Author: john mcgowan

Meretricious

Here’s a passage from Jonathan Coe’s excellent 2004 novel, The Closed Circle.

“. . . the young couple, who had arrived just behind Paul in a white stretch limo were enjoying the attention of a crowd of journalists and photographers.  This couple, whom Paul had not recognized, had last year been two of the contestants on Britain’s most popular primetime reality TV show.  For weeks they had kept the public guessing as to whether or not they were going to have sex with each other on camera.  The tabloid papers had devoted hundreds of column inches to the subject.  Neither of them had talent, or wisdom, or education, or even much personality to speak of.  But they were young and good-looking, and they dressed well, and they had been on television, and that was enough.  And so the photographers kept taking pictures, and the journalists kept trying to make them say something quotable or amusing (which was difficult , because they had no wit, either).  Meanwhile, Doug could not help noticing, right next to them, waiting for his wife to emerge from the ladies’, the figure of Professor John Copland, Britain’s leading geneticist, one of its best-selling science authors, and regularly mentioned as potential Nobel prizewinner.  But no one was taking his photograph, or asking him to say anything.  He could have been a cab driver, waiting to drive one of the guests home, as far as anybody was concerned.  And for Doug this situation encapsulated so perfectly everything he wanted to say about Britain in 2002—the obscene weightlessness of its cultural life, the grotesque triumph of sheen over substance, all the clichés which were only clichés, as it happened, because they were true—that he was, perversely, pleased to be witnessing it” (275-76).

Not a good passage; usually Coe avoids editorializing like this in his novel.  But I wanted to comment on it because 1) I usually, by absenting myself completely from it, avoid “weightless” culture while 2) fighting shy of the clichéd lament about its “obscenity” (laments that echo through the two hundred plus years of despair over the mediocrity of bourgeois, democratic, non-noble mores).  It is interesting to see Coe feeling compelled to both make the clichéd complaint and to chide himself for making it in almost the same breath.  At some level, we elites are not allowed to sound like Flaubert anymore, not allowed to express our distaste—and, yes, our contempt—for what gets dished out on reality TV shows.  Perhaps Milan Kundera was the last fully self-righteous and completely un-self-aware critic of kitsch.  Even as his notion of weightlessness (“the unbearable lightness of being,” such a portentous but still fantastic title/phrase) winds up being little more than the fact that men find it unbearable to be faithful to just one woman.  Kundera’s petulance and (ultimately) silliness put the last stake through the heart of “high” culture’s contempt for low.

But, still.  I have seen Fox news only three or four times in my life; read People  magazine the same number of times, and have never seen a reality TV show.  When I do encounter such things, I am (I admit) flabbergasted as well as bored.  That such trash fills the channels of communication is a mystery as unfathomable to me as the idea that people buy $10,000 watches.  Who would do such a thing—and for what earthly reason?  I don’t even have a condescending explanation to offer.  Fascination/obsession with the British royal family fits into the same category for me.

Meanwhile—and I don’t think Coe sees this—his ignored professor is a “best-selling” author and likely to win a Noble prize–so hardly universally treated like a “cab driver.”  Yeats and W. B. Auden are just two among the great early 20th century poets who lived in fairly dire poverty.  Even the post World War II poets—Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz and the like—were spared that kind of poverty by having moved into sinecures in the beefed-up post-war universities.  Twenty-first century poets will complain bitterly about how few books they sell, but they are lionized within the tight confines of the “poetry world,” giving readings to robust audiences, and never threatened with the kind of poverty that Yeats took for granted.  We live in a world of niches now, so that no poet today can command a nation’s attention the way Yeats did (of course, he had the advantage of writing for a very small nation, about four million people strong, half the size of today’s New York City or London), even though no poet today can be as poor as Yeats.  The niches, in other words, reward well—have cultural capital in both its forms (financial and reputational) available for distribution.

All of this has to do, in very large part, with the ways that the post-war universities have become the patrons for the arts in our time.  Outside of the university it is very hard to make a living by the sweat of your pen.  The Grub St man of letters, writing his reviews for the papers and the weeklies, no longer exists—while no poet and very few novelists can make a living apart from teaching creative writing.  But the universities do provide a structure that insures rewards.

