Category: Liberalism

A Veteran’s Worldview

I have just finished reading Stephen Budiansky’s riveting biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, subtitled “A Life in War, Law, and Ideas” (Norton, 2019). Like Louis Menand, Budiansky claims—and makes a very compelling case for the claim—that Holmes’ manner and belief are all shaped by his service in the Civil War. Holmes was severely wounded twice (once in late July 1861 and then again at Antietam in September 1862). The second time (like Robert Graves) his death was reported in the newspapers. Holmes returned to service after both wounds, but saw only limited combat after 1862 since he joined a general’s staff. He had had more than enough—and quit the war in 1864 as soon as his three year term of service had expired.

Budiansky does a superb job in portraying Holmes’ worldview, one that I think is shared by many veterans. It certainly resonates with the hard to describe beliefs that animated my own father, who saw serious combat (although far short of the slaughterhouse that was September 17, 1862 at Antietam) in the Pacific during World War II. At bottom, Holmes became a “it’s struggle all the way down” guy. In the final analysis, it is force that tells—and that rules. That is an ugly truth. Force is relentless, mindless, brutal, and unrelated to justice or any other ideals. People who mouth ideals or try to call others to account in the name of ideals are naïve at best, deluded hypocrites speaking claptrap. At worst, they are moralistic despots, deploying their moral certainties to tyrannize over the rest of us. Dewey’s pragmatist attack on “the quest for certainty” becomes in Holmes the justification of an activist pluralism. The role of the law is to create a social field in which individuals are free to live their lives according to their own vision of the good life. Oddly enough, this yields a positive value: basically the very English value (both Holmes and my father were over-the-top Anglophiles) of “fair play.” Holmes’ Supreme Court decisions, in almost every instance, were directed to leveling the playing field, to denying any one or any group more power than any other. Thus he was a liberal in the Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear” sense; the focus is on preventing concentrations of power.

But Holmes (and here he is also very pragmatist) did not accept that uncertainty meant nihilism. “’Of all humbugs the greatest is the humbug of indifference and superiority,’ he wrote . . . in 1897. ‘Our destiny is to care, to idealize, to live toward passionately desired ends.’ He always dismissed the nihilistic attitude ‘it is all futile,’ which he termed ‘the dogmatism that often is disguised under skepticism. The sceptic has no standard to warrant such universal judgments. If a man has counted in the actual striving of his fellows he cannot pronounce it vain’” (130).

Eureka! I can’t help but take this for the cornerstone. It jives with William James’s constant harping of “striving,” and it is tied to a deep commitment to a certain ideal of masculinity. Holmes (like my father) was clear-eyed about the waste, the futility, the sheer brutal nastiness and devastation of war. He could see that a killing field like Antietam left nothing to individual initiative, ability, or resolve. It was all sheer chance as to whether one survived or not. And yet, he still hung on to the time-worn notion that war was the supreme test of manhood—and thus valuable because (for reasons never examined) manhood has to be tested. Maybe that goes back to the struggle thing; one needs to compete against others for the prize of being able to, in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others, be accounted a man. Since the struggle lies in front of us, the prize goes to those who most energetically strive. And by upping the stakes to life or death in the way that combat does, manhood is fully tested.

Thus, he famously wrote (in 1884) of himself and his fellow Civil War veterans: “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top . . . Through our good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire” (127). And later, during the First World War, he wrote: “I truly believe that young men who live through a war in which they have taken part will find themselves different thenceforth—I feel it—I see it in the eyes of the few surviving men who served in my Regiment. So, although I would have averted the war if I could have, I believe that all the suffering and waste are not without their reward. I hope will all my heart that your boys may win the reward and at not too great a cost” (363).

That last bit strikes the note perfectly. A real desire to avoid war joined with an equally real belief that war brings its own distinctive rewards, along with the absolute distinction between those who have the incommunicable experienced of war and those who do not. The veteran is part of the elect; he has looked into the abyss; he has seen the fundamental ugly truth of struggle, and is the better man for it.

