Ideology and Dialectic Continued

Hayek, who I quote in the previous post, has put the most convincing argument forward for the failure of what he calls a "planning" mindset.  The failure on the left on the macro scale were clear enough in the successive failure of the Soviet block in Europe and the introduction, as they say, of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."  The failures of the left were clear enough too in the successive failures of the Great Society programs to deliver on their promises.  One has to credit somewhat the conservative argument that both sets of failures stemmed from the importation of the scientist's and engineer's habits of thought into the social and economic spheres, the difficulty being, of course, that none of the social and economic engineers fully comprehended the whole of the reality they were attempting to manipulate, nor did they fully understand what might be called the Heisenbergian principle of social and economic change.  Because we do not fully comprehend the whole of the reality we are attempting to manipulate, we can know in part the current state of reality, and we can know what in that reality we would like to change, but we cannot fully predict the impact of that change on the whole of reality.  The creation of low cost subsidized housing solved one effect of poverty, but by concentrating the the unemployed and unemployable into specific locations, it served too to concentrate the effects of poverty in ways that few fully anticipated.   As Hayek put it, the result may be "the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utter different than those we had expected."   The difficulty with government solutions is not government in and of itself.  I suspect that government is no more, no less effectual than any other human organization, and big government is no more, no less effectual than the transnational corporate structures that currently exist.  If the latter have an edge on efficiency, and resist the imposition of government as an impediment to that efficiency, it's that corporate structures rarely, and never fully, provide a public account for the human costs of that efficiency.  The difficulty with big government is not that it is government, or that it is big, but rather that it is not big enough to comprehend the whole of the human endeavor it attempts to manipulate.  It fails, and the response to failure is predictable for those who are in power and who wish to hold power.   The first victim is 'truth,' which, as Hayek observes, and I think correctly, "ceases to have its old meaning."  It ceases to be an "interaction of individuals, possessing different knowledge and different views," and becomes "something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort."  The truth, with its lower-case contingency and transience, becomes Truth, once and for all.  If it begins with the scientists' and engineers' habits of thought -- where "the individual conscience [is] the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence warrants a belief" -- it ends in a faith-based commitment to a comprehensive social and economic doctrine.   It ends, as Hayek put it, in the "intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of the social process."  The history of the gulag provides the remainder of the story.




   

Ideology and Dialectic Continued

As a brief detour, since I am on the subject of science, let me touch for a moment on the nature of science, since it is important to a complementary notion of the rational secular state.  I won't repeat the whole of thomas Kuhn's argument here, but will simply suggest that the history of science is a history of beautifully concocted schemes each of which failed to fully comprehend the whole of reality.  Ptolemaic astronomy fell to Copernican astronomy.  Newtonian physics fell to Einstein's relativity, which in turn fell to Bohr's quantum mechanics, and he list goes on.   The history of science, no less than other human endeavors, is a history of beautifully concocted schemes, none of which succeeded in fully comprehending the whole of reality, each of which was supplemented or supplanted by a new scheme, each of which will in turn be supplemented or supplanted by even newer schemes.  The history of science, more so than other human endeavors, is marked by "progress."  Copernican astronomy represents an "advance" on Ptolemaic astronomy.  Einstein's relativity represents an "advance" on Newtonian physics, and quantum mechanics an "advance" on relativity.   Each advance is marked by contingency and its truth ultimately proves to be transient -- that is to say, each theoretical advance, each beautifully concocted scheme, is marked by its potential future failure -- it is precisely this contingent transience, this possibility of failure that allows for "advance."  The differences between the schemes of science and the schemes of religion are too numerous to list, but central to the differences is the foreclosure on this notion of "progress."  While it is dangerous in some circles to suggest that religion is no less a human endeavor, its history no less a history of beautifully concocted schemes, each of which has been supplemented or supplanted by new schemes, the evidence is clear enough.  The gods of Rome were supplanted by the one true god, and the church that celebrated that one true god has been supplemented with any number of protestant variations on a scheme.  None, however, really represents an "advance," but rather the assertion of an end to advancement -- the truth once and for all.  If the religious mind misunderstands the scientific mind, it is precisely on this point of falsification.  The truths of science are always open to their eventual falsification.  Darwinian evolution is not a truth once and for all, but a truth that has been confirmed over and over again by the preponderance of evidence, while the mechanisms that support it have been subject to continuous revision.  Climate science has presented us with a body of evidence.  The best theoretical explanation of that evidence is open to some dispute, and consequently the optimal policy decisions too are open to some dispute, but what is not in question is the body of evidence -- the earth is getting warmer, and human actions are, to one degree or another, causing or contributing to that warming.  We understand climate change better today than yesterday, and no doubt will understand it better tomorrow than today, and presumably our policy decisions should be informed by those "advances."

