Leisure, Mangled

Originally a comment left at The Chronicle of Higher Education website for the article, In Praise of Leisure, by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky

I can't say I'm persuaded, and not just because of the superabundance of quotes which the authors seem to think fill in the gaps of the argument, or the fact that this is a pale retread of select Plato and Aristotle without the context of their ethics, or the passive swipes at easy targets. Rather their inattention to the essential matter of definition is shockingly sloppy.

First, the authors define "leisure" as "activity without extrinsic end" and then as "spontaneous activity," and I pass over the latter on account of its senselessness (as written.) By "extrinsic" one could mean either "inessential" or "external." Now since they imply leisure is very important I suppose they mean "external," which, let us be honest, they should have written even though it does not sound fancy. (Or they should have qualified what the task was extrinsic to, since it is not extrinsic to the individual.)

Anyway, the authors go on to give examples of a teacher, a musician, and a scientist which are all inappropriate because as you say, sort of, it is the purpose (or lack thereof) that makes a leisure activity. They may be paid, the authors say, but because such people don't do it for the money, it is leisure. They chose these particular crafts because they are respectable and you essentially argue that such activities are by nature leisure activities (although they don't say why.) What they should have said was "anything chosen for its own sake" is a leisure activity, but that doesn't pander to the likely Chronicle readers, I suppose. Too, it could apply to any activity.

Fine, then, we have our definition of leisure. Why is it important? Frankly, that's what the article should have been about. Instead we get a lot of quotes to make us feel smart and elite. Oh, and who fits such a caricature of someone who values money in itself? Scrooge McDuck? Don't most people with money spend it on things? Why not argue that those things are wasteful? Because the authors don't want to offend their target audience by telling them that they should not spend on iPods and trips to the Caribbean and should instead take "stoic vacations" in their minds? Isn't such a rebuke sort of implied by their "limits" on money, since limiting money would limit people to what you think are the essential goods?

Second, the authors define capitalism (kinda sorta) as desiring wealth. Why? I know they want to demean mindless acquisitiveness but why call such "capitalism?" Capitalism has as often been defined as simply or essentially, "absolute property rights."

Speaking of rights, I would mention their "[il]liberality." They write that liberalism is not neutrality but specific values. Fair enough. They also implied (sneaky!) that, like Keynes, Berlin, and Trilling, that the state ought to "uphold civilization" otherwise the people with money will control public taste. Since they let this cat out of the bag. . . a few questions.

They use the word "guardians of capital" to set (just whom anyway?) as the "guardians of culture." Platonic guardians, I take it? So the elite should control, via the state, what is promoted? Or the people, because they elect the state? Would they argue that democracy chooses the good, or defines it? Better than oligarchy? Does money control taste? Does it change or promote it? Has it? Does it more than other means? Why? If so, doesn't that spell doom for a liberal society and property rights?

But wait the authors don't want to ban money, it's just that "the game should be subject to rules and limitations." So I guess they will indeed be the guardians. So just what brand of "liberalism" are they advocating? "State-guided liberty?"

Lastly, don't you think advocating the good life and living it joyfully will promote it better than ivory tower finger-wagging? Or developing a philosophy based on values? No, better to write a quasi-scholarly parade of quotations to sell your book in the hope that it competes with Michael Sandel's equally flatulent book which just beat theirs to press.

I'm willing to believe their book is better than this, but who would buy it after such a poor precis? I would rather re-read Josef Pieper's, "Leisure: The Basis of Culture," which beat their book to press by 64 years and deals systematically with actual concepts and philosophy.

The Tax Zone

With apologies to Rod Serling.

Tiberius Quartermain had just returned home from another day of trading Triscuits on the wheat exchange. "What peace!" he thought, pacing through the last steps of daily journey back to his door. Anticipating the liberty of the evening, weary Tiberius hung up his overcoat and unlaced his bluchers. He finished the day's last duty by feeding Bimperl, his wife's Pomeranian, and then for himself he prepared some tea. At last like every other Friday, Tiberius, with his Earl Grey steeping beside him, sank into his lounger to dilute amongst the noble lays of Schwanda, der Dudelsackpfeifer.

Just as Tiberius began to list asleep the telephone rang. Tiberius, who could bear no cacophony of any kind, vaulted from his cozy repose to arrest the clamor. "Hello," he gargled, before clearing his throat.

"Hello is this Teeberoos Quarterman?" the woman asked. Tiberius heard enough of the faint voice to recognize his mangled nomen.

"Yes, this is Tie-bee-ree-uhs Kwor-ter-mayn," Tiberius articulated as he lifted the head off the record.

"Oh good, Mr. Quarterman." the woman replied, "We're so glad we found you and boy are you going to be glad we did."

With Schwanda silenced Tiberius resigned himself to the conversation. "Yes and whom do you represent, madam?" he asked.

"We've called to tell you about our special program which we know you will–"

"Pardon me madam, please," Tiberius interrupted, "but whom do you represent."

"I'm from the government," she replied, "and I'm here to help."

But no one could help Tiberius now, for although he didn't know it, he was in. . . The Tax Zone.

Fund the Arts?

His cats, however, look amiable.

Privileged this morning to enjoy a day of leisure, that is, rest and study, upon waking I picked up my iPad to read a bit. I set upon Bach's cello sonatas to highlight the insights that awaited me. Zipping through my Twitter feed I brought my vigorous fingering of the screen to a hasty halt: Lo! Alex Ross has tweeted. I tapped through and began to read the article he had posted. As I read a cloud formed in my mind. A haze fogged my vision. My synapses writhed and my neurotransmitters gushed in an attempt to explain what I read. It wasn't just me, either. I'm certain Casals split a string as I spoke the crazed falderal in the vain hope that my ears could translate what had befuddled my eyes. Alas and Alack! They could not.

You see there is a particularly gross caricature of conservatives that irks me. In this fantasy Dick Cheney is Medusa, who plans to replace all of the world's museums with oozing oil rigs. He rides a chariot cast from melted Greek bronzes and pulled by a Brobdinagian Hydra of Conservative High Philistines. You cut of the Goldwater head and Reagan pops up. Cut off the Burkean head and Scruton rears his ugly one. One neck supplies an endless supply of Bushes. Before the beast marches the Grand Army of Conservative Neanderthals, their dragging knuckles raising such dust that their approach blots out the sun.

That a quiet, soft-tempered conservative man sits at his desk reading Latin and listening to Bach does not enter into this chimerical relief. That peace, quiet, and privacy are his preferred environment does not gel with his reputation for bloodletting. His childlike love of family belies the news stories that he lets children die in the streets and his hobbit-like love of the earth and all things growing nips at the fib that he cares not for the environment.

I would be an unserious or dishonest man not to admit the above descriptions are themselves caricatures. Neither image, of the conservative as saint or scion of darkness, is likely to be found with great ease or in great numbers. What to make of this article by a Mr. Will Robin from his blog Seated Ovation I'm not sure. What to make of Ross' Tweet of it, which can only be seen as a semi-tacit public endorsement, I know a bit. It's like finding Jersey Shore sandwiched between Ikiru and Wild Strawberries on his DVD shelf, or I suppose Lady Gaga between Bach and Mozart. It's embarrassing. Yes, we all come to moments of exasperation with our political opposites, moments in which we heedlessly lap up material which is more polemical swiping than scholarship. Yet these moments are brief and regretted as indulgences to baser impulses. To grace such fetid fair with display, let alone the slightest approbation, is to tread without wisdom.

Yes, I really am blathering on about this reflexive Tweet of a thoughtless essay but I think the occasion is quite revealing. You see I do think people change over time, but slowly and almost imperceptibly until they suddenly seem a caricature of their former selves. This is so because we to become more like our surroundings. Being surrounded by people who are crass and rude rubs off on you. One cuss becomes two becomes three until those all-too-versatile four-letter words have replaced a good deal of your vocabulary. Theodore Dalrymple has a recent and customarily noteworthy take on the phenomenon, but the ability of habits to form and change your character is as old as Aristotle. For my part I've recently been enjoying the series Edward the King in which, somewhere late in the series, someone shouts ass! It comes as quite a shock given the genteel world we've grown accustomed to in the program.