What everyone keeps lamenting these days (instead of lambasting the meretricious glob of TV and the tabloids) is the utter lack of contact between the niches.  The “culture” we teach in school is utterly divorced from the “culture” our students access outside of school.  They know nothing, and care less, for the material to which we introduce them—except for the very small minority we convert over to what by now should be called “school” culture, not “high” culture.

School culture does get a boost from all those middle to upper middle class parents who, for various reasons, see fit to give their children violin, ballet, singing, and (less frequently) art and acting lessons in lieu of (or in addition to) having them play little league or soccer or join a swim team.  The arts/athletics divide in American child rearing practices deserves sociological study.  Both for characterizing the parents who give their children different kinds of lessons—and in a longitudinal study of what effect those lessons have on later choices in life (chances of going to art museums or to the symphony; kinds of career paths taken).  And how does deep involvement in youth sports culture track to an obsession with celebrities or TV world?  Not any obvious connection there.

These schisms no doubt always existed in American culture.  But they didn’t used to track so directly to different political allegiances/views.  My colleague Jonathan Weiler thinks he can tell your political affiliating after asking only four questions, one of which is your emotional response to Priuses.  I have fear he is right.

And, as usual, most perplexing–and disheartening–to me is the deep hostility that such divides now generate.  Just as I really cannot understand why the uber-rich are so discontented, so determined to increase the financial insecurity of their employees, I cannot understand why our cultural warriors are out to destroy the universities.  Yes, its partly their war against all things public.  UNC is in the cross-hairs in a way that Duke will never be.  But it is more than that.  They have some leverage over UNC; they’d go after Duke as well if they could.  The need to punish one’s enemies as well as look to one’s own well-being is what I don’t get.  Peaceful co-existence of the various niches, the indifference of tolerance, is off the table it seems.  I keep referring back (in my mind) to a comment Gary Wills made years ago about the Republican nominating convention (of 1992 or 1996; I don’t remember what year).  He reported that over 30% of the delegates were millionaires, yet they seethed with discontent and rage.  What objective reason did they have to be so agitated? Life in the US had treated them damn well.  The same, of course, can be said of Donald Trump in spades.  What is the source of all his anger?  Pretty obviously the fact that he does not feel respected by the cultural elites.  So he wishes to destroy them, to cause them maximum pain.

A final question: does meretricious popular culture, all that weightless trash, always have this kind of aggression against dissenters to that culture packed within it?  In other words, I am back to thinking, yet again, about resentment–about its sources and about the cultural/societal locations in which it lurks.

Moral Envy and Opportunity Hoarding

One quick addendum to the last post—and to Bertrand Russell’s comment about how the traditionalist is allowed all kinds of indignation that the reformer is not.  What’s with the ubiquity of death threats against anyone who offends the right wing in the United States?  That those who would change an established social practice/pattern, no matter how unjust or absurd, deserve a death sentence is, to all appearances, simply accepted by the radical right.  So, just to give one example, the NC State professor who went public with his memories of drinking heavily with Brett Kavanaugh at Yale immediately got death threats—as did some of his colleagues in the History Department.  Maybe you could say that snobbish contempt for the “deplorables” is the standard left wing response to right wingers—just as predictable as right wingers making death threats.  But contempt and scorn are not solely the prerogative of the left, whereas death threats do seem only mobilized by the right.

Which does segue, somewhat, into today’s topic, which was to take up David Graeber’s alternative way of explaining the grand canyon between the left and right in today’s America.  His first point concerns what he calls “moral envy.”  “By ‘moral envy,’ I am referring here to feelings of envy and resentment directed at another person, not because that person is wealthy, or gifted, or lucky, but because his or her behavior is seen as upholding a higher moral standard than the envier’s own.  The basic sentiment seems to be ‘How dare that person claim to be better than me (by acting in a way that I do indeed acknowledge is better than me?”” (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory [Simon and Schuster, 2018], 248).  The most usual form this envy takes, in my experience, is the outraged assertion that someone is a “hypocrite.”  The right wing is particularly addicted to this claim about liberal do-gooders.  The liberals, in their view, claim to be holier than thou, but know what side their bed is feathered on, and do quite well for themselves.  They wouldn’t be sipping lattes and driving Priuses if they weren’t laughing their way to the bank.  Moral envy, then, is about bringing everyone down to the same low level of behavior—and thus (here I think Graeber is right) entails a covert acknowledgement that the general run of behavior is not up to our publicly stated moral aspirations.  So we don’t like the people who make the everyday, all-too-human fact of the gap between our ideals and our behavior conspicuous.  Especially when their behavior indicates that the gap is not necessary.  It is actually possible to act in a morally admirable manner.

