess" might be different in origin, but not in kind.  The socially constructed constraints on the pieces (rules proper) are directly analogous to the physiologically and ethically constructed constraints on ingestion, and are perhaps different in origin, but not in kind.  (Imagine watching someone swallowing nuts, not of the tree borne variety, but of the metallic variety, the sort one might find in a workshop.  Their behavior might look like "eating," we might even describe it as "eating," even "eating nuts," but we would assume that the behavior points to either ineffectual "eating," an instrumental act of highly questionable instrumentality, or an incomprehensible "eating," an act perhaps instrumental to an intentionality, but an act that fails to signify its intentionality, an act aimed at something other than the desired state-of-affairs of a satiated hunger.  Language helps to blur the picture here.)