Indeed TV is a particularly powerful method of habit-forming since it's influence is over long periods of time. Because of that length of time, as I have articulated before, at some level we perceive television as real. I can't imagine what watching one of the many graphic criminal shows week after week will do to you, to say nothing of reality TV. Considering politics again, take Comedy Central's lucrative tag-team of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Funny they may be and often, but their shows consist of nothing more than relentlessly excoriating "the right" and without any formal standards of logic or argumentation or broad consideration of facts. Any honest man would call it, at best, infotainment. With scant exception, I say those I know who are fond of these shows are cynical, they think they are highly intelligent, and they are not nearly as informed as they think they are. Over time their image of their opposition has veered toward the cataclysmic scene I sketched before. Their change wasn't deliberate but it was unchecked. They think the Democratic Party is at worst incompetent but best left in charge because the Republican Party is manic. Add Stewart's plangent appeals to reason, the fact that his only real criticism is that people are stupid, and Colbert's shtick of mocking the reason (i.e. alleged lack of reason) of the right, and you have a feedback loop frightful to look upon. . . from the outside.

We can see then that pandering is not such a mild vice. We need little encouragement, already seeking out as we do, people, places, facts, and so forth, that allow us to perpetuate what comforts us.

Robin's Argument is of course no such thing. It is simply a series of assertions about government funding of the arts and cheap shots at conservatives. Though this rattle-banging falderal cannot be taken seriously I will endeavor to respond. I will spare any further mention of the embarrassing flaccidity of the argument as well as the extent to which using that clip from the television drama West Wing falls squarely within the behavior we looked at before. That said, I will address the points as they should have been made and as they would have to be made to respond.

The first issue is obviously the legal one, that is, the constitutional one. Our government is not set up as a pure democracy but a democratic-republic which requires deference to written law and also a declaration which acknowledges an overriding and inviolate natural law. I hope that sounds as serious as it is. If that doesn't sound reasonable to you then you're not a democrat since "Democracy" implies both the rule of the many and individual sovereignty, but simply a majoritarian. So if you want to spend on anything not spelled out in the constitution, prepare an amendment. That's the process. If people don't think it's appropriate for the government to do at all, whether or not it produces good, then that's the end of it.

The next issue would be when such a hypothetical amendment were being debated. Remember a government acts for all people, so any law should be supported by as high a majority of people as possible. By definition the fewer people that support it the less democratic it is. So to fund the arts, art itself would have to be defined. If that enterprise doesn't cause you some concern then you've put the cart ahead of the horse. Must it have a specific purpose, or should it not have specific purposes? Must it consist of specific parts? May it be abstract? Must it be intellectual? What about expressive content?

Then, whether you settle on funding art by a particular definition or anything calling itself art, you have more questions about the content. Should art be funded independent of content? What about art advocating breaking the law, or treason? What about religious art? These seemingly detailed questions beg another, which is of course why fund art? It's not as if art has some special edifying power apart from its process and the idea it expresses. Any old self-expression isn't necessarily of value and in a free society not everyone shares the same values.  Cato taught his son fighting, riding, and boxing in addition to reading whereas Aemilius Paulus gave his son a Greek education. (See Plutarch on these men for the details.) Take a guess whether or not Cato or Paulus would have tolerated meddling in their sons' educations?

Apart from processes, though, there still remains to discuss the ideas and as ideas are unavoidable in expression there is no such thing as funding " just the arts" because you're in effect funding specific art and specific ideas. So you end up with a council or individual enforcing standards. Now if everyone agrees, fine (maybe). None other than Destutt de Tracy, an Enlightenment thinker most influential on Jefferson, didn't see a problem with the government promoting republican values. (Why would a republican government not want to promote republican values?) Still: in that situation would it or would it not be propaganda? Bear in mind, this is a problem stemming from propagating ideas on which people already agree:  republican government. Imagine the storm around ideas on which people disagree.

Besides those points, who appoints the members of this committee? Do they run for the office? Is this an "office?"  For how long do they stay in office? Or is this committee just another government bureaucratic entity no one understands or oversees except those with enough pull to tug the ears of its members? Are they appointed in the way the "Secretary" or "Czar" is? Is that very democratic? To whom are they responsible? How? Robin speaks of "the symbolism of the position." Shouldn't in a liberal society, the symbolism of any office of authority make one a tad, oh, nervous? This issue is no less than the problem of government itself and that this serious matter is glossed over by Mr. Robin as wanton conservative mongering is nothing short of outrageous (and illiberal.) Robin continues with this wistful thought about a best-case scenario for what we'll benignly call the "post" in dispute:

Maybe we would end up with someone with a lot of political clout. . .

You see in the Res Gestae of Augustus the emperor states that during his reign he had no more potestas than any of his political colleagues but rather only more auctoritas. That is to say, technically he had no special power buy he wielded such enormous influence that he was the one in charge anyway. This might be laudable if there were no government at all, maybe, but to praise political muscle instead of the authority conferred by the office is once more, illiberal, undemocratic, and un-republican.

Even more illiberal is the following proposition:

Any attempt to create a position at the level of Secretary of Arts/Culture would be a political debacle. Let’s say we somehow actually get the position approved (can you imagine the nightmare of congressional hearings?). . . 

Whence this contempt for the political process? Aren't the problems of electing officials worth having in a free society? Aren't they more then "debacles" and "nightmares?" Shouldn't liberals consider undemocratic processes "nightmares?" Good grief!

So instead of treading this authoritarian path consider how you yourself, directly, might spread the arts without the use of force and perhaps even for free:

1. Make instructional videos, podcasts, or materials.
2. Write a book.
3. Make a website.
4. Subscribe to a scholarly publication.
5. Donate everywhere you can as much as you can.
6. Buy things from institutions whose causes you support.
7. Perform wherever and whenever possible.
8. Tutor people.
9. Raise money for a local school's scholarship or competition.
10. Pay for someone's education. 

Lastly, to promote the arts is to change men's hearts. Never underestimate this task and how little grand designs will succeed at it. No society has or will embrace "art for art's sake." Nor should one. They need ideas to want to express. I'll leave it to Nietzsche to explain the greatest folly of "funding the arts."

If forced to speak, philosophy might say: Wretched people! Is it my fault if I am roaming the country among you like a cheap fortune-teller? If I must hide and disguise myself as though I were a fallen woman and you my judges? Just look at my sister, Art! Like me, she is in exile among barbarians. We no longer know what to do to save ourselves. True, here among you we have lost our rights, but the judges who shall restore them to us shall judge you too. And to you they shall say: Go get yourselves a culture. Only then will you find out what philosophy can and will do. [Emphasis mine.]

Culture, although Robin so casually adds it to the title of his newly minted post, "Secretary of Arts/Culture," is by no means easy to define. It is certainly not something that can be planned, bureaucratized, produced, or administrated. It is not the same as "education." For a fuller discussion of this  topic I direct you to T. S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture and some of our other essays below.

If you enjoyed (or hated) this essay you may enjoy (or hate) the following: 

• Culture and Community
• Libertarianism and Moral Authority
• Manners, Duties, and Society
• A Telling Comment
• Caution: Intellectuals at Work
• Defining Progressivism
• Democracy and Freedom
• Primitive Romance

Minus Virtue

Aristotle and the Neuroscientists

The NY Times is running psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker's review of the new book, "Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength," by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. Pinker's review is one of those pieces, of which the Times specializes in, that makes me wince. Not because it is poorly written or even wrong but because it is liable to leave the reader unacquainted with the deeper problems of the issue at hand with a facile, shallow, understanding of the topic while making him think he is at the cutting edge of thought. Unfortunately it is not quite so easy to critique a book review. Whose ideas am I critiquing? Those of the reviewer, those of the author, or those of the author as understood by the reviewer? I will persevere, though, because it is the impression the review leaves which is of interest to me.

Please indulge me, though, with a few minor points. First, Adam and Eve, Odysseus, and Augustine lived at different times. Agreed? Thus saying that "Ever since" and listing those figures is sloppy and, I might add, annoyingly so. Second, Pinker writes, "the very idea of self-­control has acquired a musty Victorian odor." If it rose in the 19th century (the Victorian era) then it was simply Victorian. If it declined starting circa 1920 then when exactly did it, acquire the "musty Victorian odor?" Did it come back after that? Pinker doesn't say. Not to put to fine a point on it, but the opening two paragraphs make a terribly sloppy preface to what Pinker really wants to talk about. Oh, and "a homunculus in the head that physically impinged on a persistent antagonist." Editor on aisle five!