In the implacable face of violence and death, high ideals mean nothing. The only worthy response is to shut up and get on with it. Grim determination, strong silence, and doing the job well are what is worthy of respect; nothing more or less. His ideal men “were free to be egoists or altruists on the usual Saturday half holiday provided they were neither while on their job. Their job is their contribution to the general welfare and when a man is on that, he will do it better the less he thinks ether of himself or of his neighbors, and the more he puts his energy into the problem he has to solve” (137). His contempt for intellectuals and moralists was unbounded. “More than once he cautioned his friends about ‘the irresponsibility of running the universe on paper. . . . The test of an ideal or rather of an idealist, is the power to hold it and get one’s inspiration from it under difficulties. When one is comfortable and well off, it is easy to talk high talk’”(131). His attitude toward intellectuals was very close to that of George Orwell; they talked a talk they never had to walk—and they rendered the world frictionless in their images of its betterment. It is the contempt of the self-styled man of action for the man of ideals—and is undoubtedly tied up with a cherished ideal of manhood. And, of course, in both Holmes and Orwell, it comes from two men who are primarily men of words. But they both share their military experience, so can see themselves as superior to the non-veteran.

When you aspire to be a man of action, the nostalgia for combat is understandable. What other field of action that is not contemptible does the modern world offer? What honor is there in making more money than others? Where, in other words, is the moral equivalent of war? Certainly not in politics, which is even more contemptible than trade. Holmes was determined not to become either the gloomy Henry Adams nor the god-seeking William James. He wanted, instead, to be the tough-minded realist described in the opening pages of James’s Pragmatism book.

I want, in my next post, to consider how tough-minded realism plays itself out in Holmes’ understanding of the law. But today I will end with the way that realism renders Holmes a pluralist in an additional sense. He is a pluralist in the John Rawls sense of believing that the central unalterable fact that liberal society must negotiate is the existence of multiple visions of the good, none of which should be allowed to trample on the others. He is a pluralist in the Isaiah Berlin sense in asserting that, even within a single vision of the good, there are competing goods that require tradeoffs and compromises; we will never getting everything we could wish for because those things cannot co-exist. Going to the theater tonight means missing a dinner with a different set of friends. Intellectuals, he thinks, never take the inevitability of never achieving the maximum into account in their criticisms of the men of action or in their imagined utopias. “Remember, my friend [he wrote], that every good costs something. Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be this means to be not that’ (131).

In sum, life’s a struggle and a real man just gets on with the job, harboring no illusion that it will be all wine and roses. That real man is full of contempt for the complainers and idealists, the ones who aim to change the basic fact of struggle into some kind of gentler form of cooperation that tends toward ameliorating the sufferings of himself and/or others. You just need to face up to the suffering in stoic silence, doing the best that you can for yourself and for those you love. Because you are a man and they are depending on you, even as you have no one to depend on but yourself. It’s a cop-out of your manhood to expect help; it’s a sign of weakness, of not being up to the struggle, to whine for help from the law, from society, from anyone.

Economic Power/Political Power

A quick addition to my last post.

The desire is to somehow hold economic power and political power apart, using each as a counterbalance against the other. To give the state absolute power over the economy is to insure vast economic inequality. Such has, generally speaking, been the lesson of history. Powerful states of the pre-modern era presided over massively unequal societies.

But there is a modern exception. Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe did produce fairly egalitarian societies; in that case, state power was used against the accumulation of wealth by the few. There still existed a privileged elite of state officials, but there was also a general distribution of economic goods. The problem, of course, was a combination of state tyranny with low productivity. The paranoia that afflicts all tyrannies led to abuses that made life unbearable.

But (actually existing) communism did show that it is possible to use state (political) power to mitigate economic inequality. Social democracy from 1945 to 1970 was also successful in this direction. Under social democracy, the economy enjoys a relative autonomy, but is highly regulated by a state that interferes to prevent large inequities.

Where there is some kind of norm that political power (defined as the ability to direct the actions of state institutions) should not either 1) be a route to economic gain or 2) be working hand-in-glove with the economically powerful to secure their positions, the violations of that norm are called “corruption.” The Marxist, of course, says that the state in all capitalist societies (the “bourgeois state”) is corrupt if that is our definition of corruption. The state will always have been “captured” by the plutocrats.

What belies that Marxist analysis is that the plutocrats hate the state and do everything in their power (under the slogan of laissez-faire) to render the state a non-player in economic and social matters. Capitalists do not want an effective state of any sort—either of the left, center, or right. A strong state of any stripe is not going to let the economy goes its own way, but will (instead) fight to gain control over it. I think it fair to say that the fight between political and economic power mirrors the fight between civil and religious power in the early days of the nation-state. The English king versus the clergy and the Pope.

