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(The following is an edited exchange on Facebook, following the post of a picture of a granny brandishing a gun at some implied criminal, and an accompanying argument that anyone who is critical of her use of a gun shouldn’t be because she is just defending herself.)
SH: It’s not her use of a gun that’s the problem; it’s your faction’s idolization of the use or threat of the use of deadly force that’s the problem.
AB: I agree Steve…after all, isn’t THAT how government runs its business?
SH: We don’t have the option of eliminating implicit or explicit force from human existence, only the option of how to organize it, and reduce its rate of explicit expression while increasing the balance of its use to liberate rather than oppress, exploit, or destroy. You prefer the Hobbesian paradise of a decentralized mutual threat of violence, which, as history and current reality shows, more frequently results in the actual use of violence. I prefer a popularly controlled centralization of the legitimate use of force, which is the basis of human civilization and the means to create a foundation for mutual cooperation for mutual benefit. Your Hobbesian paradise leads to a life that is nasty, brutish and short. The enforceable social contract leads to the benefits of human cooperation, including the market itself. Your “analysis” is a caricature of reality, a shallow shadow of the far more complex and subtle world with which we must contend.
Let me put it another way: I said that her use of the gun isn’t the problem, but rather your idolization of it that is. Similarly, the implicit force behind government isn’t the problem, and neither is, in my case, its idolization, since I don’t idolize the implicit force but rather desire the benefits of pacified social co-existence that it produces. The images those of my orientation “idolize” aren’t the images of people with weapons imposing their will, whether a granny or the government, but rather of people being well-served by our social system, able to access the health care and opportunities and safety from the threats imposed by others that make one truly free and truly able to thrive. We don’t worship the militaristic or decentralized or “get tough on crime” images or symbols of force that are so strongly associated with the right. We don’t tolerate police violence against presumed “bad guys” the way so many on the right do, or support the belligerent stance toward the rest of the world that so many on the right do, any more than we rejoice at the image of individuals threatening one another the way so many on the right do.
Force, to us, is a necessary evil to be sublimated as much as possible and used or threatened as sparingly as possible, not the symbol of what we stand for, to be brandished as frequently and irresponsibly as possible. We represent concern for life, for human welfare, for the growth of human consciousness and human welfare, while you represent a commitment to as primal and reptilian an existence as you can manage to impose on the rest of us. Your ideology is a product of the basal ganglia of the human brain, the reptilian response to perceived dangers, the locus of fear and hatred. Humans would be wise to try to transcend those tendencies and reflexes, to rely more on the cerebral cortex, the center of reason and analysis and imagination and aspiration. This is the real nature of the ideological struggle this nation and world is in.
If your view were truly as reasonable as you insist it is, then laws against murder would be as odious to you as whatever laws it is that you oppose, since in both cases the implicit or explicit use of governmental force is implicated. If you think it’s okay for us to have laws against murder that are enforced by a professional police force rather than no laws against murder but only an armed society of individuals all threatening one another, then you believe that there is a benefit to that centralization of the legitimate use of violence, at least to some extent or under some conditions. The real question then becomes one of details, not one of general principle, since it’s easy to demonstrate the irrationality and dysfunctionality of the position that there should be no centralization of the legitimate use of violent force. Your problem is that you replace an analysis with a platitude, and are satisfied that the latter is sufficient, when it really isn’t.
AB: Damn Steve, you use a lot of words.
SH: I also use a lot of logic (which comes from the Greek for “word”). The measure of the value of an idea or analysis isn’t the quantity of words used, whether few or many, but rather the quality of the thought expressed. And the measure of the value of the critique of an idea certainly isn’t how irrelevant it is (except in the sense that that is an indication of the critique’s relative lack of value), but rather how well it addresses the actual arguments made. Of course, your need to rely on pithy misdirection rather than on reasoned argumentation is understandable.
AB: Maybe I should go into politics….that’s where I’m LEARNING it.
SH: Again, irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether political discourse in general is or isn’t a bastion of pithy misdirection; it only matters who in THIS debate is relying on that modality, and who is relying on reasoned argumentation.
AB: I give up! You have BEAT me to death with WORDS. I’m too old to comprehend it all…and in addition I have quit fighting all things and all people. I have found ‘peace’ and refuse to let the actions of others disturb it.
SH: You act as though YOUR words, your choices of what to communicate to the world, are not actions and have no importance. That’s not the case. Politics is the competition of narratives, and the relative success of competing narratives translates into the public policies we collectively choose to live by. Those policies, in turn, determine the quality of life lived by real human beings, and the distribution of wealth and justice and opportunity and unjust or unnecessary suffering. I don’t challenge ideas (“memes”) put out there by others of ideological persuasions that inflict harm on us as a people in order to be cruel, or to “disturb you,” but rather to be kind to those who are adversely affected by the policies that those memes underwrite.
I’m glad you have found peace, but if you participate in public discourse you are not somehow entitled to go unchallenged in what ideas or attitudes or orientations you choose to publish and promote. Be at peace, by all means. But consider helping to bring peace to others as well, by taking responsibility for what it is you are fighting for in the public arena. It is irresponsible to promote ideas you can’t defend and don’t understand. Cheers.
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(The following exchange is from the Facebook thread following my post of my recent essay, Apollo’s Creed.)
EF: Steve, I appreciate the time you put into this, however we do not agree on this. You see the creation of a pencil as an example of the collective, I see it as many individuals working together through only the coordination of the market. Now you would say that is the collective, but it is not, as there is neither a central conscious organizing force nor any force at all….and if there was one of either, the end result would be much worse.
SH: E, you are lost in semantics, and in such an eagerness to pre-empt any line of thought that might eventually be ideologically inconvenient that you feel compelled to insist that black isn’t dark. I don’t care if you call it “a collective” or “a market.” And if you had any actual understanding of my paradigm you would understand that it is predicated on the recognition of systemicness, of organic coherence, not dependent on any central conscious organizing force. When I talk about language as an example of our fundamental interdependence, it is not by reference to a central conscious organizing force, but by reference to the fact that the universe, the Earth, ecosystems, societies, organisms, ant colonies, human minds, forests, all have systemic coherence. It’s obvious. You assume that this is an argument for centralized government. It isn’t. It’s simply the recognition of a reality of fundamental organic interdependence, a fact which is not something that depends on your agreement or disagreement, any more than the fact that rain is wet does.
The fact is that you think in a language that was collectively developed, to employ concepts that were collectively developed, utilizing technologies that were collectively developed, under the auspices of social institutions that were collectively developed, because it was only through the signals sent among the nodes of those networks that any of those things ever came into existence and continued to develop. That’s not really a matter of opinion. It’s just a fact.
But I’ll give you this: If you are so lost in a delusion of absolute ontological individuality that you don’t understand the systemic, diffuse, organic coherence of Nature, including human nature, then you are too lost in an ideological fiction to ever be anything but an obstacle that humanity will have to overcome. And humanity will overcome those who insist that humanity doesn’t exist or matter.
EF: In your writing Steve I see the celebration of the collective. Which is fine…it’s just not a celebration I want to join in on. We celebrate it enough in our society…let us celebrate the fruitful struggle of the individual.
SH: It’s not a celebration of the collective. it’s recognition of the existence of interdependence, without which we cannot forge sound and functional policies, because we are not operating within the framework of reality. Of all societies, and of all developed societies, we celebrate that least, and you fear we celebrate it too much. Sorry, E, but that’s just pathological.