Anyway his hastening to the 20th century is "rather telling," as I am fond of saying. Pinker passes over the time when not having self-control was considered a moral failing. Now it is not. Now it is a utilitarian "virtue" to be used to get ahead and ensure maximum efficiency in getting whatever it is we want. You strengthen it like a muscle and then gloriously resist temptation. This and the authors' advice about building it up is all well and good. It is, predictably, in concert with Pinker's own notions as he set forth in The Blank Slate. So what am I quibbling about? That he treats this shift as a historical and not a philosophical one. We will revisit this point at the end of our discussion.

Meanwhile, Pinker calls "self-control" a virtue. Is this appropriate? (Also, the title of the book is "Willpower." I suppose we should understand self-control and willpower as synonyms.) Let us first consider what he means by "virtue." In Aristotle, "The opposed virtues are virtues only because they encourage and help constitute a full rich life." [1] They are not the oxymoronic "utilitarian virtues" Pinker in effect calls for. Likewise acting virtuously requires 1) knowledge of your self and the situation, i.e. being virtuous and not simply foolhardy, 2) being virtuous for its own sake, 3) being virtuous out of character and not by accident or incidentally. If there is no particular good for man then it seems inappropriate to call these "useful habits" "virtues."

Let us now consider what "self-control" means. Unfortunately in the review the word is not defined, though it seems simply to mean. . . well I'm not so sure. It cannot simply the ability to do something, anything, since the gist of the article is resisting one inclination to pursue something else.  Interestingly, all of Pinker's and the authors' examples involve physical activity. Likewise the faculty is likened to a muscle which can be flexed to resist temptation. This is a most convenient analogy because it implies that self-control 1) is a faculty, 2) exists in one already, albeit undeveloped. In fact it is just as plausible that one is learning to do something he was not inclined to do at all, but that it is still necessary to do. Does one truly have a virtue before one exercises it, the same way an infant has sight before it is developed into acute vision, or in contrast is it acquired through habituation? The analogy disguises a question of great importance.

Self-control, then, seems inherently to be connected with bodily pain and pleasure. In this it seems akin to temperance, though temperance implies a mean and not just resisting. Yet Pinker uses the word "passions" for that which needs controlling. Yet surely we must distinguish between appetites and passions, the former occurring in individuals without any stimuli and the latter only after some conscious appraisal of a situation. There are then both bare appetitive forces and "deliberative decisions" and thus also a role for reason in virtue. Yet deliberation itself consists both in conscious reasoning and desiring a particular end. Pinker, though, derides the "ghost in the machine" and then glosses over the issue with the problematically vague, "mental entity." So your soul with reason and desire toward an end does not guide the passions, but your "mental entity" with your "self-control" does. This is neither a clarification nor an improvement.

Crazy Libertarians!

There exists a discrete genre of journalism native to the internet. This writing, of the short and pointless variety, is too vapid to find a way into even the most fluffy or pandering papers. I do not mean to suggest this species of writing is usually poor, for in fact it is not. In fact I often find the pieces well-crafted. To what end, you surely ask. These pieces must conform to a few rules. First, they must have a clear audience, i.e. clear worldview, to pander to. Second, it must convey the centrality of that view. Third, it must not offend said audience. Fourth, it must entertain. Last, and this feature is most unique to this species, it must make other views appear alien.

This piece from NPR is a prime slice.

It starts off with a kitschy premise: bacon. I doubt this event, about a gathering in the woods in which nothing happened, would have been newsworthy in any way without a trendy hook, in this case, bacon.

The use of the word "best" in the phrase "best pitch" is extremely clever. Was it his best pitch? Did the man say, "here's my best pitch?" Did the author ask for his best pitch? We don't know and it's operative because calling it "best" implies that his pitch, and the whole event, is as good as libertarianism gets. It implies that if this event sounds ridiculous or doesn't work, this best effort, then the whole libertarian endeavor is daft.

The next bit is even more clever. Permit me a brief quotation:

As I'm asking about food safety, we are interrupted by another customer, who happens to have a handgun strapped to his belt.  

"We'll regulate him," he says. "If he poisons me, I won't buy his food. And he'll be done."

The sense here is odd, since adding the bit about the gun makes "We'll" seem like it refers to the man and his gun. One can almost feel the man pat his pistol as he says, "We'll regulate him." Being libertarians the man surely meant by "we," himself and the author of the article, i.e. the patrons of the business. The last sentence is clearly explanatory. The man is explaining, using himself as an example, what would happen if here were poisoned: the man's reputation would be done. So here we have a very simple encounter reported in such a way as to make a completely ridiculous reading of it plausible, but reported without saying anything untruthful.

Another quote:

Trying to give up the U.S. dollar means a lot of extra math. You hear it all day long. How much is silver? How many grams in an ounce?

"A lot of extra math?" Really? Converting units and looking up information that's been in the backs of marble notebooks for untold years? "A lot of math?" These people are wacky, I tell ya! They're doing "a lot of math." Nuts! "It's 8:30 in the morning, in the woods, and people are checking the precious metal prices on their cell phones." Egads! Of course the irony is that people with dollars are checking the prices too, but because the government is printing money. But no, the people freely engaging in private commerce are the kooks.

The point about government regulation, the FDA and USDA, is supposed to imply again, that even in this libertopia in the woods, you depend on the government, I suspect falls flat even among the people the article most precisely targets. The example clearly suggests you cannot escape the government, because they regulate practically everything.

But the guy just shakes his head. He only takes the round silver coins, not the laminated strips of silver I have.

Uh oh, back to the bank table! The horror! Better contract out the work of managing my money to the government so I can sit here and stuff my face! Viva la libertà!

The final two sentences drive home the point the author began with and the tone which he established in using the word "best:" that this is as good as libertarianism gets, and it doesn't work.

This piece is a clear species of the genre. Foremost it is entertaining and completely uncritical of the view, this time unspoken but implied as the opposite of that which is depicted, it places at the center of the world. It has a clever hook and it makes its subjects appear alien and lacking in the realization that what they are doing is in fact odd and nonsensical. The piece is very much like a very bad ethnography, slyly poking fun at the people it observes.

Whether or not he fancies himself a liberal Franz Boas the joke is on the author for it is indeed what he did not report that has become the center of the article. The inflation, the fistfights, the theft, starvation, thuggery. I guess there wasn't any. So a bunch of libertarians gathered in the woods and conducted their affairs privately, without force, incident, or need of assistance. Crazy libertarians!


N.B. I pass over the title, clearly intended as a diminutive to compare the attendees to children at summer camp, because authors often do not have a say in the title of their piece.

Anathema, 2011

As regular readers may be aware, every Thanksgiving here at APLV we compile a list of music, paintings, et cetera, we are especially grateful for. Last year the theme was Sacred Music. That was six months ago. Now as you might well imagine, in a sense that list generates its antithesis and it seems fitting that the antithetical list make its appearance now.

Henceforth and forthwith the "Anathema List" will appear this time of year and serve as a foil for our Thanksgiving list.

-

The theme of this list, then, is still sacred music. This music, though, is thought to be poorly written regarding competent composition, written without attention to style, or without attention to the ideas they are attempting to express.

Some are indecorous, undignified, or simply ugly. Some are clearly in the wrong style altogether, but they are also simply bad. The words and music are, at times, incomprehensible. Jingly-jangly, sing-songy, insipid. . . you get the idea.

Elsewhere we have praised music which perfectly complemented the ideas or even created the idea and hence the relative poverty of the forthcoming songs which either poorly express or are at odds with the ideas.

Of course I am not condemning any of the performers. Too, I realize many will have sentimental attachments to some of these songs.

Anathema, 2011

10. I Am the Bread of Life, by Suzanne Toolan [YouTube]

9. Send Us Your Spirit, by David Haas [YouTube]

8. Blest Are They, by David Haas [YouTube]

7. City of God, by Dan Schutte [YouTube]

6. I Am the Living Bread, by David Haas [Amazon Preview]

5. Center of My Life, by Paul Inwood [YouTube]

4. TIE: In the Breaking of the Bread & A New Commandment by Michael Ward [YouTube]
[Amazon Preview]

3. River of Glory, by Dan Schutte [YouTube]

2. Gather Us In, by Marty Haugen [YouTube]


1. Send Down the Fire, by Marty Haugen [YouTube]

Honorable Mention:

• We Remember, by Marty Haugen [YouTube]

On MacIntyre on Capitalism

This essay is a sort of sibling to my previous one, Caution: Intellectual's At Work.