The ordinary citizen, I am arguing, is better off when neither side can win this fight, when the two antagonists have enough standing to prevent one from having it all its way.

Our current mess comes in two forms, the worst of all worlds. We have a weak state combined with massive corruption. What powers the state still has are placed at the service of capital while politicians use office to get rich. We have a regulatory apparatus that is almost completely dormant. From the SEC to the IRS, from the FDA to the EPA, the agencies are not doing their jobs, but standing idly by while the corporations, financiers, and tax-evading rich do their thing.

The leftist response is to say that the whole set-up in unworkable. We need a new social organization. I have just finished reading Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia (Verso, 2016). Interestingly enough, Jameson also thinks we need “dual power” in order to move out of our current mess. The subtitle of his book is “Dual Power and the Universal Army.” More about Jameson in subsequent posts.

Here I just want to reiterate what I take to be a fundamental liberal tenet: all concentrations of power are to be avoided; monopolies of power in any society are a disaster that mirror the equal but opposite disaster of civil war. Absolute sovereignty of the Hobbesian sort is not a solution; but the absence of all sovereignty is, as Hobbes saw, a formula for endless violence. Jameson says the key political problem for any Utopia is “federalism.” That seems right to me, if we take federalism to mean the distribution of power to various social locations. Having a market that stands in some autonomy from the state is an example of federalism. There are, of course, other forms that federalism can take. All of those forms are ways of working against the concentration of power in one place.

Liberalism (Yet Again)

In his London Review of Books review (February 6^th issue) of Alexander Zevin’s history of The Economist magazine, Stefan Collini makes a point I have often made-and which I presented at some length on this blog some eighteen months ago. To wit, the term “liberalism” is used in such a loose, baggy way that it comes to mean nothing at all—or, more usually, everything that the one who deploys the term despises. If John Dewey and Margret Thatcher are both liberals, what could the term possibly designate?

My take has always been that there are a number of things—habeas corpus, religious tolerance, social welfare programs, freedom of the press—that in specific contexts can be identified as “liberal” in contrast to more authoritarian positions, but that the existence of these specific things are the product of different historical exigencies and do not cohere into some coherent, overall ideology. They may be a family resemblance among the positions that get called “liberal,” but there is no necessary connection between habeas corpus and religious tolerance. You can easily have one without the other, as was true in England for several centuries.

In a letter to the LRB, Zevin objects to Collini’s refusal to credit the more generalized use of the term “liberal.” I find his objection cogent and thus offer it here:

“Resistant, in general, to overarching categories, he [Collini] seems particularly sensitive when it comes to liberalism. ‘When people ask me if the division between men of the Right and men of the Left still makes sense,’ the essayist Alain once remarked, ‘the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a man of the Left.’ When someone says, mutatis mutandis, ‘all you mean by liberalism’ is ‘not socialism’ and ‘there is no such thing,’ it is safe to assume the speaker is a liberal, defensively protecting himself.”

So, yes, guilty as charged. I am a liberal—and do have something at stake in claiming that the term ‘liberalism’ is used in too loose a fashion to do much good. I want a finer grained statement of what specific features of the political landscape are desirable, are worth fighting to preserve where they exist, and to introduce where they do not. We should know what we are talking about—and what we are advocating for. Zevin’s point (not surprisingly) is that the liberalism of The Economist encompassed its support of the Vietnam and Iraqi wars; Collini, no doubt, would argue that many liberals opposed those wars, whereas they were the brainchild of many to the right of liberalism, those often called neo-conservatives. The right, in other words, was more solidly unified in its opinion on those wars than a sorely divided liberal camp. Yes, some liberals supported those wars, but hardly all. And it is very hard to believe that a centrist like Al Gore would have led the US into that “war of choice” in Iraq. To which, the anti-liberal leftist says I have two words for you: Tony Blair.

The left, it seems, needs to continually assert its distance from a detested center that it calls ‘liberalism.” It also needs to constantly trumpet the sins of that liberalism and to mitigate its differences from the right. For the soi disant radical left, neo-liberal and neo-conservative become equivalent terms, with no appreciable difference between them. Hilary Clinton is no better and no worse than George W. Bush. And somehow both are liberals.

My defensiveness comes from wanting to save the term “liberal” to designate a raft of values and positions I wish to advocate. Maybe I should give that up, call myself a “social democrat,” and move on. I resist that move because there are values captured by “liberalism” (especially those connected to rights and tolerance) that aren’t covered by “social democrat,” with its focus on economic sufficiency and regulation of market forces and market practices.