The problem with your rejection of reality, E, is the same as if we performed some other human enterprise, such as surgery or construction, by means of some democratic process, and there were one faction that insisted that respiration and blood circulation were irrelevant and that it’s fine to just perform the surgery without bothering to take them into account, or structural integrity in construction isn’t an issue, so let’s not build our buildings attending to those aspects of the enterprise. You end up with patients who die and buildings that collapse. Similarly, your determination to simply wish interdependence away, and to impose that utterly dysfunctional exclusion from consideration of what are in fact vital systemic aspects of the human enterprise, you end up with societies that don’t function well. And that’s why, among all developed nations, we alone have such astronomically high rates of poverty, malnutrition, infant mortality, homelessness, lack of access to health care, incarceration, deadly violence, poor educational outcomes, lower social mobility, higher inequality in the distirbution of wealth, a lower percentage of our population who actually are affluent. I respect your civility, but the ideology that hides behind it is simply as uncivil as they get.
EF: Steve, now you are putting words in my mouth. I did not say we are not interdependent, I said something different.
SH: And yet in your initial comment you rejected the premise of the essay, which was that the reality of our interdependence implies that we must acknowledge our mutual responsibilities to one another as well as assert our individual rights. You can’t have it both ways, E.
To take it a step further, E, your belief that the market solves all human problems is simply absurd. I’m a huge fan of markets, a great admirer of their organic robustness, of the way in which they process an enormous amount of information in a decentralized way to coordinate disparate wills and interests to mutual benefit. But, despite this impressive quality, you impute to them a magical power they simply don’t possess.
First, for markets to exist in the first place, all sorts of non-market forms of human social organization must occur. Humans must communicate, coordinate, and create a context within which market exchange can occur, construct a marketplace, arrange a meeting, and so on.
Second, for complex modern markets to function well, much more extra-market organization must occur: definition and enforcement of property rights, government backed currencies, reduction of uncertainty through health and safety regulations facilitating increased consumer confidence and more robust buying and selling (with a less costly learning curve imposed on the public, which, in reality, would suffer a manifold higher degree of constant exposure to deadly commodities in an unregulated market), expensive and difficult market policing to prevent insider market gaming that imposes catastrophic costs on the public (often involving the collapse of markets themselves).
Third, markets fail in certain systemic and well-known ways: 1) They generate externalities which affect those who were not parties to the exchange. Since most externalities involve ways in which costs are imposed on those who were not parties to the exchange (because the competition to reduce prices tends to bias externalities in this direction), markets create aggregate suboptimal outcomes unless those externalities are internalized. This fundamental underlying reality of market dynamics is what generates the need for a public agent acting in the market on the public’s behalf. 2) Markets are less efficient producers of utility than hierarchies under a variety of circumstances involving economies of scale, high market transaction costs, and path dependencies resulting from large up-front costs in exchange for far larger but temporally remote returns (e.g., expensive investments in very large projects with very long time horizons tend not to be provided by market mechanisms, though they are often the foundations of enormous growth in the production of prosperity). 3) They perpetuate historical inequities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity due to differential material and social inheritances.
You want to believe that this one sledgehammer is the only tool required for all human enterprise. It’s simply not so, and the ideology that insists on it, stifling our development and utilization of obviously necessary and beneficial complementary tools is a mass insanity inflicting great harm on this society and this world.
EF: Steve, Did I say that markets solve all problems? No, I did not – you are once again putting words in my mouth. I am also well aware of free rider and other problems such as externalities. However, I am also very aware that progressives generally want to take the most attenuated non-market borne cost and turn it into an externality.
Bottom line is this – you use large economic terms, but they do not justify the state you seek to implement.
SH: No, E, I’m not (putting words in your mouth), because that premise is the cornerstone of the ideology that you are constantly espousing, and the assumption that underwrites every position you take and argue. You don’t have to say it, when everything else you say is predicated on it. Look, I sincerely respect your civility and your commitment to the open exchange of competing ideas. But in the end the value of those commitments is their ability to allow the lathe of disciplined and imaginative reason (or disciplined and well-reasoned imagination) to mold our understandings in service to our welfare. Eventually, you’re going to have to face the fact that your paradigm, like all others, is riddled with anomalies, and must either yield to the beneficial process by which paradigms shift, or remain the obstacle it has become to the growth of human consciousness and of rational, pragmatic, humane self-governance.
SB: What Steve Harvey wrote in his essay is pretty much axiomatic, and as he pointed out, it’s been articulated for centuries by theologians and philosophers. I don’t know why so many people reject the idea. The US has been a country that supported individualism. There are and have been dictatorships the suppressed individualism, like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and China. Individualism in the US is nurtured by a huge infrastructure. In a modern city like Denver we’re dependent upon thousands of different people for our very existence. The US has always had a high amount of social capital compared to many other countries, so it’s not clear why so many people are now rejecting the notion. Maybe it’s propaganda by very wealthy and greedy people who don’t want to pay taxes. The failed states of the Middle East have had little collective action and at the same time have suppressed individualism, and the result has been poverty and hopelessness.
SH: SB, I like the way you put it: Recognition of our interdependence has always been pretty much axiomatic. When the absurdity of rejecting that axiom is pointed out, everyone runs for cover: They never said we’re not interdependent! They only rejected every single implication that follows from that recognition! “Yes, of course we’re interdependent…, but we should pretend that we’re not, because otherwise it’s socialism.” It’s a cultural pathology that infests our political process, and we absolutely, positively, and urgently need to extricate this bizarre rejection of our interdependence and its implications from our cognitive landscape. It’s a pernicious weed that is ravenously destroying our social institutional ecosystem, and will leave a desert behind if we don’t confront it, and confront it effectively.
EF: Steve, You have missed my ideology and my view of yours I recognize that government adds value in a limited value of circumstances such as protecting property rights. However, those instances are much more limited than what you say and your “we are all in is collectively “(like the Borg ;-) ) is an invitation to create exceptions to the benefits of individualism that will swallow the rule that individualism benefits us all.
SH: E, the problem is that you are insulating your conclusion from critical examination, assuming it rather than arriving at it. if you allow that we are interdependent and that government has some role in realizing that interdependence, then the question of what that role is is a question which must be left open to careful analysis and debate. But if, instead, you start with your conclusion (the way in which ideological dogmas work), and then direct your energy to ensuring that that conclusion is protected from all threats to it, you do things like disagree with an essay that merely lays out the premise that we are interdependent and that that interdependence imposes on us mutual responsibilities, only to claim later not to reject that premise after all.
First, let’s look at how the issue of how much government is the right amount of government entered into this current conversation. It entered in your last comment, in which you responded to something that no one had said. Find the place in my essay or in my above comments where I declared in a conclusory manner how much government we should have? You can’t, because I didn’t. So, as I’m laying out premises for an argument the conclusion of which you fear you will not like, you don’t wait for the argument to actually be presented, but find ways to reject the premise in a preemptory manner in order to ensure that your conclusion is never challenged.