Philosophy in Plato's Apology certainly seems to be very political and indeed it is. There are ideas behind all actions and Socrates' teaching certainly had broad effects. (To make an enormous understatement.) Thus how we act and interact part of political philosophy.  Yet where is the line between political and personal? At what point does someone trying to live a good life become a busybody trying to reorient other people?

I was pondering those questions, and others, after I read this essay on Alasdair MacIntyre in Prospect. It was a curious read for me because I in many was have an Aristotelian outlook on life. So MacIntyre seems to also, and yet we were not as nearly in accord as I would have expected. Let me share some of my concerns.

"MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well." Is that not a little. . . unnerving to hear? In the other of this pair of essays I mentioned that the intellectual ought to be humbled by the philosophical endeavor and a little reluctant to start reordering society.The administration of justice, to Aristotle, was the principal order of society, not a consensus on how one ought to live.

Such is a problem with intellectuals, that they are so intelligent they don't see the bounds of what they can and ought to do. Likewise, they seek perfectly logical systems of belief, at the expense of whether something is likely to work and often in contrast to observation. Hence the extraordinarily immoderate ideas of many highly intelligent people. Such would not be so problematic if they did not lend their stamp of authority on highly dangerous figures and movements. Such is not to say consistency is not laudable, but that it may have a price. The author reports one of MacIntyre's ideas in a very Aristotelian phrase, "The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others." Of course living with others is natural, but it is too easy to misread this phrase as, "because one lives (and must live) with others that one lives only to live with others" which is rather off base. (This may be an awkward paraphrasing of MacIntyre, I suspect.)

Too, today the word modernity is invoked as a buzzword to summon up images of industrialization, pop music, and kids who don't read listening to iPods.  This sort of association is not unlike the association between the word "factory" and images of sooty stone buildings with Mr. Moneybags taking advantage of child labor. (Modern medicine, modern online libraries, and the like don't get much praise.) This cliché is wearing tenuously thin. If one has a particular idea to critique, do so.

Wearing thin with me also is the tendency of people to use the word capitalism without defining it. The word is usually used to mean something tantamount to "something bad involving money." It is used nine times in this essay and we have no remote, let alone satisfactory, definition of it. 

The economics he describes, or at least how it is presented, is also particularly confused.

Take the following example:

For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy its products. So there is tension between the need to keep wages low and the need to keep consumption high. Capitalism has solved this dilemma, MacIntyre says, by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.

Not quite and not having defined capitalism, understanding this paragraph is problematic. How does capitalism require anything? You don't have to buy anything. If there is demand for something, someone might create the product to meet the demand. If not, the productive capacity will go to produce something else. I suppose in theory if you couldn't produce anything that anyone wanted, you could just support yourself farming. What MacIntyre is in fact against is mainstream Keynesian economics. This economics, now offered up as our saving grace by certain economic big wigs, relies on buying for the sake of buying just to get demand up. (An absurd notion since people don't buy just anything, they don't by globs of GDP by products they need.) The asset bubbles created by the government were created, in part, under the assumption that you could continuously engineer growth and have an everlasting rise in values. The government, not only "people behaving badly," created the easy credit which made taking risks (which at any other time would have been regulated and rendered impossible by a market) possible.

He continues,

This expansion of credit, he goes on, has been accompanied by a distribution of risk that exposed to ruin millions of people who were unaware of their exposure. So when capitalism once again overextended itself, massive credit was transformed into even more massive debt. . .

What imperative exactly is he implying here? First, that you have a responsibility to disclose something of the risk to the borrower. This sounds very nice, but how do you actually ensure someone understands something? They sign the paperwork, they nod. You could explain it perfectly clearly and still not be sure they knew what they were getting into. Second, he is implying that the borrower does not have the responsibility to figure this out for himself.

Moving on,

Not only does capitalism impose the costs of growth or lack of it on those least able to bear them, but much of that debt is unjust. And the “engineers of this debt,” who had already benefited disproportionately, “have been allowed to exempt themselves from the consequences of their delinquent actions.”

Indeed, but that only happens if you force people to pay back the debt of others. If the only people affected are the lender and the borrower, no one else is implicated. This is an issue of the "debt engineers" having corrupted the members of the government, i.e. the people with the monopoly on the law, and "persuaded" them to force citizens to pay back the debt.

Oddly, he proposes regulation but according to this article does not consider his proposals "regulation." Yet when he writes that, "since regulations merely 'have as their aim the prevention of further large-scale crises' he is in a sense correct because the regulations, like his own non-regulation regulations, seek to put managing the economy in to the hands of elites instead of allowing individuals to manage their own affairs and assess risk for themselves.

The question again, as we have discussed before, is where does discipline and order come from? MacIntyre properly faults the "capitalism" of the government-run sort, but would replace it with his non-regulation regulations. The distributist model discussed in the article is likewise statist by nature.  

Overall, the economic thinking in this essay is lamentably muddled. (As presented, the association between "money-trading" (another vague term) and inequality is so thin I can't even critique it.) In a way this is unsurprising, since as Jesus Huerta de Soto demonstrated in his essay, "Economic Thought in Ancient Greece" [1] philosophers seem unable or unwilling to consider economics as a separate discipline. They're also, though often admittedly, not concerned with liberty. What is not admitted is that in a free economy, one not managed by the government, you wouldn't have to fear the debasement of your money and you wouldn't have to engage in any kid of activity you don't want to.

Virtue in Aristotle is in fact a most complicated notion and discussing it also requires familiarity with his logical books. Discussing the political aspects requires familiarity with nearly of Aristotle. In Aristotle virtue is a complex of innate desire and conscious action, inducement and freedom, nature and cultivation. It is impossible to speak about it glibly and do it any justice.

Perhaps MacIntyre does not provide a legitimate critique of capitalism, but rather of capitalism as most people think of it, i.e. as an economy managed by the government. If so, his criticism may be well-placed.  It is laudable that MacIntyre attempts to acknowledge both the good and bad of, say, globalization, but I think his thinking would benefit from some more precise definitions. Of course it is possible MacIntyre is badly represented in this article, a potentiality I duly acknowledge. As presented in this article though, his cases are rather muddled.

–

[1] http://mises.org/daily/4707 and my response: http://apologiaproliterativita.blogspot.com/2010/09/response-to-economic-thought-in-ancient.html

See also:

• Common Objections to Capitalism [video lecture] by Art Carden
• Cooperation: How a Free Market Benefits Everyone by Jeffrey Tucker 
• Economics As Science: A Catholic Defense of the Free Market by Thomas E. Woods Jr.
• No, the Free Market Did Not Cause the Financial Crisis by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• Bring Back the Guild System? by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
• The Empirical Case against Government Stimulus by Robert P. Murphy
• The History of Capitalism (excerpt) by Ludwig von Mises
• Why the Meltdown Should Have Surprised No One [video lecture] by Peter Schiff
• How A Marxist Sees the Crisis (a short observation) by Jeffrey Tucker
• The Meaning of Competition by Daniel Krawisz

Caution: Intellectuals at Work

I haven't read Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society[1] but ever so often I read something and share more in his skepticism of intellectuals: skepticism of what they do and what they want others to do. It sounds like such a nice word. It comes from the Latin intellegere, meaning "to understand" and it conveys a sort of lofty attention to reason, a philosophical detachment from emotions. The World English Dictionary lists it as, "delight in mental activity" which sounds so very cerebral, like you're some genius ecstatic by the quantity and profundity of your thinking. Now in all of this praise for oneself and one's endeavor is liable to make one quite haughty about both. "I'm a smart person, I've set my great brain on this matter, I've solved it, and people ought to listen. I'm an intellectual!"

Now I'm not going to start bashing reason and thinking, but I would like to raise a few questions about the intellectual project. Well, one at any rate: what is it? Namely, 1) does it attempt to understand by welcoming criticism, reflection, change, variation, modulation, interpretation, and perhaps synthesis with other ideas? 2) Does it imply that it itself is the truth and ought to be followed. Or 3) does it simply present itself and not impose any further? Perhaps #1 and #2 are silly questions: surely a thinker on the one hand hopes his ideas are true but on the other would welcome correction or incorporation into the truth. Now is position #3 possible? Can you actually write, think, or do something and not hope it to be emulated somehow?