But how about the “not socialism” broad brush? Michael Clune, in an essay entitled “Judgment and Equality” (Critical Inquiry, 2019, pp. 910—917), repeats the by-now familiar dismissal of liberalism’s individualism, its reduction of everything to “choice,” to “consumer preference.” Even a cursory reading of 20^th century liberals such as Dewey or Charles Taylor would indicate how sloppy a vision of liberalism such a charge demonstrates. Not to mention that one standard conservative charge against liberals is precisely that they negate individual responsibility in their emphasis on the social determinants of behavior. Which is it? Liberals are full-scale believers in heroic individual autonomy, or they are apologists for the impoverished and the misfit, blaming social conditions for their perceived failures?

Still, Clune does make a concrete claim: “The liberal tradition supports the effort to correct egregious market inequities through policies that leave the market intact” (928).

Now we are talking. I do think that the commitments I think of as liberal include an acceptance of the market. That acceptance is, partly, pragmatic (in the vulgar, not philosophical, sense of that term.) I think the chances of overthrowing the market and installing something different in its place are nonexistent. In that sense, there is no realistic alternative at the current moment. So, says the radical, you and Thatcher are the same. Told you so.

Not so fast. What I am saying is that the consequential political battles of our time are going to be fought over what kind of market we are going to have. This is a real battle, with real stakes. The right over the past seventy years has fought tooth and nail to discredit social democracy, to roll back any state (or other) regulation of the market, and any mechanisms (from unions to minimum wage laws to other forms of state involvement in wage negotiations) that would overcome the imbalances of power existing between employers and workers in an unregulated market. We know two things: one, that the right has been largely successful in this battle; two, that the vast majority of workers in the West are worse off now than they were in 1960. Social democracy was a better deal for workers than the present regime (call it neo-liberal if you like, although that term ignores the liberalism of the twentieth century in favor of the “classical liberalism” of the 19th).

Another (contingent) feature of liberalism is its distrust of concentrations of power, its desire to share power around, to create “checks and balances.” Currently, that entails a recognition that economic power is over-concentrated; that we need state power to counterbalance it because the collective power of workers (through unions or other mechanisms) is hard (if not impossible) to mobilize under present economic conditions.

It is fair to say that the founders were more concerned about concentrated state power than about concentrated economic power. It is a stretch, I believe, to see Jefferson as a laissez-faire classical economist, but his words and ideas can be wrenched in that direction (by historians like Joyce Appleby) because he wanted to establish sources of power outside of the state’s reach.

I think economic sufficiency does provide a citizen with some independence from the state. Therefore, I am also willing to argue that acceptance of markets is not just a pragmatic expediency, but also justified in its own right. Economic bases of power apart from the state are not necessarily a bad thing.

The bad thing is overweening economic power, just as tyrannical state power is a bad thing. Markets, like states, tend toward the abuse of power. We need mechanisms, enforceable regulations and structuring rules, to curb market power. We also need to identify various basics—like health care, education, transportation, clean water and energy—that are not well served by markets and create alternative institutions for their provision. The best guideline for these alternative institutions is that old liberal standby: equality of access for all.

There are three very strong arguments against the market. One, the market inevitably produces wildly unequal outcomes. The liberal response: there are mechanisms, including unions, taxes, and redistributive policies that can combat those unequal outcomes.

Second, markets are inimical with democracy. The liberal response: workplace democracy is possible, as is political democracy. Its achievement depends on active mechanisms of participation which must be mandated as part of corporate and state governance. But there is no absolute bar to the existence of such mechanisms.

Third, economic power always overwhelms political power—if it does not simply convert itself directly into political power. The reforms that liberalism envisions as answers to numbers one and two never happen because the opponents of such reforms always already have power—which means the power to perpetuate existing inequalities.

That last argument is the killer. It simply seems true—and then the issue becomes how best to diminish the power of the wealthy, how to turn plutocracy into democracy, and use the democratic state to rein in the inequities of the market (not to mention its environmental degradations).

At this point in the argument, I don’t think the leftist and the liberal have very different goals. They just differ strongly on tactics. Is it better to aim to win the way to reform of the market? Or is it better to work toward the total overthrow of the market? I don’t see any remotely realistic pathway to that second goal, which is why I remain someone committed to the re-emergence, in even stronger and better form, of social democracy.