Second, let’s recognize that once you acknowledge that we are indeed interdependent, that our interdependence does indeed imply that we have mutual responsibilities to one another as well as individual rights to be asserted “against” governmental (or, one might even say, mutually imposed) intrusions upon them, and that government does have some role in the realization of those mutual responsibilities, then we have to go to the trouble of engaging in careful analyses and robust debates over exactly what and how extensive that role is. That’s pretty much the crux of what I am advocating for, and what you are constantly trying to forestall by arbitrarily assuming the answer, using not case-specific analyses, but rather an all-encompassing ideological conviction.
Third, in service to the preemption of the argument whose conclusion you fear, you mobilize an anology of oppressive corporatism (‘the Borg”) as a way of rejecting any argument concerning how to use our agent of collective action as a polity, our government, and thus avoiding the discussion of exactly how and to what degree under what circumstances government should be used, rather than engaging in it. It’s like citing “Rollerball” in a discussion of how best to legally frame the existence of corporations in our political economy as an argument that the speaker’s ideological conviction that the almost complete dismantling of corporations is optimal is the only position that can be considered and accepted. It is a technique for eliminating nuance, reducing a debate to a caricature of reality, and avoiding the hard work of examining the world in its actual complexity and subtlety in order to arrive at the most intelligent and functional conclusions.
E, I’m pretty sure you self-identify as more analytical than ideological, but you have anchored your analysis in blind ideology. The only way to be truly analytical is to yank that anchor out of the concrete into which you have embedded it, and start from the premise that we really don’t know exactly how much government, or what precise role of government, is the optimal form amount and form it should take to best serve our interests as individuals and a nation. Certainly, we all start off with predispositions to think more or less, but when we turn those predispositions into pre-emptory conclusions, the assumption of which precludes the consideration of arguments that might challenge it, then we have lost all claim to being analytical, and have fallen entirely under the spell of ideological false certainty.
And, no, you don’t consider competing arguments, as evidenced from the fact that you are so committed to preempting them before they can be presented. You respond to my essay on the fundamental reality of human interdependence by saying you disagree, then deny that you disagree because you really disagree with something else; and that something else is the conclusion that might be arrived at if you consider the implications of our interdependence. You insist that, though you acknowledge that there is a limited role for government, that you also by some magical alchemy are endowed with the exact knowledge of the precise amount and form that that role must take, and that therefore any discussion of our interdependence and mutual responsibilities is something to disagree with, because you already know the answer to any questions that such a discussion might raise! E, that is pure ideology.
You’re a smart guy. You want to be a powerful voice in political discourse. Your tentative understanding is that the best government is the least government and that’s fine. But allow yourself to be an even smarter guy: Know that you don’t know, and let wisdom fill the space provided by that knowledge.
BTW, E, I haven’t missed your ideology: It is a fixed assumption concerning the optimal amount of government, based on a dogmatic conviction and insulated against empirical analysis. And here’s what you don’t understand about mine: It ISN’T a fixed assumption concerning the optimal amount of government, and is committed to on-going empirical analysis to continue to explore a complex and subtle issue.
E keeps insisting that individualism without recognition of interdependence has benefits for us all. Yet, when comparing America, the most individualistic of developed nations, to other developed nations, it would appear that just the opposite is true. We have the smallest percentage of our population sharing in our national prosperity, by far the highest rates of deadly violence, by far the highest percentage of our population incarcerated, the highest poverty rates, the greatest economic inequality, the highest infant mortality rates, the lowest social mobility, the lowest percentage of our population covered by health insurance, among the poorest educational outcomes…. It’s a bizarre ideology that continues to claim an advantage the existence of which is overwhelmingly empirically refuted.
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Of the many wonders that happily impose themselves on a curious and observant mind, there is one that relentlessly taunts my imagination and tries my patience: The degree to which we fail, as a people, as a species, in our communities and on our own to take what seems to me to be, even more than that taken by the late Neil Armstrong 43 years ago, one small step for us as individuals, but one giant leap for our nation and for humanity. In this case, the small step is a step forward in thought and habit, in perception, and the giant leap is what it would yield in terms of our ability to govern ourselves in a way more conducive to the liberation and mobilization of our collective genius in service to our collective welfare.
Even as I write, I know that, for reasons that defy reason, those words grate on the ears of a large and vocal political faction. The word “collective” scares them, as if there is nothing collective about our existence, as if, despite the manifest absurdity of it, we exist as mutually exclusive entities. Lost in a caricature of reality, anything that smacks of the least recognition of human interdependence, of an existence not only as individuals but also as members of a society and citizens of a nation, resonates in their tortured minds as an affront to something holy and inviolable.
As is often the case, such folly results from the drawing of the wrong lesson from a set of failed applications (and the refusal to notice the larger set of successful applications) of a sound and inevitable principle. But the sound and inevitable principle must be acknowledged and addressed: We are not only individuals whose individual liberty must be protected and preserved, but also members of a society whose interdependence must be recognized and negotiated.
Our Founding Fathers did not fail to know this, and frequently explicitly and implicitly emphasized it: “United we stand, divided we fall;” “e pluribus unum,” “We must all hang together or we will surely hang apart,” The Constitution itself, the arguments in The Federalist Papers (which were overwhelmingly about our interdepedence and the mutual responsibilities as members of a society that it imposes on us), “The General Welfare.” So much a part of the fundamental assumption of human existence was it, such an essential pillar of their Enlightenment doctrine (committed to the application of Reason to the improvement of Society), that they could neither have intended nor foreseen that some of the heirs to their political experiment would manage to erase it from their consciousness.
But reality has frequently reasserted itself, revealed the complexities and subtleties, highlighted the need to articulate two views of the nature of human existence that are simultaneously in mutual tension and two sides of a single coin. Without our fundamental interdependence, our existence as members of a society, we have no existence as conscious human beings. The very languages we think in are expressions of generations of coexistence, concepts and symbols growing not in isolated minds but in interlinked minds. Our technologies, our social institutions, the physical products of our labors, everything that makes us human, are never incubated in a single mind or created by the labor of a single pair of hands, but always in the communication of the members of a society and in the articulation of individual efforts.
The man who builds his own house did not mine his own ores to forge his own nails, and, if he did, did not learn the techniques for doing so only through his own trial and error without reference to any knowledge that preceded him. The current political debate over whether our individual achievements and creations are solely the product of one individual’s efforts, or are always in myriad ways a product of our social contract, is one based on an absurd blurring of reality: Of course they are a product of a social process, brought to fruition, frequently, by the focused efforts of one individual working on the margins of that larger process. We want neither to denegrate that individual effort, nor pretend that the contributions of an entire society were not also involved.
We’ve discovered, through our lived history, that individual rights can rarely be absolute. The right to freedom of religion does not mean that you have the right to sacrifice human beings on an alter if that is something that your religion requires of you. The right to freedom of speech does not mean that you have the right to slander another, or to incite others to violence, or to maliciously ignite a panic. The right to dispose of your property as you see fit does not mean that you have the right to dump toxic waste on your own land in a way which poisons others’ water. The tension between individual rights and mutual responsibilities is not just an occasional anomaly; it is a part of the fabric of our existence.
The step of which I spoke at the beginning of this essay is one which, like Neil Armstrong’s, requires first this vast journey across a daunting expanse of untraversed space. It requires the voyage from the ideological delusion that individual liberty is a value that stands unqualified and without countervailing recognition of our social contract, to recognition of the reality of our interdependence. We must stop referring to individual liberty without also, simultaneously, implicitly or explicitly, recognizing our mutual responsibilities to one another. This isn’t socialism or communism; it isn’t a rejection of the values incorporated into our nation at its founding; it isn’t rejection of capitalism or a presumption of the answers to the questions that it poses. It’s simply a journey of consciousness we absolutely must take.