But then Graeber goes on to do something unexpected—and to me convincing—with this speculation about moral envy.  He ties it to jobs.  Basically, the argument goes like this: some people get to have meaningful jobs, ones for which it is fairly easy to make the case that “here is work worth doing.”  Generally, such work involves actually making something or actually providing a needed service to some people.  The farmer and the doctor have built-in job satisfaction insofar as what they devote themselves to doing requires almost no justification—to themselves or to others.  (This, of course, doesn’t preclude all kinds of dissatisfactions with factors that make their jobs needlessly onerous or economically precarious.)

Graeber’s argument in Bullshit Jobs is that there are not enough of the meaningful jobs to go around.  As robots make more of the things that factory workers used to make and as agricultural labor also requires far fewer workers than it once did, we have not (as utopians once predicted and as Graeber still believes is completely possible) rolled back working hours.  Instead, we generated more and more bullshit jobs—jobs that are make-work in some cases (simply unproductive in ways that those who hold the job can easily see) or, even worse, jobs that are positively anti-productive or harmful (sitting in office denying people’s welfare or insurance claims; telemarketing; you can expand the list.)  In short, lots of people simply don’t have access to jobs that would allow them to do work that they, themselves, morally approve of.

Graeber’s point is that the people who hold these jobs know how worthless the jobs are.  But they rarely have other options—although the people he talks to in his book do often quit these soul-destroying jobs.  The political point is that the number of “good” jobs, i.e. worthwhile, meaningful jobs is limited.  And the people who have those jobs curtail access to them (through professional licensing practices in some cases, through networking in other cases).  There is an inside track to the good jobs that depends, to a very large extent, on being to the manor/manner born.  Especially for the jobs that accord upper-middle-class status (and almost guarantee that one will be a liberal), transmission is generational.  This is the “opportunity hoarding” that Richard Reeves speaks about in his 2017 book, Dream Hoarders.  The liberal professional classes talk a good game about diversity and meritocracy, but they basically keep the spots open for their kids.  Entry into that world from the outside is very difficult and very rare.

To the manner born should also be taken fairly literally.  Access to the upper middle class jobs still requires the detour of education–and how to survive (and even thrive) at an American university is an inherited trait.  Kids from the upper middle class are completely at home in college, just as non-middle-class kids are so often completely at sea.  Yes, school can be a make-it and a break-it, a place where an upper class kid falls off the rails and place where the lower class kid finds a ladder she manages to climb.  But all the statistics, as well as my own experience as a college teacher for thirty years, tell me that the exceptions are relatively rare.  College is a fairly difficult environment to navigate–and close to impossibly difficult for students to whom college’s idiolects are not a native language.

So two conclusions. 1.  It is a mixture of class resentment and moral envy that explains the deep animus against liberal elites on the part of non-elites—an animus that, as much as does racism in my opinion, explains why the abandoned working class of our post-industrial cities has turned to the right.  As bad as (or, at least, as much as) their loss of economic and social status has been their loss of access to meaningful work.  Put them into as many training sessions as you want to transition them to the jobs of the post-industrial economy, you are not going to solve their acute knowledge that these new jobs suck when compared to their old jobs in terms of basic worth.  So they resent the hell out of those who still hold meaningful jobs—and get well paid for those jobs and also have the gall to preach to them about tolerance and diversity.  2.  It is soul-destroying to do work you cannot justify as worth doing.  And what is soul-destroying will lead to aggression, despair, rising suicide rates, drug abuse, and susceptibility to right-wing demagogues.  Pride in one’s work is a sine non qua of a dignified adult life.

The Class/Race/Generation/Political Divide

Back with a little tidbit from Bertrand Russell’s Human Society in Ethics and Politics: “Traditionalists hold their opinions more fanatically than their liberal-minded opponents and therefore have power out of proportion to their numbers.  A man who publicly advocates any relaxation of the traditional code can be made to suffer obloquy, but nothing of the sort can be inflicted upon benighted bigots” (125).