I've pondered that question a lot when thinking about the possible effects of my own writing. It seems that all writing sort of exhorts the reader to do something. In fact could one say all thinking is to some end? So it's a sort of gamble, thinking. You could easily go very wrong. It's a sort of odd problem isn't it? How is it possible to think something which is impossible? Where did that thought come from? Why should we be able to imagine something which is not? I think that's what intrigued some philosophers when considering artists: how did they come up with that? From whence did that art come? Hence Nietzsche's fascination with the creative power of the artist and Plato's explanation for how a random person like Tynnichus came up with something like his famous paeon ode (he was inspired by the Muses.)[2] One might be tempted to say: yes you created something new but the potential was there. The words, notes, colors, et cetera already existed. (This argument, similar to Aristotle's explanation of change via the concept of the potential) has much merit. But what about an idea? Again on the one hand you might say that reality somehow prompted you to think that idea. Indeed, perhaps. Yet if it is wrong. . . then it's only an idea. For example, I can interpolate two ideas which are impossible in reality: the plane Jupiter with human feet. So this mis-perception has sort of produced something and thus it's really quite striking you could come up with something, however you do it, completely at odds with reality.

So that's a very long-winded way of saying it is possible to be wrong. Indeed. I apologize for the discursion. Yet truth is a fickle thing. For example, consider Shakespeare's Hamlet. It didn't happen, maybe it couldn't have, maybe nothing like it ever will. Yet there is something truthful about what happens in it. Likewise science seems only to offer provisional truths, each being superseded by a model more consistent with observed phenomena. Yet there is something truthful even in the primitive explanation.

Now I'm not advancing ditching reason, but I think an awareness of these epistemological issues should give an intellectual a little modesty. Such an awareness should make it a little harder to say, "Hey do x, y, and z" especially when they haven't been tried before. Or especially when they have been tried and have failed. You would think this kind of awareness would be present in intellectuals, if indeed they are intellectuals. Now we all have ideas about which we are fairly certain, very certain, not so certain, and so forth. Now aside from any particular moral reasons, you would think this uncertainty would affect what you exhorted others to do, let alone what you deign to force others to do. That's why, from this principle of philosophical uncertainty alone, I think federalism and republicanism are laudable practices. The ideas everyone believes in go at the top. Everyone follows those rules but there are very few of them. Some ideas apply only at the state level; there are more of them but not too many. And so forth down until you reach your personal values which are your own personal idiom.

Thus the intellectual might offer a caveat: "Here is what I am thinking, what I believe, or how far I've come in considering this problem." Perhaps we might add, "I hope it helps" or "Do good with it." Yet I keep wanting to add more caveats. You don't want to be responsible for leading someone to anything bad, but once you get someone thinking that's certainly a possibility. Of course it's not really your fault, per se, but how would you like to have been responsible for getting some dictator "thinking"? Now this problem is of course not new and has plagued philosophy from its birth. Socrates was of course tried for corrupting the youth. Surely if anyone could have vindicated philosophy Socrates could have.

Well, in his own defense he says that he didn't take any money for what he did. He also said that since bad people harm others, why would he corrupt anyone, who would come back and harm him? Thus he must have corrupted them unintentionally. In the Crito he notes that even if he is not guilty, he has been found guilty and must follow the laws. How could he disgrace the laws of the city that raised him? How could he accept exile and lose the rights of a citizen and live in other disorderly cities? Would not disobeying the law corrupt the youth, and then prove the judges right?–Is this is really a defense of philosophy?

In his apology he goes on to link philosophy to, "wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul." Now that is a more specific claim, but it lacks the how. How does philosophy bring those things about? Why? Does it always? Can it lead you astray? In discussing teaching Plato's Apology of Socrates, Allan Bloom said:

How would you understand the effect Socrates had on Alcibiades? Alcibiades was an ambitious, young, political man. What did Socrates teach him? Isn't it possible that if you take an ambitious young political man and you give him gifts of philosophic criticism you can turn him into a very dangerous man?

You must in your own experience have had students who sometimes turned sour. And who used what you taught them. . . [3]

Bloom didn't finish that line with any specific action, but we might infer "something bad." We also might use, "not toward the ends of wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul." Indeed it is not difficult to think of philosophers and specific works which were interpreted in such was as to bring about great ill. Yet perhaps more interestingly, Bloom then flips the problem: "What about a man who came along and caused pious men to suspend their faith until they had answers to certain philosophical questions?" We now have the problem of both dangerous truths and dangerous untruths, and beliefs which may be either (or both in admixture.)

Yet might also ask, "Is it moral not to question?" While reason and philosophy don't guarantee truth or goodness, you are at least aiming at both. If you are not questioning how things work, what your place is, what you ought to do, then how do you hope to do good?

To question or not to question? And if to question, how? And once you have your answer, how certain are you of it? And even if you are quite certain, what are the implications of that truth? Does it give you responsibility, authority?

In his apology Socrates tells the story of how he goes out seeking to disprove the oracle and find someone wiser than himself. He looks among those reputed to be wise, among politicians, among poets, and among the artisans. Those reputed to be wise had no sense of what they didn't know, the artisans thought because they knew one thing that they could speak of all things, and the poets could not even explain their own poetry. Socrates did not find any of these men wiser than himself because they had no hint of their own ignorance.

It seems that this underlying requirement of philosophy, and admission of ignorance, is in some tension with a desire to do good and improve one's soul, which are positive acts. The admission, though, ought not diminish one's zeal but rather temper his conceit.

–

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp/046501948X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1290179591&sr=8-1
[2] Ion, 533-534; See also Apology
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRnzrDpGN5A

More Choice Mencken

Selections from A Mencken Chrestomathy
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. New York. 1949.


XIV. American Immortals: Mr. Justice Holmes

I find it hard to reconcile [Holmes's opinions] with any plausible concept of Liberalism. They may be good law, but it is impossible to see how they can conceivably promote liberty. My suspicion is that the hopeful Liberals of the 20s, frantically eager to find at least one judge who was not violently and implacably against them, seized upon certain of Mr. Justice Holmes's opinions without examining the rest, and read into them an attitude that was actually as foreign to his ways of thinking as it was to those of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes. Finding him, now and then, defending eloquently a new and uplifting law which his colleagues proposed to strike off the books, the concluded that he was a sworn advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I do not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of the rights of law-makers. There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence. He believed that the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that the courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including, apparently, even the Bill of Rights. If this is Liberalism, then all I can say is that Liberalism is not what I thought it was when I was young. . . To call him a Liberal is to make the word meaningless.

Let us, for a moment, stop thinking of him as one, and let us also stop thinking of him as a littératur, a reformer, a sociologist, a prophet, an evangelist, a metaphysician; instead, let us think of him as something that he undoubtedly was in his Pleistocene youth and probably remained ever after, to wit, a soldier. Let us think of him, further, as a soldier extraordinarily ruminative and articulate – in fact, so ruminative and articulate as to be, in the military caste, almost miraculous. And let us think of him still further as a soldier whose natural distaste and contempt for civilians, and corollary yearning to heave them all into Hell, was cooled and eased by a stream of blood that once flowed through the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table – in brief, as a soldier beset by occasional doubts, hesitations, flashes of humor, bursts of affability, moments of sneaking pity.


XVI. Economics: Capitalism

All the quacks and cony-catchers no crowding the public trough at Washington seem to be agreed upon one thing, and one thing only. It is the doctrine that the capitalistic system is on its last legs, an will presently give place to something more "scientific." There is, of course, no truth in this doctrine whatsoever. It collides at every point with the known facts. There is not the slightest reason for believing that capitalism is in collapse, or that anything proposed by the current wizards would be any better. The most that may be said is that the capitalistic system is undergoing changes, some of them painful. But those changes will probably strengthen it quite as often as they weaken it.

We owe to it almost everything that passes under the general name of civilization today. The extraordinary progress of the world since the Middle Ages has not been due to the mere expenditure of human energy, nor even to the flights of human genius, for men had worked hard since the remotest times, and some of them had been of surpassing intellect. No, it has been due to the accumulation of capital. That accumulation permitted labor to be organized economically and on a large scale, and thus greatly enhanced its productiveness. It provided the machinery that gradually diminished human drudgery, and liberated the spirit of the worker, who had formerly been almost indistinguishable from a mule. Most of all. it made possible a longer and better preparation for work, so that every art and handicraft greatly widened its scope and range, and multitudes of new and highly complicated crafts came in.



