Category: Meaning and Life and the Humanities

More Comments on What We Should Teach at University

My colleague Todd Taylor weighs in—and thinks he also might be the source for my “formula.” Here, from Todd’s textbook is his version of the three-pronged statement about what we should, as teachers, be aiming to enable our students to do.

To gather the most relevant and persuasive evidence.
To identify a pattern among that evidence.
To articulate a perspective supported by your analysis of the evidence.

And here are Todd’s further thoughts:

“I might have been a source for the ‘neat formula’ you mention, since I’ve been preaching that three-step process as “The Essential Skill for the Information Age” for over a decade now. I might have added the formula to the Tar Heel Writing Guide. I am attaching a scan of my textbook Becoming a College Writer where I distill the formula to its simplest form. I have longer talks on the formula, with notable points being that step #1 sometimes includes generating information beyond just locating someone else’s data. And step #3, articulating a perspective for others to follow (or call to action or application), is the fulcrum where “content-consumption, passive pedagogy” breaks down and “knowledge-production, active learning” takes off.

The high-point of my experience preaching this formula was when a senior ENGL 142 student shared with me the news of a job interview that ended successfully at the moment when she recited the three steps in response to the question ‘What is your problem solving process?’

In my textbook, I also have a potentially provocative definition of a “discipline” as “a method (for gathering evidence) applied to a subject,” which is my soft attempt to introduce epistemology to GenEd students. What gets interesting for us rhet/discourse types is to consider how a “discipline” goes beyond steps #1 and #2 and includes step #3 so that a complete definition of “discipline” also includes the ways of articulating/communicating that which emerges from the application of a method to a subject. I will forever hold onto to my beloved linguistic determinism. Of course, this idea is nothing new to critical theorists, especially from Foucault. What might be new(ish) is to try to explain/integrate such ideas within the institution(s) of GenEd requirements and higher ed. I expect if I studied Dewey again, I could trace the ideas there, just as I expect other folks have other versions of the ‘neat formula.'”

Todd also raised another issue with me that is (at least to me) of great interest. The humanities are wedded, we agreed, to “interpretation.” And it makes sense to think of interpretation as a “method” or “approach” that is distinct from the qualitative/quantitative divide in the social sciences. Back to Dilthey. Explanation versus meaning. Analysis versus the hermeneutic. But perhaps even more than that, since quantitative/qualitative can be descriptors applied to the data itself, whereas interpretation is about how you understand the data. So no science, even with all its numbers, without some sort of interpretation. In other words, quantitative/qualitative doesn’t cover the whole field. There is much more to be said about how we process information than simply saying sometimes we do it via numbers and sometimes via other means.

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.

Religion, Sect, Party (Part Two)

Having given you Taylor’s definition of religion last time, I now want to move over to Slezkine’s discussion of religion (which then bleeds over into politics) in The House of Government.

He offers a few attempts at defining religion, the first from Steve Bruce: religion “consists of beliefs, actions, and institutions which assume the existence of supernatural entities with powers of action, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose. Such a formulation seems to encompass what ordinary people mean when they talk of religion” (73; all the words in quotes are Bruce’s, not Slezkine’s). If we go to Durkheim, Slezkine says we get “another approach. ‘Religion, according to his [Durkheim’s] definition, is ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.’ Sacred things are things that ‘the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity.’ The function of the sacred is to unite humans into moral communities” (74).

Durkheim’s position is functionalist; religion serves human need, especially the needs of human sociality. Slezkine continues: “Subsequent elaborations of functionalism describe religion as a process by which humans create a sense of the self and an ‘objective and moral universe of meaning’ [Thomas Luckmann]; a ‘set of symbolic forms and acts that relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence’ [Robert Bellah]; and, in Clifford Geertz’s much cited version, ‘ a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these with such an aura of facticity that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (74).

In Bruce’s terms, I don’t think I can be considered religious, since I think morality is uniquely human; I don’t think there are impersonal or divine processes/beings that have a moral purpose and are capable of acting to further that moral purpose.

But the Durkheim/functionalist positions seem closer to home. What I have been worrying for months on this blog concerns the “sacredness” of “life.” Does taking life as sacred, as the ultimate value, as the thing that profane hands (the state, other agents of violence, the lords of capitalism) should not destroy or even render less full, fall within the realm of religion? It does seem to aim at some of the same ends—certainly at establishing a “moral community” united by its reverence for life; certainly in establishing a “moral universe of meaning” underwritten by the ultimate value of life; and certainly in paying attention to “the ultimate conditions of existence,” i.e. the drama of life and death, of being given a precious thing—life—that can only be possessed for a limited time.

I am never sure what all this (that is, the “formal” consonance of religion with humanism) amounts to. If it is something as general as saying that the question of meaning inevitable arises for humans, and that the ways they answer that question has inevitable consequences for human sociality/communities, then the resemblance doesn’t seem to me to have much bite. It is so general, so abstract, a similarity that it doesn’t tell us anything of much import. It is like saying that all animals eat. Yes, but the devil is in the details. Some are vegetarians, some kill other animals for food, some are omnivores.