Lots can be said about this—and count on me to say lots.  For starters, we have here the usual contrast between mild-mannered liberals, lacking fire-in-the-blood passion, and visceral conservatives.  The politics of reason versus the politics of passion. “The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats).  I am not very convinced.  More plausible, I think, are explanations that look to “loss aversion” and to the superiority in “reality” of what is over what could be.  In my experience, those proposing reforms always meet with fierce resistance; stepping into the unknown always is based on uncertain gains balanced against very obvious losses.  What will be destroyed by the change is concretely There.  Those who are just fine with current arrangements will have a direct, straight-forward case for outrage.  “Jeopardy” in Albert Hirschman’s anatomy of the “rhetoric of reaction.”  Your changes will jeopardize the good things we enjoy now with no guarantee that what you put in the present’s place will be better.  You, the reformer, are inflicting an easy to identify harm.

Russell believes that “most of the disagreements that occur in practice are, not as to what things have intrinsic value, but as to who shall enjoy them.  The holders of power naturally demand for themselves the lion’s share” (110).  Is this true? That is, are there actually very few deep moral disagreements; rather, the real source of disagreement is about the distribution of the goods that everyone agrees are actually good.  That shifts the moral terrain significantly; the focus becomes who legitimately is entitled to a share and who legitimately can be denied a full share.  I am inclined to think conservatism is always, au fond, about legitimating unequal distribution.  The grounds for cutting some people out—race, meritocracy, education, expertise, various social and moral stigmas, citizenship—vary widely, but the basic goal is the same: to justify inequality.  We fight over the goods–not over what should be designated good.  At least in most instances.  Sounds plausible.

One maddening thing is that unequal distribution could (possibly) be justified by scarcity.  If there was not enough to go around, then some might have to do without.  But there is ample evidence to show that removing the condition of scarcity does little to quell the urge toward unequal distribution.  The drive for status, for hierarchy, for distinction, leads to inequalities as steep and as cruel (i.e. tending to total deprivation) as scarcity.  Russell does not pay much attention to the deep desire for status.  He is no sociologist.  But he believes that the “desire for power” is basically universal, as is the abuse of that power by any who possess it (118).  His only solution to this snake in the garden is sublimation: “to educate in such a manner that acquired skills will lead the love of power into useful rather than harmful channels” (118).  Like Freud and William James, he seeks for a “moral equivalent” of war, competition, status seeking, and the desire to dominate over others.

Not much cause for optimism there.  I do think “loss aversion” can help a bit here, as can a ground-level sense of fairness, of justice.  Russell is not keen on appeals to justice.  “I think that, while the arguments for approximately equal distribution are very strong wherever an ancient tradition is not dominant, they are nevertheless arguments as to means, and I do not think that justice can be admitted as something having intrinsic value on its own account” (117).  The idea is that justice is a means to peace—where peace produces a stable society in which everyone can enjoy the goods they have without fearing the violence of either the strong seekers of power/privilege/wealth/status or the aggrieved violence of the deprived.  Self-interest in such peace and the stability/security it provides is the foundational rock, not some commitment to justice per se.

I think Russell is wrong about that.  I think a disinterested (for lack of a better term) outrage about perceived violations of justice is a much stronger—and independent—motive than he allows.  It is, of course, true that many disputes that claim to be about justice are masking self-interest.  But I do not think that is always to case.  The same psychologists who uncovered “loss aversion” with their ingenious experiments have also noticed that people will be satisfied with less for themselves when a distribution procedure is seen as “fair.”  A real life example is elections.  People accept being on the losing side of a vote if they think the vote was fairly conducted.  One sign of deep trouble in our democracy is the growing refusal to accept the outcome of elections.  When results trump procedures, democracy is in trouble.  Even then, radicals on both sides—left and right—will shout that the vote was not “fair,” that is was fraudulent in one way or another.  A pretty infallible sign of the far-out radical left is the deep conviction that the “real majority” in the US favors the radical’s own program, refusing to countenance all the evidence that the American public is just not that leftist.