I am suggesting, of course, that the policy orientations of what I have called the rational secular state are open to falsification in ways that the faith-based theocracy is not.  The beautifully concocted schemes of science are sustained or fail on the basis of confirming or falsifying evidence.  On what basis is the truth or falsity of the biblical accounts drawn into question?  Likewise, if ideological purity is the predicating good, on what basis is the truth or falsity of free market accounts drawn into question?   From the conservative mind-set, if the account fails to fully comprehend our human reality -- if it fails to address our contingent needs -- the difficulty lies, not in the account, but in each individual's faith in the account.  One is more or less faithful to the given truth, and dialectic, as such, is directed, not at a closer and closer approximation to truth, but at the discovery of apostasy from an already given truth.   The "social issues" could be the "core problem in the polarization of the  American politics."  The New York Times quotes Christine Whitman, the former republican governor of New Jersey and Environmental Protection Agency administrator, as suggesting that "anger over the state of politics increases apathy."  Consequently, "'only the most rabid partisans vote,' so political strategists steer campaigns to issues that turn them on," and "for republicans, those are often social issues such as abortion, gay marriage and contraception.  But the rise of a new strain of fiscal conservatism has also led to moralistic portrayals of votes on spending and the debt limit.  And when issues are framed around morality, compromise becomes very difficult."  I doubt, however, that the social issues are in themselves the "core problem."  I think, rather, one's position on social issues serves simply to signify and substantiate one's alignment with faith-based and increasingly theocratic social and economic truths.  The importation of the "habits of thought of the natural scientist and engineer" into the social and economic spheres -- a mindset that seeks neither moral approbation or disapprobation, but causality in human social and economic behavior, and if not causality, then predictable correlation -- "impose ideals of organization on sphere[s] of thought to which they are not appropriate," and they are not appropriate because they are mechanistic accounts that deny human freedom, and because they deny human freedom, they preclude the possibility of moral choice and moral blame.  If social behavior can be reduced to causality and correlation, then it is difficult to ascribe moral blame to individuals for "their choices," their unwillingness or inability to conform to prevailing moral standards.   If social behavior can be reduced to causality and correlation, it also implies an obligation for the creation of social and economic policy.  If the absence of work, for example, is the underlying causal factor for the rise in single parent households, if the relationship is indeed mechanistic, then the solution to single parent households is simply to create jobs, not to insist upon the moral probity of young women, is not to demand abstinence and then test that abstinence by denying access to contraception.         

Ideology and Dialectic Continued

To suggest that Santorum sees himself as a messianic figure might be to over-state the case, but it is clear enough that the values he professes are centered in a comprehensive and uncompromising world view, one complete unto itself and consequently no longer open to dialectic.  Santorum's world view is comprehensive, in part because it is uncompromising.  It is sustained by a father knows best nostalgic idealism, a desire for an America that never really existed, but even if it had, an America that could no longer exist within the boundaries of his comprehensive vision without some very broad and very obvious exclusions.  There are, of course, the exclusions that emerge out of the world view (a reduction of sexuality and of women's sexuality in particular to reproductive efficacy) and the exclusions that have emerged outside of the world view (the vilification of non-Christian religious world views but perhaps more those who resist, on secular grounds, the imposition of political theology, the "American left who hates Christendom").  As Krugman points out in a recent editorial, however, it is not only "about sex and religion."  Santorum has "also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a 'beautifully concocted scheme' on the part of the 'the left' to provide 'an excuse for more government control of your life.'"  There is an element of conspiracy theorizing behind Santorum's denunciation of the "junk science" behind the "whole narrative," and that in itself should render the diatribe suspect, but Santorum goes on to point out that it's a "beautifully concocted scheme because they know the earth is gonna [sic] cool and warm.  It's been on a warming trend so they said, 'Oh, let's take advantage of that.  We need the government to come in and regulate your life some more.'"   I find such a dialogue improbable at best, absurd at worst, in part because, at one remove, it is difficult for me to imagine who might actually benefit directly from such government control -- the environmentalists, perhaps, but who has significantly profited from a regulatory stance to limit greenhouse emissions?  Any regulatory stance is predicated on the common good, and while it is incumbent on those who advance the regulations to demonstrate how they do serve the common good, it is equally incumbent upon those who resist regulation to demonstrate how they harm or impede the common good -- that is to say, engage in dialectic aimed at consensus.   Having said that, the list of those who might in fact profit from the contrary stance and who might want to foreclose on dialectic could be rather long.  It is just as easy, if not easier, to imagine big oil executives making contributions to a super pac in support of a reactionary cabal against the regulation of greenhouse emissions.  If Darwinian accounts of evolutionary biology must be rejected because they don't square with Biblical accounts of creation, the recent accounts of climate change caused by, or helped along by, human action must likewise be rejected because they don't square with an equally sacred notion, the self-regulatory free market.