Once we take that journey together, once larger numbers of us follow that voyage across space to something that has always been shining in our sky and recognize it to be something other than a mirage, we can step from that vessel of consciousness onto the otherworldly realization that we can and should and must work together as members of a society to confront the challenges and seize the opportunities that this world and this life present to us.
On that lunar surface, freed to leap a little higher in the lighter gravity, we can rediscover it as common ground that belongs to all parties and nations. Taking that step is not a partisan agenda, it is a human one. It does not resolve all partisan disputes, but rather frames them in more functional ways. It narrows the conversation to that which is minimally required by reason and lucidity. It ends the reign of an ideological folly and partisan cold war that did violence to humanity.
Obviously, not everyone will take this journey of consciousness, will believe that we could land on that distant moon and take that momentous step. Some will refuse to recognize the fundamental truth of human interdependence. There will always be such denial. Ignorance and folly are not things we can banish from the human condition. But we can diminish their degree, sometimes in small ways that have dramatic effects.
I have argued frequently and passionately for others to join me in the formation of a social movement that is not for the promotion of an ideological or partisan agenda, not to affect election outcomes or influence policy positions, but rather to take as many of us as possible as far on this journey as possible. We need to travel to the moon before we can walk on its surface. We need to cultivate our consciousness before we can act under its influence.
Of course, we will continue to act under the influence of the consciousness that we have, even while we devote just a little more effort to cultivating one more conducive to more functional and humane public policies. These are not mutually exclusive. Nor am I speaking only of us each cultivating our own consciousness (though that is, as always, absolutely vital); I’m speaking of us organizing in service to the cultivation of our collective consciousness.
My purpose in life is not to promote the Progressive agenda. My purpose is to promote wise self-governance in service to human consciousness and well-being. I think it’s important that we continue to remind ourselves of the distinction, because we cannot move humanity forward until we can appeal to people who are not in the market for a partisan identity. And if we can appeal to people who already have one, especially those who would recoil at the thought of working to advance any liberal or progressive agenda, all the better.
It is not a subterfuge: it is a refocusing of all of our minds on what is truly essential and truly important. It is the commitment to look past competing blind ideologies shored up by shallow platitudes toward ultimate purposes and deep underlying values. And getting past these rigid ideological camps into which we have relegated ourselves is one of the necessary steps toward real progress.
It depends on robust discourse among people of differing views. It flourishes when more of us recognize that there’s only one ideology to which any of us should adhere: That of striving to be reasonable people of goodwill, wise enough to know that we don’t know much, responsible enough to try to understand and see the merit in opposing views, compassionate enough to recognize that the goal of these efforts should be a commitment to humanity, working together with all others willing and able to embrace such an ideology to do the best we can in a complex and subtle world.
This is my mission in life: To promote this simple ideology, encourage as many as possible to work toward encouraging as many others as possible to adopt it to the greatest extent possible, always as a work in progress, more focused on our procedures for arriving at the truth than on what we currently think is the truth, always open to the possibility that we are dramatically wrong on one or more crucial points. This is something we should do independently of what we do regarding electoral politics and issue advocacy, diverting some small portion of our time and effort and passion into the long-term investment in a deeper political paradigm shift, into traversing the space between here and that distant moon where we recognize that we are interdependent, that we are fallible, and that we are all in this story together.
It’s not the first time such spaces have been traversed, such thresholds have been reached. We’ve had a Renaissance and a Reformation, a Scientific Revolution and an Enlightenment and the political revolutions based on it, an industrial revolution and now an information technology revolution, a confluence of globalizing forces and a movement to recapture some of the wisdom and beauty of the cultures that were trampled underfoot by modernity’s advance, and human history is still accelerating in amazing ways full of both promise and danger. We are a part of that process, participants in it, with an opportunity to plant the seeds for a future that could be one of ever-more rapidly growing human consciousness and an ever-wiser realization of our role on this wonderful planet of ours.
We are a work in progress, and maybe the word “Progressive” needs to be understood by those who bear it to mean “still a work in progress,” because once people fall into the trap of thinking they have all the answers, they forget how to ask the right questions.
Here’s to us! I believe in our potential, but I’m also keenly aware of the obstacles that stand in our way of realizing it, obstacles that, for the most part, we create ourselves, and throw up in front of us, seemingly determined to perennially condemn ourselves to live in interesting times….
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There is much ado about President Obama’s recent statement “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” The overwrought right is abuzz with angry indignation. How dare he! they shout in unison, aghast that this evil communist could so thoroughly declare war on private enterprise. Let’s take a closer look.
First, it helps to have the entire quote before you:
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
It’s a bit impolitic, a bit overstated. But how far off is it?
As I said in The War of American Interdependence, there are two cognitive frames in competition here, one which thinks that we are fundamentally, ontologically “individuals,” fundamentally mutually independent, and one which recognizes that we are fundamentally, ontologically members of a society, fundamentally interdependent. We think in languages we didn’t individually invent, using concepts and conceptual tools we didn’t individually invent. Every aspect of our lives implicates and depends on countless others, no matter how much of a rugged individualist one may be: Few frontiersmen built their own firearms, and, if some did, they did not mine the ores that provided the materials for it. And whatever they did, in almost all cases, they learned how to do it from others.
Most of us rely on one another to a far greater extent than that: Most of us don’t grow our own food, or, if we do, we don’t build the tractors and drill for the oil and do myriad other things involved in the enterprise. Most of us don’t make our own clothes, or build our own homes, or make our own tools, or produce our own electronic devises, or, if we do some, we certainly don’t do all. The market isn’t an expression of our mutual independence, but rather a social institutional form which helps deepen and facilitate our fundamental interdependence.
Our laws, as well, are an expression of our interdependence. We forge them in the light of what that interdependence demands of us. The developments of the modern era that led to market economies and popular sovereignty framed by written constitutions with carefully delineated rights and powers are part of the evolution of our interdependence. The concept of “liberty” itself is an expression of our interdependence, of the discovery of both increased vitality and increased humanity achievable by freeing up individual initiative and creativity to as great a degree as possible, while still recognizing and working within the framework of our fundamental interdependence.
Obama was talking about exactly that. It’s not some crazy idea, it’s not even really debatable: It’s a fundamental fact of our existence. We thrive through coordinated efforts and actions, through participation in a society with divisions of labor and mutual reliance on one another. The ideology currently in vogue which attempts to erase that fact from our awareness is pernicious and destructive; it attempts to redefine private wealth as attributable to nothing other than private actions, when that’s simply not true. Ben Franklin, unsurprisingly, got it right: Wealth is as much a function of the laws and markets and other social institutions that we forge together, and of the efforts of countless others channeled through those social institutions, as it is of individual effort, because without the former our own efforts have no framework within which to achieve their ends.
So, no, even in the more exceptional rather than more common instance in which a business is built up without any element of relative privilege (the differential material and social inheritances that we draw at birth) having advantaged the entrepreneur, they are not solely responsible for the creation and success of that business; the myriad other human efforts that it implicitly depended on are as well. And the market does not magically reward all of those efforts in ways which serve the ultimate goal of continuing to create the most robust, fair, and sustainable political economy human genius is capable of.