I am inclined to believe that those who are driven by an inordinate desire/need for power are a small minority, akin to the small set of adepts that Randall Collins claims can actually commit sustained violence.  (In his book Violence.)  That small number prey on the rest of us.  Our part in life is to try to ward them off, to resist them, and to get on with the business of living.  The powers of resistance are pretty strong; not always sufficient of course but able in many instances to frustrate the seekers of power.  It is not the insecurity of the tyrant that makes him miserable (in my view and pace Plato).  The control of the means of violence is pretty thorough, plus the tyrant’s delusions of grandeur include a sense of immunity to the normal vulnerabilities of the flesh (think of all those 80 year old Senators).  No, what makes the tyrant’s life miserable is the limitations on his power.  Finally, it’s just damned hard to get other people to do what you want them to do.  They resist—passively more often than actively, by not paying attention or doing things half-assedly, or just melting away.  The art of not being governed, as James Scott calls it.  It’s the path that Fred Moten and David Graeber recommend.  Just ignore the tyrant, as far as that is possible.

Or scream bloody murder—like the traditionalists do.  Take the moral high ground whenever any kind of change is proposed.  There were all those artists—Yeats, Proust, Galsworthy, Nietzsche—documenting (often lamenting) the death of the aristocracy as the 19th century became the 20th century.  A privileged class was losing some of its privileges, but more crucially was losing its relevance.  Its material well-being wasn’t threatened, but its right to lead, to set the tone culturally and to direct the nation politically, was slipping away.  Today, it’s white America that is slipping away.  In the popular arts, black America has set the tone for quite some time.  Look at our music and our sports (the NFL and the NBA).  The change has been less swift in film and TV, and even less swift in the non-popular arts like classical music and museum culture.  The difference this time (as contrasted to the period of 1880 to 1920) is that neither the declining class (whites) nor the ascendant one (non-whites) is gaining economically.  Instead, both groups are getting played by the 1% that is hoovering up all the wealth to itself. But the decliners, the traditionalists, are certainly screaming bloody murder.  To a lesser extent, so are the exploited.  (Or maybe they are screaming just as loud, but lack access to the channels–literally Fox and Limbaugh–that would allow their screams to be heard.  The corporate consolidation of American media condemns them to an outer darkness.)

Hence the generalized rage.  The whites has “loss aversion” to the max; they are increasingly irrelevant, feel disrespected, and increasingly insecure financially.  The non-whites, while accorded a certain kind of cultural power and respect (but only within elite circles in New York and Hollywood and, even there, inconsistently), are resolutely kept from getting a decent slice of the pie.  And everyone looks for someone to blame, with the sad, boring, classic American story of getting the poor whites to obsess about their non-white rivals to the advantage of the rich whites.  I wish I had a different story to tell.  Sometimes the truth is astoundingly uninteresting, completely predictable, and apparently immune to any kind of creative rewriting.  It just sits there, an indigestible lump.

No surprise, then, that we turn to the young for an imagined way out of this impasse.  Their much-vaunted sympathy for socialism coupled with their skepticism toward a capitalism that has not served them at all (no less “well”) is seen as the road toward radical transformation.  The radical always relies on a sense that “things can’t continue this way,” that the current arrangements are unsustainable.  But they are unsustainable only if people refuse to countenance, to suffer, them.  And things from my perspective have been intolerable for fifty years now.  And, somehow, little in terms of the basic structures of distribution have changed in the US—except for the worse.

I can’t help but think that American politics are still transfixed by the political, economic, and cultural upheavals of 1965 to 1975.  Just like mainstream economists are still fighting the battle against inflation of the 1970s (unable, apparently, to process that inflation has been a non-issue for Western economies since 2000), so our political fault lines divide along the axis of those who want to return to a mythical 1950s (its prosperity, its blue collar jobs, its women contentedly at home, its blacks out of sight and out of mind, its gays utterly invisible) and those who affirm the various upheavals that brought women, blacks, gays into the public view, with their noisy demands for attention, respect, and their due.  Astounding, really, how traumatic the 1960s were—and how long-lasting (as is the case with traumas) its after-shocks.  The problem is that it is the cultural upheavals (experienced as traumatic by some and liberating by others) that gets all the attention, that generates 90% of the heat.  The economic coup d’etat, every bit as traumatic as the cultural changes, mostly flies under the radar.  The consolidation of economic power never becomes the explicit topic of political inquiry or rhetoric.