Idelogy and Dialectic Continued

The current presidential race could hardly be called a clash of the titans.  While many of us held out great hope for Obama that he would point us toward a humbler and more rational post-partisan politics, but that hope has been frustrated again and again.  There is sufficient evidence that he is open to dialectic, but dialectic takes two, and there is little evidence that his conservative counterparts are willing to engage, as they sat, meaningfully.  Indeed, among his republican opponents, each seems hell bent on demonstrating that their unwillingness to engage is greater than the others unwillingness to engage, a posture associated with an odd notion of ideological purity in the absence of a pure ideology.  Some of the posturing is, well, posturing.  On the list of Romney howlers, however, his suggestion that he was "a severely conservative governor" stands as a case in point.  It has already been noted that "severe," as an adjective, is normally used to modify a negative condition, a disease, as in "severely depressed," and I don't want to add my voice to the chorus.  Nevertheless, "severe" is hardly a word that brings warm feelings to mind -- something more like Scrouge in his counting house -- but even setting that aside, the sense that Romney is slick, disingenuous, may well be a simple observation that Romney, despite his public statements, is much less a tea party ideologue, more a business pragmatist.  With the so-called Romney-care, he had a problem to solve, and he solved it, apparently to wide satisfaction, and if ideological purity came into the discussion, there must have been some real reluctance to sacrifice the successful solution on the alter of ideological purity.  His personal values, his religious and family values, would fall well within the comfort zone of the restorative reactionaries, those who would push the reset button and return us to Leave it to Beaver -- no one familiar with the Mormon faith would doubt his credibility in this domain -- but his public values come forward most sincerely when he stands unapologetic for his wealth and the implicit business pragmatism that created it -- "hey, it's mine, I earned it!" -- that the manner in which he earned it had little or nothing to do with Christian values is of little or no consequence.  It's a different matter altogether.

Rick Santorum, however, is a more genuine conservative, one who would sacrifice almost anything on the alter of ideological purity.  If a political gaff is a time when a candidate inadvertently speaks the truth, his remarks on JFK and the separation of church and state represent a real gaff.  As the New York Times reported it, Santorum "described how he had become sickened after reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech calling for the rigid separation of religion and politics," and then asked the follow on question,  "What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?"   His personal values, one suspects, verges on political apocalypticism, the grand Manichean contest between the satanic forces and the good people of Christian America, a contest that can only be resolved by putting religion (and few would doubt that he is using the term generically, and even fewer would doubt that he is referring to a version of his religion) at the center of public life.  If he has reversed himself, suggesting that "I’m for separation of church and state,” it is not simply political hypocrisy at work, though one suspects some damage control in the face of criticism, but it is also a reaffirmation of his own position as the redemptive candidate, the one who would bring church and state, the one who would bring the personal values of his religion and the public values of the presidency into convergence. 

To be continued. 

Ideology and Dialectic

The apparent political dialectic between the conservative and liberal ends of the spectrum within the US is not a dialectic.  The term, of course, is loaded with Hegelian, and following Hegel, with Marxist overtones, and I should perhaps admit up front that, in using the term, I have no grand vision.  I am thinking neither of the Hegelian dialectic recently celebrated by Fukuyama, a grand historical process that culminates inevitably in liberal democracy more or less as we know it in the US, nor am I thinking of the Marxist dialectic celebrated by a host of celebrated 20th century writers, an even grander historical process that culminates inevitably in the communist state.  In short, I am not thinking of dialectic on a world historical scale at all.  I have something less grandiose in mind, a questing dialectic, something on the order of the Socratic dialectic before Plato appropriated it in service of immutable Truth and the Ideal State.  The dynamic is perhaps the same.  The thesis is advanced only to be challenged by its antithesis, and through the ensuing exchange something like a tentative synthesis, a consensus, emerges.  The Socratic dialectic always ended with a note of the provisional lingering in the air, if not the Good once and for all, then a good enough for now, at once a resting point and an anticipated point of departure.