Those who are adamant that human genius cannot intrude on some imaginary pure and absolute individual “liberty,” that to do so is “social engineering” or “communism,” are rather remarkably ignoring how that individual liberty was legally constructed in the first place. Our own Constitution is an act of “social engineering,” and, in the way that too many now use the word, a “communist” plot. Indeed, the framers had to argue that we needed a government strong enough to facilitate effective collective action in our collective interests, “The Federalist Papers” frequently seeming to forecast the later invention of “game theory” and the recognition of what has since come to be called “collective action problems.” (See Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems).
The right claims to rever our Constitution and our Founding Fathers, and yet can’t seem to recognize that both acknowledged our interdependence. Art. I, Section 8, Clause i of the United States Constitution empowers Congress to tax and spend in the general welfare, meaning that “what’s mine” isn’t just mine; the public also has some claim on it. How much of a claim isn’t specified; that’s for us, as the popular sovereign, to determine and redetermine, in the light of growing knowledge and udnerstanding.
And as for the Founding Fathers, their views differed. Jefferson’s and Madison’s are frequently cited, but Ben Franklin’s are generally ignored, even though Franklin alone among them helped to draft and sign every single one of our founding documents and was the undisputed senior American stateman at the birth of this country. Franklin maintained that any private wealth beyond that need to sustain oneself and one’s family “is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it” (Walter Isaacson, “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” Page 424, quoting Franklin).
It’s not about denigrating individual effort and initiative, or failing to respect the vital role they play in our shared social existence. I can only speak for myself, but I’ll tell you clearly: I respect and admire individual effort and initiative, and recognize it as absolutely vital to our collective welfare. It’s not about failing to recognize the need to frame our shared social existence in ways that take that into account, and work to liberate rather than stifle such individual effort and initiative: I am adamant that it is imperative that we recognize the importance of that dimension of our shared existence in every public policy debate.
But it is not the ONLY dimension that we need to consider; it is not the ONLY value that we must respect and maximize. Our nation today has the highest gini coefficient (statistical measure of economic inequality) of any developed nation on Earth, and the statistical reality of one’s socioeconomic status at birth predominantly determining throughout life is inescapable (see http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/hertz_mobility_analysis.pdf). This is not only unjust, but also systemically dysfunctional: The two most catastrophic economic collapses of the last 100 years in America were immediately preceded, by a matter of months, by the two highest peaks in the concentration of wealth in America in the last 100 years, in 1929 and 2008, respectively.
Such gross inequality of opportunity and in the distribution of wealth hurts us all, and violates fundamental American values of fairness. It is one of the challenges facing us as nation, that we have to meet and address as a nation. It’s not wrong to remind those who succeed by some combination of individual effort and good fortune, facilitated, in either case, by our entire social production function, that they succeeded by virtue of their membership in this society, and that their success does not come without reciprocal responsibilities to the society that made it possible.
And that was very clearly and explicitly Ben Franklin’s view as well as mine (in fact, his was a stronger statement of it), so if you want to vilify me for daring to recognize that the public has some claim on private wealth, be sure to vilify him as well.
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On a comment thread of a map of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, one poster was adamant that it was completely inappropriate to refer to the Holocaust experienced by those peoples at European colonists’ hands as “genocide,” making very unconvincing legalistic and semantic arguments. After a bit of back and forth, he finally got very angry, and let loose with a rejection of the very notion that there was anything about that conquest that anyone should feel in anyway ashamed of. This was my response:
After all the meaningless noise, we get to the truth: It isn’t the word you object to after all, but rather the acknowledgement of the magnitude of the historical brutality and inhumanity that went into the formation of this nation! We can’t say “genocide,” not because its role as a legal term prohibits us in casual conversation from using the word in a way in which it is commonly used (oops), not because it is an insult to Jews (oops), but because, by god, how dare we insult your ancestors and nation by emphasizing the brutality of its formation!
And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You oppose the use of the word not in SERVICE to “truth,” but in OPPOSITION to it; not because it’s too imprecise, but because it cuts too close to the bone.
We are determined to emphasize, and you are determined to de-emphasize, the very real brutality of the conquest of this enormous nation and the clearing away of the indigenous population, a brutality whose magnitude is not adequately captured by ANY word. You resent the use of the strongest word available, because it gets us one step closer to a sense of the true magnitude of the inhumanity involved, rather than, as you prefer, keeping us one step further away, in the ideologically convenient haze of historical semi-amnesia.
You don’t want to own the past because you DO want to own the present and future. The more we acknowledge the brutality of the past, the less free we are to continue it. That’s what this is all about: A battle of narratives, whether to be the jingoist chauvinists we have too long been and too many want us to remain, continuing to blithely trample on humanity while surrounded by the arrogant and self-serving halos of “American exceptionalism” and “manifest destiny,” or to be a people aspiring to true greatness of spirit and consciousness, recognizing without diminution the errors of the past in service to doing better in the present and the future.
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(This is the continuation of the dialogue reproduced in A Response to a Conservative on Patriotism, Militarism)
DK: Anyway, I appreciate you efforts in trying to communicate with me. I was happy to learn you served. I didn’t see the justification for the war in Vietnam, but whereas my dad served in WWII & grandfather in WWI I couldn’t dodge service. My solution was to serve 6 years in the Army National Guard, most of that as an officer. Becoming an officer reinforced my belief that making excuses can be harmful. If you want something, go for it. I was working full-time during that time and in a four year JD program nights at Suffolk Law. I came from a blue collar background but found a way to put together a fairly successful career. I now run a small investment advisory service to keep busy in retirement, helping people as well as I can. I help with children’s services by raising funds through my service club. When I grew up this was considered a duty. I now fiind that there are those today who think it should all be the “job” of government. In fact I hear that whatever I do is done just to make myself feel better. I guess that is true. Given my upbringing helping others is a core principal. Of course we do that too with paying our taxes that also provide help to those in need, but passing the buck isn’t enough. I answer to myself, which is part of being a responsible person. I don’t need or want to to judge you. Obviously you are driven to help others by working very hard providing the justification for the government making more decisions for us and how we should lead our lives. I can’t figure out why you believe you can make better judgements than I can for myself. Your subjective opinions are made to look like axioms. In support of your beliefs you accumulate experts, like Krugman. You do know that some smart people have different opinions, but they are just selfish. I can provide you with contrary “evidence”, but because I don’t find it in “liberally approved ” resources you will dismiss it out of hand. I really do think you are a good person with just a different set of values (bias). We need to know ourselves. The smartest people do and are always questioning their assumptions (bias).
SH: It is not sufficient to respond to informed arguments by saying, “well, that’s just your bias,” and then burying the precise analysis that was employed under a lot of misdirectional rhetoric about others trying to tell you what to do when you know better than they do what is best for you to do. Because, let’s face it, we all know that there are numerous circumstances in which we reject that premise out of hand: You don’t get to murder people because you know what’s best and no one has any right to tell you what you should do. The issue isn’t whether we are interdependent or not, whether we, as a society, have some rights over you as an individual, to protect and advance the rights of all other equally valuable individuals; it’s a question of how and where and by what reasoning and values to realize the ideal balance between your individual liberty and our social coherence. I believe in doing it through the careful and systematic use of the full breadth and depth of our consciousness, in service to humanity, all values considered. You believe in relying on a convenient set of ideological platitudes that carefully remove a plethora of relevant information and analysis from consideration, and then declaring that all opinions are equal.