XVII. Pedagogy: The Educational Process

That ability to impart knowledge, it seems to me, has very little to do with technical method. It may operate at full function without any technical method at all, and contrariwise, the most elaborate of technical methods cannot make it operate when it is not actually present. And what does it consist of? It consists, first, of a natural talent for dealing with children, for getting into their minds, for putting things in a way that they can comprehend. And it consists, secondly, of a deep belief in the interest and importance of the thing taught, a concern about it amounting to a kind of passion. A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it – this man can almost always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy. That is because there is enthusiasm in him, and because enthusiasm is as contagious as fear or the barber's itch. An enthusiast is willing to go to any trouble to impart the glad news bubbling within. He thinks that it is important and valuable for to know; given the slightest glow of interest in a pupil to start with, he will fan that glow to a flame. No hollow hocus-pocus cripples him and slows him down. He drags his best pupils along as fast as they can go, and he is so full of the thing that he never tires of expounding its elements to the dullest.

Defining Progressivism

I tend not to talk practical politics here and more importantly I tend not to talk about polemical political articles. In this case, though, indulge me because I would like to wrangle over a definition. In Dissent Magazine, Conor Williams defends Progressivism.

Let me say it does not instill confidence when someone starts defining something by what it is not. Also, let us bear in mind two points from our discussion of argumentation a few weeks ago. 1) "a definition is a thesis." [Post. An. I.ii. 72a] 2) one may attempt to fashion a definition for rhetorical purposes, excluding all of the negative aspects of a word from your particular use of it and ascribing them to an opposing idea, instead of attempting to discover the essence of your subject.

Mr. Williams seems already to be off to a shaky start on point #1 with his non-definition.

I'll simply address some of his addressings of concerns in turn.

Much of modern progressivism is founded upon American pragmatism, a homegrown school of political thought.

Hmmm. Interestingly, the definition of pragmatism has interesting implications here. Since it means, in brief, that if an idea is practical, i.e. if it works, then it is moral to that extent. Ironically, built into that definition is a lot of wiggle room. What constitutes "working?" Williams adds, "a homegrown school of political thought." What do its origins matter? Does he mean to suggest that pragmatic ends are subordinate to some other considerations? It feels like he's saying that pragmatism is American and that somehow it can't be at odds with anything else which is American. That's quite cleverly written, I must say, since he does not say as a proposition, what he thinks someone who is not progressive would like to hear, "pragmatism is subject to finite values like liberty, freedom of speech, et cetera." Yet those who disagree are meant to read that into the statement. Very clever!

Mr. Williams in the same paragraph:

Rights are not “natural,” but they are still meaningful and extremely important. The pragmatists recognized that rights mean different things in different historical contexts. The meanings of “freedom of speech,” “citizenship,” the “right to vote,” and “property” have changed over time in the United States because of important shifts in public understanding.

This is a very interesting way to continue the line of thought. Again, he seems to be saying something so obvious as to be incontrovertible: the values come from the people. In fact he is capitalizing on his definition of pragmatism; this is logically honest but less so given his presentation. We asked above, "Does he mean to suggest that pragmatic ends are subordinate to some other considerations?" Now we have our answer: No. Political values are the arbiter of the good, and if they change, they change. Then he says, "Much of modern progressivism is founded upon American pragmatism, a homegrown school of political thought." He leaves himself more wiggle room with "much." Clearly some of progressivism is founded upon something else. This is a very handy definition of pragmatism: whatever you want plus the authority to do it "if it works."

We ought to note the obvious distinction between "Rights are not 'natural,'" vs. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Yet by Mr. Williams' definition, clearly the former has precedent.

Mr. Williams goes on to say:

Thus, for most progressives, rights represent a wager we have made as a political community, a wager with our fellow citizens as to the sort of life we aim to live.

Notice the lack of distinction between society and politics. I postulated a few weeks ago that somehow some people seem to relate to one another without relationship to public law. As a result, manners, which are impossible to legislate, fell by the wayside because they weren't proscribed. Mr. Williams prompts me to a similar diagnosis. According to this proposition, there is no appeal to anything other than popular considerations.


Williams continues, consistently not appealing to natural rights:

In the United States, the right to vote has expanded over time to include American citizens of all races and of both sexes, because Americans came to believe that this was a better way to live as a political community.

Also:

 Progressives only argue that calling rights “natural” artificially fixes their meaning, often in troubling ways. After all, the “natural” right to property once meant a right to own other humans, and the “natural” right to vote originally was limited to white male citizens with a sufficient amount of property. Sanctifying rights as “natural” makes them convenient tools for justifying outrageous injustices.

This is the crux of the matter, the heart of "progressivism." His point is that pinning something down, defining it finitely, means you cannot change it, and you need to change things, according to pragmatism, when people think things need to be changed. This lack of acknowledgment of a finite end is what has caused and will continue to cause non-progressives to label progressives as nihilists. As defined, progressivism is nothing more than a broad appeal to "the good" without appeal to anything more definite.

Williams continues:

Progressive philosopher John Dewey asked Americans to consider the meaning of individual freedom through the following thought experiment: imagine an individual without property, education, or employment. Is this individual free to amass property? Would it matter if she was?

This hypothetical is significant because in Williams' argument it appears to flow from his discussion of pragmatism, but in fact it stems from a different definition of "freedom." We are meant to understand that the political status quo is a failure because the constitution wants to guarantee liberty and this woman cannot "amass property." The actual point is that our the founding principles of the United States rest on a different definition of freedom: the pursuit of happiness unencumbered by the government, not happiness as guaranteed by the government. This is a very clever slight by the author.

Williams continues:

PROGRESSIVES’ WILLINGNESS to challenge the hegemony of “neoliberal” interpretations of property rights law often prompts the most vituperative reactions from conservatives. They charge that reconsidering the meaning of various sections of the American Constitution represents a grave threat to its original intent. Against this accusation, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. maintained that the law was meaningful as a source for ongoing interpretation, not as a set of fixed principles. While the Constitution does not permit infinite interpretation, he argued that “in a civilized state it is not the will of the sovereign that makes lawyers’ law, even when that is its source, but what a body of subjects, namely the judges, by whom it is enforced, say is his will.” If progressives revisit the meaning of American ideals, principles, or rights in response to structural changes, they are only continuing in a long-running project of American self-critique and matching legal and political revision.

This is just another example of pragmatism: the people want to change the law and they change the law. Look at that last sentence: he's appealing to the tradition of "revisiting" American ideals for the right to revisit them. Again, this is consistent with his position, but notice the frightful trend in this article: there is no delimiting principle.

Williams puts forth a common objection to progressivism but does not seem to understand the nature of the objection:

. . . conservatives frequently claim that acceptance (and qualified endorsement) of changes in political meanings reflects the utopian optimism at the heart of the progressive intellectual tradition. If past meanings of individual liberty are constantly superseded by new and improved versions, doesn’t this imply eventual arrival at political perfection?

The second sentence is simply baffling. It would prompt one to say, "Of course not, not if they are being constantly superseded." Aside from also implying that all change is good change, i.e. progress, it implies an expects an undefined and unknown final end, which will come about by constant change. So apparently we won't know it when we see it, but when we see it we'll love it. In case we doubted the contradiction, Mr. Williams continues:

To be a progressive is to admit that dogmatic certainty has no place in a complex world with many moving parts, and that the best we can offer each other is a commitment to engage, experiment, and reevaluate our choices.

Wouldn't claiming to have found "political perfection" be very. . . dogmatic? So apparently we won't know perfection when we see it and we won't love it.

That would not seem to be the best argument for progressivism.

How to Avoid the Apocalypse

or, On False Curmudgeonry

My habit of reading online articles is this. I sit at my desk, often with a cup of Earl Grey tea or cranberry juice, and I have some music playing, usually Mozart or Haydn string quartets or serenades. I open up my web browser and bam! Which politician is destroying the country, which corporation is destroying the environment, which country is destroying the world, group A needs money from group B, things ought to be this way, things ought not to be that way and so on and so forth ad nauseam. Sometimes I just say "Ah foohey!" and stick with Mozart. Such claims of catastrophe are surprisingly predictable and highly formulaic. The continuing existence of newspapers is testament to, among other things, the weakness of man's memory. There is of course a class of people, the curmudgeons, who find ill and ailing everywhere. Yet the art of curmudgeonry is hard to perfect. Fall short of the curmudgeon's charm and wit and you become a gross bore to read. The craft of the curmudgeon lies in fact not in elegizing or deconstructing or proving, but in shedding a revealing light on life's incongruities and then, in the guise of complaining, relishing the contradictions. One comes away from the curmudgeon thinking, "Hah, we people are funny creatures, no? Hah!" and then goes about his business.