This note of the provisional stems perhaps from Socratic humility.  As he put in his Apology, "although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him."   It is easy enough to up-end the Socratic stance, to read his disparagement of falsity as a commitment to the truth, but the Socratic humility is at once the Socratic arrogance.  The false, once unmasked, can never again be an object of faith without the most egregious and self-serving cynicism.  I am among those who "like to hear the pretenders examined," and and there is something of divine comeuppance in seeing the pretentious ego popped, and it does take some courage to be the one with the pin.  Socrates demonstrated that courage by going to his death before accepting the shibboleths of his day.  Yet too, there is a cowardice in it.  Perhaps, like Socrates, I am too tentative to see a grand historical pattern, too hesitant to step forward with a grand plan of action.  I can all too easily see myself as the next in a line of pretenders, and my skin is too thin for even the dullest of pins.

Consequently, I am far from an idealist either in the common or the philosophical sense of the word.  If history has taught us anything, it is that all ideals are contingent and transitory and ultimately victims of their own internal contradictions -- which is not to say that all things are relative and arbitrary.  I do, however, believe that there is a reality, both human and physical, and we are part and parcel of it.  Our statements about that reality are more or less true -- our actions are more or less efficacious to any given purpose -- more or less -- and as such, they remain contingent and transitory.  Anyone who has "played by the rules" and "done all the right things" -- anyone who, like Job, had enormous faith in the justice of his world and yet suffered unimagined consequences -- knows intuitively what I am driving at.  We may have a grasp on things, but things are slippery.  We may be in control, but never wholly in control.  Life is unfair, and while we crave fairness with nearly the same intensity that we crave food and sex, and we can indeed make our surround more or less fair, more or less just, but absolute fairness, absolute justice, once and for all, seems possible in theory, but always elusive in fact.    

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.            

Basic Human Dignity Continued

If we can smugly marginalize those not working, a marginalization helped along by racial attitudes, the emergent structures of the job market make it difficult to apply the old standards of blame.  When 60 minutes features a panel of heretofore middle class people who have lost work, who desperately want to work, but because they have struggled to find work over an extended period of time, find themselves not only unemployed, but increasingly unemployable.  The 60 minutes panelists, black and white -- nearly all of whom looked comfortable in suits -- nearly all of whom were educated, well-spoken and professional -- nevertheless found themselves in line for food stamps.   Nearly all articulated well the sense of shame, the loss of recognition and personal identity that came with the loss of work, the nagging sense that "they are right, something must be wrong with me that I find myself in this situation, that I cannot extricate myself from this situation."  The likes of Herbert Caine as a viable (if only briefly) conservative presidential candidate points to the deeper structure, the persistent belief that, no matter the structural barriers, no matter the overt (and covert) bigotry, upward mobility is not only possible, but the likely reward for cleverness and hard work.  As many have pointed out, Caine has allowed conservatives to reassure themselves that it's not about race, rather it is about values, and people who are entangled in the socialist safety net and cannot extricate themselves are there because they lack some intrinsic quality.  For those with pluck (and here it helps to remind ourselves of the luck in pluck) it is possible that they will get ahead on the strength of initiative alone, and even more likely in the absence of the regulatory state's rolls of red tape.

The difficulty, of course, is that there is only the anecdotal exception to support the mythology of upward mobility.  It is still possible, though less and less likely.  In the recent issue of the New Republic, Timothy Noah writes, "when American's express indifference about the problem of unequal incomes, it's usually because they see the United States as a land of boundless opportunity," particularly compared to the likes of western Europe.  As he points out, however, it just isn't true.  "Most of western Europe today is both more equal in incomes and more economically mobile than the US."  Likewise, in a recent edition of the New York Times (Jan 4, 2012), Jason DeParle writes, "despite frequent references to the United States as a classless society, about 62% of American's (male and female) raised in th top fifth of incomes stay in the top two-fifths."  He goes on to point out, that "similarly 65 percent of those born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths."  There is some residual mobility of the middle incomes, as DeParle reports, "even by measures of relative mobility, Middle America remains fluid. About 36 percent of Americans raised in the middle fifth move up as adults, while 23 percent stay on the same rung and 41 percent move down, according to Pew research. The “stickiness” appears at the top and bottom, as affluent families transmit their advantages and poor families stay trapped."  While it is encouraging that 36 percent of Americans have moved up, it is disturbing that slightly more Americans, 41 percent, are moving down into the bottom two-fifths.   There is as much, and slightly more, downward mobility.  I won't belabor the point, except to point out that, as income inequality increases, income mobility decreases. The mechanism may not be clear, but the correlation is clear enough and ominous.  It is worth pointing out that those in the bottom two-fifths, in sheer headcount, outnumber those in the top two-fifths by a considerable margin.  At what point will the majority of Americans be low income, and poor?

To be Continued