Of course, no one is without bias, and no one has any final claim on absolute truth or absolute expertise. The competition of ideas is vital to the process and outcomes I am talking about. This is a part of that competition, involving competing arguments and competing narratives. You do your best to advance your preferred narrative, using all of your skill, trying to appeal to the emotions of your audience in a way which you think will resonate with them. I, too, do my best to advance my preferred narrative, using all of my skill, trying to appeal to the emotions of my audience in a way which I think will resonate with them. But, on top of that, I make it clear, through the consistent application of disciplined reason to carefully acquired evidence, that I am doing so in service to the reason, not in service to blind ideology. My narrative IS the use of disciplined reason and disciplined imagination, applied to carefully acquired information, in service to humanity. Yours is the repetition of right-wing ideological platitudes. In the world as it is, tragically, blind ideology frequently prevails over informed reason. In the world as we should strive to make it, that should never happen.
You have the habit, which I’ve commented on several times already, of not actually responding to the facts and arguments presented, but rather simply reiterating your talking points, your preferred emotional appeals, pretending that the analyses that have challenged them simply don’t exist. That certainly can work, and has worked in many times and places. But it SHOULDN’T work. It is the undermining rather than mobilizing of reason in service to humanity. And, in the long run, it does not prevail. Our goal should be to bend that arc of the moral universe more sharply toward justice, and expedite the exploration of all other alternatives before arriving at that which is recommended by reason.
I’m all for community involvement and volunteerism, and do a fair amount myself. But we had a history of reliance on that informal and unenforced “duty” to take care of the needs of the poor and unfortunate, and we know that it does not do so to any adequate degree: It produces a Dickensonian world (and Dickens, in fact, was responding to an ideology virtually identical to your own, which had come to displace a more compassionate and responsible one that had preceded it). There’s an inherent free-rider problem; a diminishing few step up and bear the whole burden, while an increasing many say “well, I can’t solve these problems on my own, so why should I bear the burden of trying? My contribution can never meet the need out there, and my individual failure to contribute won’t change things much either.” That’s why we can, should, and must use an agent of our collective will to commit us all to responsibilities we believe we should collectively assume; because that’s what works.
“Passing the buck” isn’t saying “not only should we all do as much as possible for others, of our own accord, but we should also work together, through our social institutions, to do as much as possible for others and for us all as a society.” Passing the buck is saying “it’s up to each person to decide whether they want to help others or not; the poor, the destitute, the sick, the unfortunate, are not society’s shared problem, but rather only the problem of those who decide of their own accord to take on the burden that we do not insist that we all share, and so ensure that it is not adequately met.” Passing the buck is saying “we can’t meet those needs that can only be met as a society, because to do so would require us to act as a society, and that is anathema to our values.”
I am not looking for justifications to give more power to the government to make decisions about how we should live our lives, but rather am striving to give more power to us as a society to act through a democratically elected and constitutionally framed agency of our will to accomplish goals and meet challenges that we collectively face and cannot be accomplished or met merely as a group of disaggregated individuals. We are a society, and have to act as a society, which means using the social institutions of being a society to exercise a collective will, bear collective burdens, and meet shared responsibilities. That is one part of what it is to be human.
Using government to do what really has never been adequately done without it isn’t “passing the buck,” but rather just the opposite: Stopping the buck in the one way and one place where we can effectively stop it, in the agency of our collective will and collective action, because it is a “buck” that requires and merits no less resolve than that.
It’s not about making better judgments for you than you make for yourself; it’s about acting cooperatively to accomplish ends that can only be accomplished cooperatively. Here is an explanation of how that works: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=1459. This isn’t a “subjective opinion,” it’s a mathematical reality. We ARE interdependent, and if we fail to act in ways which explicitly recognize and respond to that fact, as effectively as possible, balancing the simultaneously complementary and competing values of individual liberty and social coherence, then we fail both to achieve the full realization of both our individual liberty AND our social coherence, and fail to achieve the full realization of our humanity.
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(The following is a quote posted on Facebook and the exchange that followed it)
“We’re coming to a tipping point… there’s going to be a huge conversation; is government an instrument of good or is it every man for himself? Is there something bigger we want to reach for or is self-interest our basic resting pulse?” -Aaron Sorkin
DK: Each person in our great country gets to reach for something bigger or not.
SH: We are far too individualistic a society. First, our individual welfare depends heavily on how well developed are our institutions for cooperation and coordination of our efforts. Second, our liberty is a function of our unity and social cohesion, not of our disunity and social incoherence, because government isn’t the only potential agent for depriving one of one’s liberty (or life, or property, or happiness), and it’s absence ensures that other, more diffuse predators will plague everyone incessantly. Third, we are primarily expressions of a historically produced collective consciousness, thinking in languages and with concepts, operating through social institutions and utilizing technologies that we did not individually invent, but rather collectively developed over the course of generations. Our “individuality” is a unique confluence and marginal variation of both genetic and cognitive shared material. We are part of something bigger than us, and as big as it, for it flows through us and we flow through it. Government is not arbitrary; it is one valuable social institutional modality, evolved over millennia, to be refined and utilized in ever more useful and liberating ways.
DK: I grew up in a small MA community that still made decisions during annual town hall meetings. There was a strong sense of community and neighbors took care of neighbors. My grandfather was the town’s tax collector (thirty-five years) and he provided that service evenings and weekends from his home (his day job was being a shop foreman). It was very efficient as were many of the other town services, like fire and police (volunteers). Today in that same town many of these same services are full-time and the town has buildings to house them. Is there better service? Nope. But that’s small town America. My point is the closer the government is to the people the better. Our founders knew this and tried to set up a system that limited federal authority. It does allow more individualism, versus collective authority and remote control. In my opinion collectivism just doesn’t work very well (Russia). I don’t want you or anyone else bossing me around. I’ll take care of myself and do more than my fair share to help others who are in need. Only independence leads to self-actualization. As a former trust officer I saw this with trust babies. Money isn’t everything.
SH: If you’re saying that the disintegration of our communities has been horribly bad for America, and that we would be better off working toward recreating such communities again, I not only agree with you, but it is a topic I write on often, and in very specific ways. When I talk about my ideal social movement (which I do at length, in dozens of essays on my blog, Colorado Confluence), reconstructing a specific, modern form of local community is one of the three components I emphasize.
If your suggestion is that the growth in the federal governmental role in our lives is incompatible with this, or the cause of this, then I couldn’t disagree more. The primary causes of the disintegration of local community have been: 1) increased geographic mobility (and the economic incentives for it), 2) increased options for associating with people remotely (thus decreasing the need to associate with neighbors who are dissimilar to oneself), and 3) the same rise in hyper-individualism that is responsible for our diminished willingness to consider government a tool of collective action and collective welfare.
A sense of community may well have been at its height at precisely the same time that we were most willing to utilize and rely on Government as a tool for taking care of one another: During the Great Depression and the New Deal. This is because the two are more inherently compatible and mutually reinforcing than inherently incompatible and mutually inhibiting.
I agree: The closer government is to the people the better. But that’s not a geographic thing, but rather an emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral thing. First, let me point out why it’s wrong as a geographic assertion, and how our history has been, in one sense, the ongoing discovery of why it’s wrong as a geographic assertion.