All human communities must be organized, in part, around securing enough food to live. But hunter/gatherers are pretty radically different from agrarians—and all the important stuff seems to lie in the differences, not in the general similarity of needing to secure food. I suspect it is the same for religion/atheism. Yes, they must both address questions of meaning and of creating/sustaining livable communities, but the differences in how they go about those tasks are the significant thing.

More interesting to me is how both Taylor and Slekzine use Karl Jasper’s notion of the “Axial Revolution.” Taylor leans heavily on Max Weber’s notion of a “disenchanted” world; Slekzine is interested in how the Axial revolution displaces the transcendent from the here and now into some entirely separate realm. Or, I guess, we could say that the Axial revolution creates the transcendent realm. In animist versions of the world, the sacred is in the here and now, the spirits that reside in the tree or the stream or the wind. The sacred doesn’t have its own special place. But now it is removed from the ordinary world—which is fallen, in need of salvation, and material/mechanical. Spirit and matter are alienated from one another. The real and the ideal do not coincide.

For Slekzine, then, every politics (like every post-Axial religion) has to provide a path for moving from here (the fallen real of the world we inhabit day by day) to there (the ideal world of moral and spiritual perfection). He is particularly interested in millennial versions of that pathway since he thinks revolutionaries are quintessential millennialists. And he clearly believes that all millennialists promise much more than they can deliver—and then must deal with the disappointment that inevitably follows from the failure of their predictions to come true.

That’s where I retain a liberal optimism—which is also a moral condemnation of the pessimist. My position, quite simply, is that some social orders (namely, social democracy as it has been established and lived in various countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Canada etc.) are demonstrably better than some other social orders if our standard is affording the means for a flourishing life to the largest number of the society’s members. Measurements such as poverty and education levels, life expectancy etc. can help us make the case for the superiority of these societies to some others.

The point is that the gap between the real and the ideal is actual—even in the best social democracies. But the point is also that this gap is bridgeable; we have concrete ways to make our societies better, and to move them closer to the ideal of a flourishing life for all. Pessimists take the easy way out, pronouncing (usually from a fairly comfortable position), that all effort is useless, that our fallen condition is incorrigible. A humanist politics, then, aims to re-locate the ideal in this world (as opposed to exiling it to a transcendent other-worldly place), while also affirming that movement toward the ideal is possible—and should be the focus of our political efforts.

In these terms, the ideal is, I guess, transcendent in the sense that it is not present in the here and now. The ordinary does not suffice even within a politics that wants to affirm the ordinary, the basic pleasures and needs of sustaining life. But there is also the insistence that the ordinary supplies everything we need to improve it—and that such improvements have been achieved in various places at various times, even if we can agree that no society has achieved perfection. There is no need to appeal to outside forces, to something that transcends the human, in order to move toward the ideal.

How a society handles, responds to, the gap between now (the real) and the ideal seems to me an important way to think about its politics. Looking at 2018 America, it seems (for starters) that we have a deep division over what the ideal should be. The liberal ideal is universal flourishing. It seems very difficult not to caricature the ideal of liberalism’s opponents. I think it is fair (but they probably would not) to say their view is premised on the notion of scarcity. There is not enough of the good, life-sustaining, stuff to go around—which generates endless competition for the scarce goods. In that competition, there is nothing wrong (in fact, it makes emotional and moral sense), to fight to secure the goods for one’s own group (family, ethnicity, nation). A good (ideal) world would be one in which the scarce goods would go to those who truly deserve them (because hard workers, or good people, or “one of us.”) But the real world is unfair, all kinds of cheaters and other morally unworthy types, get the goods, so politics should be geared to pushing such moochers away from the trough. That seems to me to be the rightist mindset in this country these days.

But both sides seem to be humanists of my sort, since both seem to think politics can move us to the ideal in this world. There is not some hope in a transcendent realm—or an orientation toward that realm.

Religion, Sect, Party

Even before quite finishing one behemoth (two chapters to go in Taylor’s A Secular Age), I have started another one, Yuri Slezine’s The House of Government (Princeton UP, 2017). Surprisingly, they overlap to a fair extent. Slezine pushes hard on his thesis that Bolshevism is a millennial sect and that its understandings of history and society follow time-worn Biblical plots, especially those found in Exodus and the Book of Revelations. I find his thesis a bit mechanical and over reductive, an implausible one size fits all. The strength of his book lies in its details, the multiple stories he can tell about the core figures of the Russian Revolution, not in the explanatory framework that he squeezes all those details into.

But Slezine does offer some general speculations on the nature of religion, sects, and parties that I want to pursue at the moment. Taylor defines “religious faith in a strong sense . . . by a double criterion: the belief in transcendent reality, on one hand, and the connected aspiration to a transformation that goes beyond ordinary human flourishing on the other” (510). A fairly substantial component of Taylor’s argument is that most, if not all, people will feel a pull toward those two things; that settling for mundane reality and ordinary flourishing will leave people with a sense of “lack,” a haunting feeling that there must be more. He considers, very briefly, the idea that secularism entails people simply becoming indifferent to transcendence and some kind of transformation beyond the ordinary—and rejects the possibility that such indifference has—or even could—become common.