Those fiery youth of the 60s did not effect some radical transformation. The few radicals, like some SDSers and Martin Luther King at the end of his life, who tried to “pivot” away from anti-war and pro-civil rights activism toward economic issues (the poor people’s campaign) didn’t get much traction.  (Although we should not forget that something akin to a basic guaranteed income for all was actually debated in Congress in 1971.  How far we have fallen from that high moment.)  Rather, as my daughter likes to remind me, the baby boomers have left the US—and the world—much worse off than they found it.  So I am not likely to place too much faith in the transformative power of today’s youth, even if the generational divide is once again as intense as it was in the “generation gap” years.  Sixties youth, after all, had the insouciance of those who felt immune to economic worry.  No such luck for today’s millennials as they step into the world of contract labor.  Welcome to the precariat.

The lines of this analysis are familiar enough, which (as I say) doesn’t mean they are not (roughly) true.  But David Graeber offers a different way to think of all this—and I will go in that direction in my next post.

Two Kinds of Reason?

The semester has obviously gotten the better of me.  Loads of things to catch up on in these notes.  So let me try to make at least a beginning.

I am reading Bertrand Russell’s 1953 book, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (Simon and Shuster, 1955), which is a summary of his ethics and political views.  Russell’s prose is extraordinary.  He is so clear, so direct, and so ready, in every instance, with an illustrative example.  He really seems to have mastered that Wordsworthian goal of being a man speaking to men (sic).  The tone is conversational, ever even-toned and reasonable, with a trick of his taking you (the reader) into his confidence when he reaches those knotty moments where he has no surefire solution to offer.

Russell is just about 100% a Humean utilitarian.  His position is that there is only one kind of reason: instrumental reason.  Reason is only at play when we are determining what means are most appropriate to the achievement of a particular end.  What Kant called the “hypothetical imperative”—willing the means that will lead to our announced goal.  For Russell, ends are determined by desire or passion (in the classic Humean formula).  Furthermore, Russell is pretty wedded to the notion that a pleasure/pain calculus can explain our desires—even if he rejects the idea (so loved by economists) that self-interest is “rational.”  The pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain is passional for Russell, not rational, based in feeling, not thought or logic.  Pleasure as an end is not a product of rational calculation, although figuring out how to achieve that end is a matter of rational calculation.

Russell even ends up asserting (as do Adam Smith and Hume) that there is a “natural” (and, hence, presumably universal) tendency in humans to sympathize with the pain/suffering in others in ways that make the observation of others’ sorrows painful to the observer.  But he has to admit that this “natural” emotion is not everywhere present.  “Sympathy with suffering, especially with physical suffering, is to some extent a natural impulse: children are apt to cry when they hear their brothers or sisters crying. [Not true in my experience.] This natural impulse has to be curbed by slaveowners, and when curbed it easily passes into its opposite, producing an impulse to cruelty for its own sake” (87).

A thin reed indeed, if it so “easily” turns into its opposite: a delight in the suffering of others.  Yet it is very hard to see how you can even get ethics founded on emotion rather than reason started if you don’t posit some kind of sympathy.  That is, if your ethics must be derived from a primitive pleasure/pain impulse, then you have to figure out a way to ground caring about others’ pain in the fact of feelings of pleasure and pain confined to the self. Here’s Russell again; “I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of other people.  It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. . . . Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy” (155-56).  The extremely cautious language here (some, somewhat) perhaps reflects Russell’s recalling how Hume, despite his thoughts on sympathy, speculated/worried that it is not irrational for me to care more about a cut to my little finger than about 10,000 deaths in China.  If you begin from egotistic premises about pain and pleasure, that Humean thought is hard to refute.  I experience my pain quite differently from the ways I experience the pain of someone else, no matter how deeply I might feel for them.