At the founding of this county, many (not all) of the Founding Fathers were concerned about the potential tyranny of a more remote government, and took for granted that the more local government was more a thing of the people. In many ways, this was a very nationalistic notion, because they thought of their state as their nation (that’s how we came to change the meaning of the word “state” as we have), and they considered governments that weren’t their own true ”national” government to be imperialistic and foreign.
But our history has been one of successive increases of federal power either to increase the federal protection of individual liberty from more local government (e.g., the abolition of slavery and the 14th amendment, which catalyzed a gradual application of the Bill of Rights to state and local government as well as to federal government; the Civil Rights court federal court holdings, federal legislation, and federal enforcement), or to increase the federal role in facilitating individual liberty by increasing opportunities to thrive economically (e.g., the New Deal, the Great Society).
But a larger role for federal government does not have to be an emotionally or socially remote thing. I feel a personal connection to my two U.S. senators (one more than the other) and several of my state’s congressmen (as well as many in the state legislature and state government). In a different way (i.e., without the benefit of actual, personal interaction), I feel a personal connection to President Obama. And all of us who feel that we are in a shared national community feel that we are also in a shared local community. We tend to be more involved locally as well as nationally. I, for instance, made an effort once to reinvigorate my community, to get my neighbors more involved in our local schools and local businesses, to become more of a community. (Ironically, it is in the strongly Republican/Conservative/Libertarian enclaves such as where I live where local communities are weakest, and in the strongly Democratic neighborhoods where local communities are strongest, suggesting again that the correlation you identified is the inverse of reality.)
“Collectivism,” like “socialism” is an inherently overbroad term, and even more so in the way that it is used by modern conservatives. It is used to simultaneously refer to a set of failed totalitarian states, and to the entire corpus of modern developed predominantly capitalist but politically economic hybrid states that are the most successful economies in the history of the world. Every single modern developed nation, without exception, has the enormous administrative infrastructure that invokes those terms from conservatives, and every single one, without exception, had such an infrastructure in place PRIOR TO participating in the historically unprecedented post-WWII expansion in the production of prosperity (pre-empting an insistence that it is an unhealthy and self-defeating by-product of such wealth). In reality, the political economic form that you insist doesn’t work is the only one that ever has, on the modern scale, and the one you insist is the best imaginable has never actually existed and can never actually work.
(Sure, before the New Deal we had a much smaller federal government, but we were already using it in multiple ways to address social problems, including child labor and anti-trust laws. It only resembled the conservative ideal when we lived in a historical period that did not support any other form, due to the state of the economy and of communications and travel.)
Our founders set up a system that had the potential to articulate with and evolve according to the realities of lived history. The Constitution is brilliantly short and highly general, except in the exact design of the governmental institutions, which remain as they were outlined, with some Constitutional modifications since (such as the elimination of slavery and of their infamous designation as 3/5 of a human being, and the direct election of U.S. senators). Our nation is not some stagnant edifice following nothing more than a blueprint which perfectly predicted and mandated every placement of every brick, but rather an organic articulation of our founding principles and documents with our lived history, creating something that is responsive to both simultaneously.
No, this isn’t the America envisioned by Jefferson and Madison. It is a bit more like the one envisioned by Hamilton and Adams, and, in some ways, not nearly as “collectivist” as the one envisioned by Franklin, who considered all private wealth beyond that necessary to sustain oneself and one’s family to belong “to the public, by whose laws it was created.” But, more importantly, it is the one that the articulation of foundational principles with lived history has created. None of us can read the minds of historical figures, or impute to them with confidence what they would think today, but for everyone who says that Jefferson would be revolted by modern America, I say that it may well be that he would be delighted by it, for the ideals he helped to codify gained fuller and deeper expression, through the unexpected mechanism of a stronger rather than weaker federal government, than he was able to imagine possible. (And it was Jefferson; after all, who insisted that our social institutions have to grow and change with the times, for to fail to do so is to force the man to wear the coat which fit him as a boy.)
Community, like a well-functioning and substantial federal government, is, to some extent, all about us as a community, as a people, limiting one another’s actions and pooling resources for mutual benefit. You may not want a government bossing you around, but I don’t want corporations poisoning my air and water because they can increase the profit margin by not “wasting” money on avoiding doing so. You may not want a government bossing you around, but I want a functioning market economy rather than the undermined and unstable one that occurs in the absence of sufficient governmental regulations to ensure that centralized market actors don’t game markets to their enormous profit and to the public’s enormous, often catastrophic, detriment.
Are there challenges to be met while doing so? Does the resolution of problems create new problems to be resolved? Absolutely. Does that mean that we should rely on the never-adequate system of private charity to confront deeply embedded and horribly unjust poverty and destitution, rather than confront it as a people, through our agency of collective action, our government? Absolutely not.
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There’s a post going mildly viral on Facebook, just one of many on both sides of the ideological divide. The post is a picture of a message on yellow paper held between two fingers, that says “Don’t claim to love the U.S.A. while trying to make it a socialist nation.” it’s a relatively mild one, to be sure, far less offensive than many I’ve seen. But it is usually accompanied by comments that make it more offensive, hateful and ignorant statements that one might expect to accompany such mindless drivel as this.
Every now and then (okay, fairly frequently), I decide to respond to such things, to challenge these pernicious and destructive narratives. This is how I responded to this one, on several of its threads:
First, what you are referring to as “socialism” is the hybrid, predominantly market-based capitalistic political economic form common to all modern developed nations, without exception, and in place in all modern developed nations PRIOR TO their participation in the historically unprecedented post-WWII expansion in the production of prosperity.
Second, it is to the right of the political economic ideology advocated by Benjamin Franklin who said “all property superfluous to (that necessary to support oneself and one’s family) is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it.” I guess that Benjamin Franklin, who was the only one of the founding fathers to participate in the drafting and signing of every single one of our founding documents, and who was the universally revered senior statesman of our new nation at the moment of its birth, had no right to claim to love America, then?
Third, “loving America” requires committing ourselves to the same level of discourse, the same openness to ideas, the same willingness to celebrate and apply reason to the challenge of self-governance, as that which characterized our founding fathers in 1787, when they gathered for the Constitutional Convention, and forged difficult compromises and sought pragmatic solutions to problems.
Fourth, this kind of nonsense, of misusing the word “socialism,” of rejecting political economic reasoning within a political economic system that is UNIVERSALLY characteristic of every successful political economy in the world today, and of vilifying those who want us to remain a modern and prosperous nation rather than be thrown into the downward spiral of ignorance and bigotry that you are so passionately striving to impose on us, is simply repugnant.
It is no expression of love for America to vilify your fellow Americans, to constrict our thought and reduce our commitment to the welfare of our people and the good of the world. It is no expression of love for America to strive to continue to impose policies on it that have put it near or at the bottom of all developed nations by most measures of human welfare, with by far the highest violent crime rates, with by far the highest percentage of our population incarcerated (of ANY nation on Earth, bar none!), with higher infant mortality rates, higher poverty rates, a poorer performing educational system….
It’s no expression of love for America to hate its people, to lack compassion or concern for the destitute, to refuse to incorporate economic theory and research into economic policy, to refuse to learn and understand the lessons of history, to remain ignorant and irrational and belligerent and bigoted and to insist that that is what must define us as a nation and a people.