Such is the best and my favorite species of critic. There are many: the polemicist, the firebrand, the whistle-blower, the belly-acher, the censurer, the grump, the nostalgiacist, the dissenter, the peevish, and the nag are the most common. They all have their time-honored styles. Sometimes, though, they come in garb of the curmudgeon.

Over the last few years there has been a constant drizzle of articles about how we use technology and how it (allegedly) negatively affects us. Such is the province of the grump-nostalgicist but these articles have come in the guise of the curmudgeon. The more notable essays are Christine Rosen's "People of the Screen" (The New Atlantis, 2008)[1], Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" (The Atlantic, July/August 2008)[2], and more recently Nicholas Carr's (again?) "Does the Internet Make You Dumber?" (WSJ, June 2010)[3], and most recently "In Defense of the Memory Theater" by Nathan Schneider.[4]

It would be dishonest not to reveal my first reaction to these essays, which is this: "Stop it!"[5] If something you are doing is bad for you then stop it! But we don't stop do we? Circling around that very human paradox should be the focus of these essays. It isn't. We said if one fails to be a curmudgeon you're a bore. One also comes off as a whiner.

These essays have much in common. Consider the histrionics: "the literary apocalypse," a "dark prophecy," "deeply troubling," and "All in the name of progress." Oh no! And to think I was sitting here sipping my tea whilst people were reading on their Kindles. The horror! Alas, alack!

They're also not seriously fact-oriented, though they pretend to be. Carr does quote someone though, writing, "The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Merzenich believes. . ." He does? OK, good. Can we go over that part then? We ought to ask, "Is this assertion a fact? Is this fact relevant? Does this relevant fact function the way the author says it does in his argument? Is the argument, then, sound? Lastly, is it persuasive?" Consider Carr's examples: does the fact that a chimpanzee brain quickly rewires (how quickly is "quickly" by the way?) when you rewire the nerves in a it's hand, mean visual stimuli would have the same effect? Consider also the statistic, "56 Seconds [is the] average time an American spends looking at a Web page. [Source: Nielsen]"  Well, what is the average time it ought to take? How was the study conducted? (So we know they factored out mistaken clicks and other variables.) They also ignore the obvious. Carr writes, "Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness." Well, if that's so, such suggests an obvious solution toward fixing the "screen experience" then doesn't it? Curious that Carr and Rosen never offer the obvious solutions their criticisms generate.

Rosen too quotes a poll but actually chides someone who questioned a point she agrees on, calling the questioner a "techno-utopian" and his question "obtuse and misguided." The essence of this attitude is, "I'm saying this elegantly and it's plausible so believe me. I'll quote something for appearances if it'll get you off my back." The essence of this is a little pact between the author and reader, "We already agree don't we? Great. No tough questions then? Deal." Are books being replaced? Is there any actual data on that? Of behavior they quote studies but not conclusions. The curmudgeon's topic (human nature) and charm give him a pass here, everyone else has to argue and prove a point.

I'm not even saying Carr or any of these authors are wrong. (I may even agree.) Their articles are simply unpersuasive, patronizing, overwrought, and generally annoying. I'm offended by their writing and I admittedly share their bias in favor of focus, cogitation, and long-form literature and art. I'm certainly not inclined to pick up any of their books. If they wanted to prove something they should have done rigorous research, testing, and thinking. People trust and like scientists. If they wanted to talk of the curiosities of human nature they should leave that to the curmudgeons. Everyone loves and trusts curmudgeons too. But the vast realm of quasi-scientific, reasonable-sounding kvetching is an unsatisfying and inane land.

Schneider's essay is clearly the best and most enjoyable, but it is quite mixed up. First, he obviously uses and enjoys technology but has a lifelong sentimental attachment with books. The former isn't replacing the latter, but it's getting better and it might. The essay comes off like this: "I've been with my books so long, but look at these digital databases, they're searchable and indexed! But they're young and fickle. . . and might leave." It sounds like he's confessing to an affair. Since he is so conflicted we won't pick on him any more.[6]

This personal touch is quite pleasant, really. And significant too. Far more than the "I can't read long books because I stopped reading long books" arguments of the other essays. Fortunately the answers are simple all around. Mr. Schneider should have it both ways and the others, well. . . they should stop it!

–

[1] http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/people-of-the-screen
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/
[3] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284981644790098.html
[4] http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/in-defense-of-the-memory-theater/
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1g3ENYxg9k
[6] Except for the fact that he ties the bookshelf's virtues to acquiring and possessing, which really does not damage the argument for the electronic reader, or at least an idealized/improved one. He admits this. So where was this essay going again? Again, all of these essays are rather flawed attempts at mixed writing styles and genres.  The bookcase would have been a fine subject for a little essay of praise, just as a few favorite long poems, books, or songs would have much more persuasively sold Carr's case. Likewise a curmudgeon's take, or a take à la Jacques Tati, on the e-reader would have been fun and revealing. Alas, alack! we are deprived.

Of Sagas and Not-Sagas

saga. sa·ga – /ˈsɑgə/ [sah-guh]

noun. a medieval Icelandic or Norse prose narrative of achievements and events in the history of a personage, family, et cetera.

e.g. Saga:

A man named Thorarin lived in Langadal. He held a godord, but was a man of no influence. His son Audgisl was a man quick to act. Thorgils Holluson had dispossessed them of their godord and they considered this a grievous insult. Audgisl approached Snorri, told him of the ill-treatment which they had suffered and asked for his support. From: The Saga of the People of Laxardal

e.g. Not-Saga:

Edward helped me into his car, being very careful of the wisps of silk and chiffon, the flowers he'd just pinned into my elaborately styled curls, and my bulky walking cast. He ignored the angry set of my mouth.

When he had me settled, he got in the driver's seat and headed back out the long, narrow drive. From Twilight "The Twilight Saga" by Stephenie Meyer

Also not a saga:

Monty Python - Njorl's Saga

Choice Curmudgeonry

With a hat tip to Gerard Van der Leun of American Digest. . .

John Derbyshire, author most recently of "We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism," had in the WSJ a few weeks ago a short list of books for the curmudgeon.

It is a fine list and includes H. L. Mencken and Gulliver's Travels. As such I was reminded of some of my favorite curmudgeonly passages from Mencken and Swift.

–

Gulliver's Travels. Part III, Chapter VIII.

A further Account of Glubbdubdrib. Antient and Modern History Corrected.

Having a desire to see those antients who were most renowned for Wit and Learning, I set apart one Day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle might appear at the Head of all their Commentators; but these were so numerous, that some Hundreds were forced to attend in the Court, and outward Rooms of the Palace. I knew, and could distinguish those two Heroes, at first Sight, not only from the Croud, but from each other. Homer was the taller and comelier Person of the two, walked very erect for one of his Age, and his Eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a Staff. His Visage was meagre, his Hair lank and thin, and his Voice hollow. I soon discovered that both of them were perfect Strangers to the rest of the Company, and had never seen or heard of them before; and I had a Whisper from a Ghost who shall be  nameless, "that these Commentators always kept in the most distant Quarters from their Principals, in the lower World, through a Consciousness of Shame and Guilt, because they had so horribly misrepresented the Meaning of those Authors to Posterity." I introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treat them better than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found they wanted a Genius to enter into the Spirit of a Poet. But Aristotle was out of all Patience with the Account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them, "whether the rest of the Tribe were as great Dunces as themselves?"

A Mencken Chrestomathy. XVIII. Pedagogy. The Education Process

If I had my way I should expose all candidates for berths in the grade-schools to the Binet-Simon test, and reject all those who revealed a mentality of more than fifteen years. Plenty would still pass. Moreover, they would be secure against contamination by the new technic of pedagogy. Its vast wave of pseudo-psychology would curl and break against the hard barrier of their innocent and passionate intellects– as it probably does, in fact, even now. They would know nothing of learning situations, integration, challenges, emphases, orthogenics, mind-sets, differentia, and all other fabulous fowl of the Teachers College aviary. But they would see in reading, writing and arithmetic the gaudy charms of profound knowledge, and they would teach these ancient branches, now so abominable in decay with passionate gusto, and irresistible effectiveness, and a gigantic success.