The Continental tradition, ever hostile to utilitarianism, has sought to solve this problem by appeal to another kind of reason—one that is quite distinct from instrumental reason.  In Kant, it’s the reason of logic.  Ethics is to be grounded in the pain (I use this word advisably) we feel at self-contradiction.  The categorical imperative basically says that I cannot, except on the pain of contradiction, assume goods to myself that I would deny to others.  A radical egalitarianism is the only path to an ethics that avoids contradiction—and, this goes mostly unsaid in Kant, our sense of self-worth, of dignity, and integrity would be lost if we contradicted ourselves.  Just what our stake is in self-worth, dignity etc. is never specified.  It is simply assumed that we desire to esteem ourselves.  Russell, along with other utilitarians, would say that Kant, at bottom, also relies on pain—just the pain of being inconsistent instead of the pain of witnessing the suffering of others.  Then the question becomes which of these two pains would we take more pains to avoid, which is the more powerful motive.

Habermas’ version of a second kind of reason is “discursive reason.”  It shares some features with Kantian reason, especially in its egalitarian strictures that all are provided with equal access to the discourse that Habermas identifies as central to human interactions.  But Habermas also adds the rationality of being convinced by arguments (or viewpoints or even conclusions) that are best supported by the evidence and by the “reasons” provided to believe them.  Our beliefs, in other words, are potentially rational for Habermas—and those beliefs are not just confined to the designation of efficacious means.  Our ends can also be determined (at least in part) through rational argument, through discursive processes of intersubjective consultation/contestation that yield conclusions about what ends to pursue.  Desire is important, but does not entirely rule the roost.  We don’t necessarily have to express it as desire being tempered or corrected or revised by reason.  We can imagine desire and reason as born in the same moment, that way avoiding giving desire some of temporal or psychological priority—a priority that may get translated into thinking desire a stronger force or one that must be tamed (as in Plato’s image of desire as the horse that must be controlled by the weaker, but smarter, rider).  I think Habermas (like Martha Nussbaum in a somewhat different way) would want to say that desire and reason are intertwined (perhaps completely inextricably) from the start—a position that makes human beliefs and behavior susceptible to argument/persuasion, thus giving “discursive reason” a space in which to operate.

Reason in Habermas and Nussbaum, then, is secular and immanent; it is produced in and through human sociality.  And I think they would say that it works to create “sensibilities,” that our “moral intuitions” are the products of cultural interactions.  Certainly, I read Dewey as taking that position, which is a way of reconciling what can seem his over-optimistic faith in “intelligence” (that key Deweyean term) with his equally firm insistence that “morality is social.”  There is no transcendent rational dictate (as there is in Kant) that grounds morals, that even pronounces its fundamental “law” (i. e. never do anything that you cannot will that everyone do).  Dewey’s social historicism tries to account for both the variety in moral beliefs/intuitions across time and space and to capture the “force” of those intuitions, the fact that they are motivating and that we feel shame/guilt when we do not act in accordance with them.  The “intelligence” on which Dewey relies does seem to be consequence-based.  He seems to be saying that things go better for human lives—whether focused on individual lives or on the collective life of societies—when we adopt modes of “democratic association” that stress cooperation over conflict/competition and proved the means for all to actively pursue their chosen ends.

Still, the rub is there: what cultivates the sensibility of, commitment to, enhancing the well-being of others.  What, in Kantian terms, keeps me from using the other as means to my self-fulfillment, just as I use various non-human things that the world affords as means.  The Kantian path basically says we must have some way to designate some things (primarily human lives) as sacred, as never to be used as means.  Otherwise, utilitarianism will run roughshod over the world—and the people in it—during its pursuit of pleasure.  What is unclear is whether “reason” can get us to that designation of “the sacred” (defined as the “untouchable,” or as that which is always an ends, not a means).

The alternative seems to be some kind of arbitrary fiat, the kind of decisionism that Derrida seems to adapt in the later stages of his career, or perhaps the kind of pre-rational “call” (or intuition) upon which Levinas bases his ethics.  The sacredness of the other is just asserted; it is not justifiable in any rational or argumentative way.  Just what the nature of its appeal is remains unclear.  What motivates one to heed the call?  To what within the self does the call touch? One answer leads to a kind of pantheism (I would read Hegel this way): the call resonates with that fragment of the spirit (or of the divine) that lurks within us, but which lies buried until activated by this voice from without.  That path, not surprisingly, is too mystical for me.  Yet it is clear that I am almost as equally suspicious of “reason” as some kind of power that can pull us up by our bootstraps, that can give us the terms of an ethics that we embrace as our own.