That is not love for America. That is hatred for humanity. And it is not who and what we are. It is not who and what the vast majority of Americans, reasonable people of goodwill, people who care about one another, people who care about being wise and compassionate and working together to do the best we can in a complex and subtle world, are going to let you turn us into.
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(This is an exchange from a right-wing Facebook thread dedicated to praise of right-wing maniac Michelle Malkin)
Marc: malkin! i feel lucky shes an american cuz she kicks some serious commie ass!!! dont mess with the malk!
Steve: Good God, where do you people come from…?
Sarah: At Steve, what are you talking about?
Steve: I’m talking about the utter destructive insanity that is your ideology. I’m talking about what is obvously a new outbreak of a perennial cultural and political disease. While we should be, and can be, rational people of goodwill working together to do the best we can in a complex and subtle world, instead we are burdened with a fanatical right-wing ideological cult that is destructive to our nation and to humanity.
I certainly don’t know everything, or perhaps even much. It’s a complex and subtle world we live in. I’m a lawyer, social scientist and de facto economist, professional researcher, policy consultant, social analyst, former teacher of U.S. and World History, U.S. Government, World Geography, Criminology, Complex Organizations, Social Change, Social Problems, Dynamics of Prejudiece, so I’ve made an above average effort to understand and know about the nature of the world I live in, but none of us really knows much in comparison to what there is to be known and understood. That’s why we need humility more than ideology, and a willingness to work with and try to understand and try to accommodate competing views.
What we DON’T need is people whose form of political participation is either “kicking commie ass,” or cheering others who they think do, because those labels are not informative or productive no matter how used, and, in modern American political discourse, are generally used for no purpose other than to vilify and dismiss ideas that are well within the range of modern capitalism, that characterize every single modern prosperous nation on Earth and did so prior to any participating in the enormous post-WWII expansion in the production of prosperity, that are more moderate than the economic ideas advocated by Ben Franklin, and that should be part of a broad, civil, informed, and analytical national dialogue about how best to govern ourselves, both in general, and considering policies and issues one at a time.
You are either a part of that healthy, productive, wise process, that serves both our welfare and our humanity, or you are an obstacle to it, undermining it, and thus reducing our wisdom, welfare, and humanity as a nation and a people.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Bob: Steve, it’s the InterNet. Don’t get so worked-up about it.
Steve: Bob, it’s not just the internet. This is just where it’s most visible, and most amplified. The internet is our new public forum, where we, as a polity, get together and discuss the issues that we have to decide upon. Public forums are very important, because they are the true and ultimate halls of government. This is really where the most important part of politics and self-governance happens, the formal places and processes simply being the consolidation of what happens here (and throughout our cultural discourse). So it matters.
There are lots of different ways of engaging in this process. The best, from my point of view, would be for there to be a general commitment to doing the best we can to emulate the academy and the courts, where reason is applied to evidence, arguments are made in disciplined ways according to guiding rules, and we arrive at conclusions that use these techniques to minimize bias and maximize accuracy and utility.
But, at heart, we’re in a competition of narratives. We each frame our own guiding narrative in what we think is the most compelling way and the competing narratives in ways least flattering to them. I frame mine as advocacy of a shared commitment to disciplined reason and imagination in service to humanity, and yours (speaking of the prevailing ideology here) as blind ideological irrationality in service to (usually passive though sometimes active) inhumanity. That’s not a ploy on my part, but rather my honest and considered perception of reality.
Obviously, most participants here, most friends of Robin, aren’t going to appreciate that characterization. They would frame our competing narratives differently, perhaps as a moral and righteous commitment to Christianity and our Constitution against liberal, elitist, godless, socialist whatever. I could choose to argue within your framing (and could do a pretty good job, I think, of demonstrating that you are faithfully advancing the ideals and letter neither of Christianity nor of our Constitution). You are “carrying a cross and wrapped in the flag,” as Sinclair Lewis presciently put it nearly a century ago, and I am committed to procedures which maximize the influence of reason, imagination, compassion, and human consciousness in human affairs.
I very strongly believe that my narrative is far more compelling than yours, period. I think that it is destined to prevail in the long-run, but constantly embattled in the short-run. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it (paraphrasing an earlier religious scholar), “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And as John Maynard Keynes put it, “People will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.” This inconsistency between our long-term trajectory (toward ever increasing reason and justice) and our constant short-term detours (into ever-erupting irrationality and belligerence toward out-groups) is really what defines the broad sweep of human history.
Since I am thoroughly convinced that my narrative (which, of course, isn’t mine alone) is more compelling, my preference is to argue it in long, well-informed and well-reasoned discourses, painstakingly demonstrating why it is more compelling. And since it is more compelling, the main task left to those who are entrenched in the opposition to it is to find ways of undermining or dismissing it. One such way is to critique the length of the discourses and ignore the substance. Another is to insist that our public discussion in our public forums are too trivial to be taken so seriously, so, thank you very much, but you can’t challenge our ideology because we’re just chatting here.
But in reality these are all discursive strategies, ways of promoting one narrative and, particularly when that is a weak narrative that cannot survive careful scrutiny, insulating it from such scrutiny and from the challenges that accompany such scrutiny.
So, which form of dismissal shall it be? An irrelevant comment about the length of my comment, thus redirecting all attention away from the content? A trivialization of the content, in order to neutralize it before it has an opportunity to be contemplated, contemplation being anathema to blind ideological fanaticism?
Or, can a miracle occur, and one or two people gain one small grain of wisdom, and start to question themselves, their own false certainties, their own habits of thought and belief, and thus, by doing so, engage in an act of courage which serves humanity in the most subtle and extraordinary ways?
Bob: Steve, it’s still just the InterNet. Sheesh!
Your penultimate paragraph is sad to read. You attempt to preempt any exchange by positioning yourself as “victim” before anyone replies??? C’mon! Man-up, Steve.
You are entitled to view your defensive circumlocution as “well-informed and well-reasoned….”
Good luck, changing the nature of discourse on the web, Steve.
Steve: Bob, I never claimed to be a victim of any kind; I have a great life, full of privilege and good fortune and all of the wonders that life has to offer. I am a student of society, and was commenting on the nature of discourse in the competition of narratives, and on the inevitability of irrelevant thrusts and parries to discredit opposed beliefs and perspectives (used most by those who depend most on insulating their ideology from any intrusion of reason and evidence, and least by those who rely most on the implementation of reason and evidence). Your response was an example of exactly that, rather than a refutation of its pervasiveness (with almost poetic irony using my pre-emptive identification of it as the pretext for doing it!). Far from it being “any exchange” that I was attempting to pre-empt, it was the obstruction of any productive and meaningful exchange that I was attempting to pre-empt, truly a daunting task with people so well-fortified against any consideration of contradictory information and argumentation! (Or is it your conviction that the tactics I named are the essence of substantive discourse?) And, since politics is a competition of narratives, of ideas and beliefs and values, and since those do change, dramatically, over time, no luck is required: We all make our marginal contributions to that process, in proportion to our ability and determination and the inherent appeal of the narrative we are advocating.
(Afternote: What I like about the exchange I reproduced here is that it perfectly illustrates the difference between engaging in discourse, and avoiding engaging in discourse, the former being the vehicle for the growth in human consciosuness and its application, and the latter being the vehicle of bigotry and ignorance.)
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