Fathers and Sons

I have just finished reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (published in 1862). I first read the novel some thirty years ago (I really have no idea when, but it must have been somewhere between 1974 and 1984). I was not very impressed by it, and filed it away in my mind in the bin labeled “overrated.” Then, for reasons completely obscure to me, I re-read it sometime in the past ten years. This time I was very moved. Bazarov, the main character, is a self-proclaimed “nihilist.” But, in fact, the novel shows that he is a very intelligent, very energetic, very talented young man from a lower middle class background (in so much as that terminology makes any sense in the Russian context). Through education, Bazarov has acquired what is a perhaps exalted sense of his talents, but his self-conceit (the novel’s term) is justified by the strong impact he has on others. He is a force. But he is a baffled force because Russia offers no outlet for his talents. Turgenev portrays a paralysed society, one that is in the process of dismantling its feudal past. The novel is set in 1859, even though it was written in the wake of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs. It clearly presents Russia as incapable of making the transition to modernity, to a rent/wage system of labor, even as Turgenev holds no truck with serfdom. What moved me was the portrait of a well-meaning (even if boorish) young man frustrated (in the deepest sense of that term) by his dysfunctional society.

So I decided to teach the novel. My recent re-reading is for my class–and I will be interested to see how they respond to it because, perhaps in the effort to see it through their eyes, I have found the novel less satisfying this time around.

Paralysis certainly seems to describe the US today. Yes, it is true we live in turbulent times. But all the sound and fury really seems to signify nothing since our dysfunctional neoliberal order only becomes more entrenched, more immune to any reform or revision. Our public discourse barely attends to our society’s ills: homelessness, racism, declining wages, ecological disaster (the list could go on). And the openings for the talented young are being eroded away. No jobs for our PhDs, for our lawyers, for our idealistic young. Politics is no place for someone with a conscience, and neither is business. Where does one get a purchase on this disaster we are inhabiting? This semester, in both my classes, my students exhibit a world-weary cynicism that alarms me. They expect nothing from our politics and our society; they view it as rotten to the core, and take attaining their own separate peace, their own precarious niche within it, as the only path forward available to them.

Reading the novel this time, I found it meandering. True, I now find E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End too formulaic in its presentation of the alternative paths open to England in 1910. Turgenev, like Forster, is writing a “condition of the nation” novel that ponders its future in relation to question of who shall inherit it. (Hence the generational focus of the title.) Unlike Forster, Turgenev offers a much more muddled portrait of the issues. His characters are harder to allegorize as representatives of concrete alternatives, and his interest in thwarted love affairs undercuts the analysis of larger social questions. In short, Turgenev can seem as baffled as his characters, lacking himself a clear vision of the social scene he is trying to portray. Since, like Chekhov, he mostly presents characters who are unable to act, and unlike Joyce in Dubliners, he suppresses any contempt for his paralysed protagonists, the result is a wide-ranging sympathy that seems ineffectual both as a narrative stance and as a political one. His novel, I think, is not angry enough, is not shot through with indignation. Even Bazarov tends to me more angry with himself, with his failures to be as tough in reality as he is in imagination, than he is with his society.

Joyce seems cruel because he blames the victims in Dubliners, never really zooming out to consider the social conditions that feed their paralysis, their despair, their pathetic stratagems for getting through the day. What Turgenev gives us instead is a kind of melancholic despair; he can see the social mess clearly, but sees no way to amend it, and is not inclined to blame anyone for it. Most everyone in the novel is well-meaning even if ineffectual. His satire is reserved for social climbers. And he quite frankly–in a remarkable passage–admits that the peasants are completely incomprehensible. They exist in a separate universe, their motives and psychology an utter mystery to their betters–and to the novelist himself. That gulf is unbridgeable in either direction–and seemingly insures that no progress, no planned change, can ever be achieved.

The parallels to our own time are real enough. There is certainly a gulf between Trump voters and the social worlds that I inhabit. The economic powers that be have managed to date to reap the whirlwind of racism, xenophobia, and class resentment, have managed to keep the essential structures that underwrite their power in place. I dislike apocalyptic scenarios, the ones that rely on a day of reckoning to give the “establishment” (as we used to call it) its comeuppance. Climate disaster is only the latest in a long list of such apocalypses that radicals look toward. Yet it is impossible to read Turgenev and Chekhov, to inhabit their tales of social paralysis, without thinking of how that paralysis led to 1917.