I am left, I think, with the idea that there are certain images of human possibility—both of individual exemplars (call them “saints” if you like) and of livable communities (call them “utopias” if you like)—that appeal to us as desirable visions of the forms life could take.  These visions are given to us by history (by religion, by literature, by philosophy, by the stories we tell)—and can become the focus of desire/aspirations, as well as the standards by which we criticize what does exist now.  In other words, articulations of the ideal (of ideas of justice) by philosophy and imaginations of the ideal in stories and literature, as well as certain concrete examples pulled from history form the basis of commitments that also are seen as ethical obligations, since it is shameful to act in ways that make realization of those ideals unlikely or impossible.  Is this “rational”?  Not fully or categorically.  But it can involve the deployment of reasons (in the plural), of arguments.  And in that sense Dewey’s appeal to “intelligence” might not seem quite so silly.  Intelligence is not a bad term to use for the assessment of our ideals and of the reasons they give us to act in certain ways as well as for assessing the possibility of the realization of those ideals.  At the same time, it seems to me that ideals do make an emotional appeal, so that the passional nature of our commitments can be acknowledged as well.

“Intelligence,” then, is a smudge term.  It’s meant the bridge the classical divide between passion and reason—in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum, in her work upon the emotions, has worked hard to demonstrate the contribution to “cognition” made by them.  Of course, the term “emotional intelligence” has entered the language in the past fifteen to twenty years.  It’s hard not to think that “intelligence” is doing a similar work to “judgment” in traditional faculty psychology.  In other words, as opposed to the Plato/Hegel line, which appeals to a transcendent Reason (with a capital R), or the Catholic theological line, which appeals to Revelation (with a capital R), we get the Aristotelean line, which aims to remain firmly grounded in the human and the here and now.  No divine interventions or even implanted divine sparks, just what our inborn mental capacities and emotional make-up renders possible. Russell is as addicted to appeals to intelligence as is Dewey.  “I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence.  And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education” (158).  I think it is almost inevitable that liberals will always end up appealing to education as the motor of improvement because they believe our ills are not permanently grounded in some kind of “nature” that cannot be re-formed.  Education is the means toward that re-formation.

But in that line (to which Hume and Kant, despite all their differences, both belong), the other sky hooks (besides education) that can get us out of being the mere pigs of J. S. Mill’s fears turn out to be either the needs generated out of human sociality or the mysterious processes of judgment (the topic of Kant’s third critique).  A utilitarianism shorn of both of these mechanisms can either throw up its hands at the issue of ends, just taking them for granted, in all their variety and perversity, as modern economic thought does.  Or it seems doomed to finding “altruism” and various other moral behaviors a deep puzzle, one only slightly assuaged by notions of “enlightened self-interest.”  In short, the problem for an utilitarianism—for any one who, like Russell, says there is only instrumental reason—is that it leaves us no way to talk about the formation of, the fixation on, ends. (This is the most customary complaint about pragmatism.) Those ends are just the product of passion, of the fundamental desire to gain pleasure and avoid pain.  Yet the actual variety of human ends, the number of things to which people are committed defies a simple calculation of pleasure or pain, indicates that utilitarianism’s psychology, its understanding of human motivations, is woefully inadequate to the actual complexities of human desires and calculations.

That said, accounting for the production of ends still remains a puzzler.  “Judgment” merely names the puzzle, gives it a site to reside. It hardly solves it.  Judgment stands as a way to explain that our moral views and our desired ends are not completely dictated to us by our culture.  That individuals in all worlds that we know of have the capacity to stand out against the prevailing practices and beliefs of their society.  They can, in short, submit those practices and beliefs to judgment.  But where do the standards by which the judgment is made come from?  That’s where some kind of notion of “intelligence” or “reason” or “cognition” (aided or not by the emotions) comes in.  Even in cases where the fact that judgment can be refined by education, where it can be developed in particular ways by particular exercises, there is still the sense that judgment also imparts an ability to stand apart from that education and those practices, to sit in judgment upon them.  I will be looking to see how Russell smuggles something like this capacity into his account of morals.  Judgment, I am saying, takes the place of that second kind of reason, that other “faculty,” that can do more than just indicate suitable means, instead offering us a way to make choices about ends.