A Mencken Chrestomathy. XVIII. Pedagogy. Bearers of the Torch

This central aim of the teacher is often obscured by pedagogical pretension and bombast. The pedagogue, discussing himself, tries to make it appear that he is a sort of scientist. He is actually a sort of barber, and just as responsive to changing fashions. That this is his actually character is now, indeed, a part of the official doctrine that he must inculcate. On all hands, he is told plainly by his masters that his fundamental function in America is to manufacture an endless corps of sound Americans. A sound American is simply one who has put out of his mind all doubts and questionings, and who accepts instantly, and as incontrovertible gospel, the whole body of official doctrine of his day, whatever it may be and no no matter how often it may change. The instant he challenges it, no matter how timorously and academically, he ceases by that much to be a loyal and creditable citizen of the Republic.

A Libertarian Case for “Free” Health Care?

Last month author, columnist, and intellectual-at-large Christopher Hitchens spoke about George Orwell and Hitchens’ new book, Why Orwell Matters, with Russ Roberts of the Library of Economics and Liberty. (A link to the audio recording of the interview is in the footnotes. [1]) It is always a pleasure to listen to Hitchens even though, perhaps especially, when I disagree with him. This interview is no different and I would like to draw attention to one argument Hitchens offered regarding the issue of health care insurance since I have not heard it from anyone else of late.

Long time member of the left, one might expect from Hitchens one of the typical arguments for “free” health care for all. Seemingly, he offers something different. Is he even more inclined today “to stress those issues of individual liberty,” as he said several years ago in a Reason interview? [2] Paraphrasing, Hitchens said: if you offered people health care and freed them from the burden of worrying, “if I lose my job and fall ill, I’ll be doomed,” you will be making them more free. It appears an interesting and novel argument in favor of the proposed “health care reform.” Amongst the many arguments offered in favor of the proposal in recent months this is interesting insofar as it appears to have a legitimate philosophical base. Who doesn’t want freedom? Freedom is great! America is founded on the notion of freedom, we should make people free!

We must first, though, define freedom before we can know whether or not we possess it. In this task I turn to the great author and scholar C.S. Lewis, whose indispensable book Studies in Words will assist us. The modern English free like the Ancient Greek eleutherios and Latin liber originally carried connotations of both autonomy and legal status. The words also contain both ethical and social connotations: that a man is both free insofar as he is not a slave and free insofar as he acts as befits one who is free (as slaves were thought inherently to be nosy, ungenerous, carry grudges, et cetera.) Additionally, the English free grew to be used in the sense of “enjoying the freedom of a city” and by extension, being a citizen of that city and enjoying the commensurate rights, namely the right to vote. With those notions in mind, we may examine the cultural meaning of free. Chief amongst these distinctions is there are certain occupations that befit the free man because he undertakes them for their own sake and not for utility. Even commercial work does not make one free in this sense, since it is done to contribute to some other end. Lewis adds, “Only he who is neither legally enslaved to a master nor economically enslaved by the struggle for subsistence, is likely to have, or to have the leisure for using, a piano or a library.” I believe this definition is most similar to what Hitchens means by “freedom.” If only we could free people of the fear they might not be able to support themselves, they will be able to do their jobs better, more joyfully, et cetera. These are variants of what I call “Star Trek Syndrome,” which is the supposition that if we removed from man his need to support himself, he would be free to devote his time to some worthy pursuit. Yet Hitchens’ idea still sounds credible, as no man living with the anguish of uncertainty can be happy.

Alas, there exist two flaws in this argument. The first is this: it assumes the government is a “rights bursar,” that it exists to (or even simply, may) create and grant freedom. This is an incorrect assumption, as our society, unlike those that heretofore defined free, is one founded upon the principle of natural rights. In a society in which social mobility is impossible, where one is either citizen or slave or lord or serf, where there is neither legal ability nor practical chance for improvement, freedom is essentially inherited. The connotations and prejudices contained in the ancient definitions are foreign to our definition of liberty. In our society, freedom is simply the ability to act uncoerced by force and it is considered distinct from prosperity or happiness. Our government exists but for one purpose, to guarantee our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government does not exist to invent additional rights and to grant them to the people, nor can it do these things. The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States of America contain acknowledgments that men are inherently, i.e. already, free. In the definitive biography of our third President, Dumas Malone summarized the Jeffersonian outlook:

Like so many of his ‘enlightened’ contemporaries, Jefferson believed that men had originally been in a state of nature; that they had then been free to order their own actions and to dispose of their own persons and property as they saw fit; that government was instituted among them in the first place by consent.” [3]

Thus the government’s purpose is to safeguard those freedoms, neither to add to nor subtract from them. This concept of natural rights represents a fundamentally different worldview from both its predecessors and successors.

A second flaw is this: who would provide these rights? If, as we have said, a man is born free, then he inherently has a right to his life and thus must be left free to use his mind to decide how best to support himself. The concept of making a man more free by alleviating him of the necessity of supporting himself is in contradiction with the above principle. In creating a legal responsibility for supporting a man, you in fact diminish everyone’s rights, enserfing both the poorer and richer parties to a distributive entity. The only way to “free” one group of people from the “burden” of supporting themselves is to have another group of people support them. The underlying assumption here is that it is not my job to support myself, but someone else’s, i.e. that I am entitled to my own freedom at the expense of someone else’s. Here we must differentiate between two concepts, freedom and prosperity. In the ancient definitions, the prosperous man is free. In our era, the free man is able to become prosperous. To impose the older definition on our society would be to mandate an average level of prosperity, i.e. the more prosperous must be brought down to average to raise those below average to the same point, that way everyone can be said to be prosperous, and thus free. The root of this conclusion is an egalitarian assumption: that equal opportunity must result in equal outcome. If we are all equal in ability, this argument goes, then it must be an unjust system or society that represses some. Without commenting on the truthfulness of this claim, I will say only that it is a concept alien to our foundational laws. It is an extra-legal belief which, of course, your are free to adopt and live by, but not free to impose on others.

If we exercise our memories (or hit the history books) we will recall this view is not new. Proposals for “additional” rights have been made before by many 20th century Progressives. In his 28th Fireside Chat on January 11, 1944 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “Necessitous men are not free men." Clearly we see the old arguments and the new are one and the same. From the same speech: [4]

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all-- regardless of station, or race or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of farmers to raise and sell their products at a return which will give them and their families a decent living;

The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, and sickness, and accident and unemployment;

And finally, the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security.

Aside from the problem of the authority by which those rights would be precisely (i.e. actually and usefully) defined and administered and the myriad problems of implementing them, author and philosopher Ayn Rand succinctly addressed the fundamental problem of these supposed rights in her 1963 essay, Man’s Rights, asking: “at whose expense?” [5] Is a nation in which some men work to provide these “rights” for others more or less free than one in which each works to support himself? Rand added, “A right does not include the material implementation of that right by other men; it includes only the freedom to earn that implementation by one’s own effort.” [5] One is free to pursue happiness, one is not owed happiness itself. In a time of great crisis, FDR asked Americans to sacrifice liberty for security. Americans have, at various points over the past 60 years taken that offer from various people, parties, presidents, congresses, et cetera. We accepted Social Security, which is now bankrupt. We accepted Medicare, which is now bankrupt. We accepted a government monopoly on education and national education standards, and school systems are in shambles. We incentivized home ownership and regulated our economy with disastrous consequences. All of these programs were supposed to make some people, the unfortunates, more free. All of these programs and more will have to be supported at the expense of some: are they more free or less free?

Today, amidst another crisis gladly not as great, our current president asks the same. Perhaps more of the poison is the cure? Yet FDR’s “rights” have indeed secured something: a government continually growing in size and power. Let us return to the understanding that freedom is the right to life, liberty, an the pursuit of happiness. Admittedly, these rights do not spell security. They spell liberty, which cannot be invented, bought, and doled out, only recognized, fought for, and preserved. What man, then, shall we call free? He, “whose life is lived for his own sake not for that of others.” [6]

[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/08/hitchens_on_orw.html
[2] http://www.reason.com/news/show/28208.html
[3] Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the Virginian. Little, Brown and Company. Boston. 1948. p. 175
[4] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16518
[5] Rand, Ayn. Man’s Rights. Signet. New York New York. 1961 (p. 113)
[6] Aristotle. Metaphysics 982b

Lewis, C.S. Studies in Words. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK. 1960 (Ch. 5: “Free”)