He pays more attention to the fact that the existence of a “transcendent reality” has simply become incredible to many people. But—and this is a major point for him—he insists that the evidence cannot (of science or of anything else) be decisive on this question, or that evidence is even the prime reason for unbelief in the transcendent. Rather, unbelief is underwritten by an ethos—one of bravely facing up to the facts, of putting aside the childish things of religious faith (the Freudian critique of the “illusion” that is religion).

I am not convinced. Am I full of contempt for the evangelicals who claim to be Christians, but are such noteworthy examples of non-Christian animus, gleefully dishing out harm to all they deem reprobate even as they accommodate themselves to the thuggery and sexual malpractices of Donald Trump? Of course. But Taylor has no truck for the fundamentalists either. His is the most anodyne of liberal Christianities; he has trouble with the whole idea of hell; basically (without his ever quite coming out and saying so) Taylor’s God does not consign people to eternal damnation. Instead, hell for Taylor gets associated with sin—both of them understood as the painful alienation from God that results from turning one’s back on the transcendent. Taylor, in other words, tiptoes away from judgment and punishment—believers aren’t supposed to be judging other humans or inflicting punishment upon them, and he is clearly uneasy with the image of a judging God. In fact, moralism (rigid rules of conduct) is one of his main enemies in the book. In its place, he urges us to Aristotelian phronesis, which insists that judgments always be particular, attending to the novelties of the situation at hand.

But back to me. Aside from my contempt for the evangelicals and their hypocrisies and petty (and not so petty) cruelties to others, do I harbor a Freudian contempt for the believer? Does my unbelief, the fact that I find the notion that god exists simply incredible (meaning there is no way that how I understand existence has room for a divine being) rest on a self-congratulatory idea of my “maturity” as contrasted to those childish believers? It doesn’t feel that way. I find most Christians harmless, and have no beef with practicing Muslims and Jews. It’s only the fanatics of all religions, but equally the fanatics of godless capitalism, that I abhor. And I share that sentiment with Taylor. So I just don’t see that it’s some basic moralistic distinction I make between believers and unbelievers that drives my adoption of unbelief. It seems much more obvious that my understanding of the world has no place for a god, makes the very idea of a god, if not quite unthinkable (because so many other humans keep insisting there is one), at least unimaginable. I might as well try to imagine, believe in, a world that contains unicorns. My “picture” of the world just can’t accommodate a god.

Taylor several times evokes Wittgenstein’s idea of our being held “captive” by a picture. But Taylor also eschews the notion that some kind of argument (like the classic ones about god’s existence) or some kind of evidence could change the picture of unbelief to one of belief. He is very much in William James territory. Basically, his position is that the facts “underdetermine” the choice between belief and unbelief, that materialist science is not conclusive, and so the materialist, as much as the theist, rests his case, in the final analysis, on a leap of faith. This is the Jamesian “open space” in which we all exist. And then Taylor seems (without being explicit enough about this) to say that the deciding factor is going to be “experience” (shades of James’s Varieties of Religious Experience), where what follows (in the ways of feelings, motivations, transformations) from making the leap of faith toward a god stands as the confirmation that belief is the right way to go. It’s the fruits of the relationship to a transcendent that Taylor wants to harvest, that make religious belief valuable in his eyes.

Here’s is where I wish Taylor had paid closer attention to James, particularly the essay “The Will to Believe.” In that essay, James says that choices have three features: they can be “live or dead” choices, “momentous or trivial” ones, or “forced or avoidable” ones. On this last one, James identifies the “avoidable” path as the result of indifference. If I say you must choose between the red or the white wine, you can answer “it’s all the same to me” or I don’t want any wine at all. You can, in short, avoid making the decision I am asking you to make. In the case of “live versus dead,” I can ask you whether you believe in Zeus or Zarathustra, and your reply can be “neither of those options is a true possibility for me; nothing in my way of life or my existing set of beliefs allows the question of believing in Zeus to be a real question for me.” Finally, “momentous/trivial” relates to what I think hangs on the choice; whether or not to have a child is momentous, with huge implications for my life and the life of others; what I choose to eat for dinner tonight is much less momentous, although not without some consequences (for my health, for the environment etc.)

I bring this up because the choice of believing in god is not, at this point in my life, a “live” choice for me. I have no more substantial grounds or inclination to believe in the Christian god than I do to believe in Zeus. Furthermore—I am on shakier ground here but think this is true—I don’t find the choice of unbelief momentous. It is just what I believe: there is no god. James in that same essay also covers this ground: most of our beliefs are not chosen. Even though I only have second-hand evidence of the fact (what is reported in books and the historical record), I am not free to believe that Abraham Lincoln never existed or that he was not a President of the US. I can’t will myself into not believing in his existence. Well, I feel the same way about god. I can’t will myself into believing that god exists. That there is no god is as settled a belief for me as my belief in Abraham Lincoln’s existence. And I don’t see that very much hangs on those two beliefs.

How can that be, asks the incredulous believer? But (and, again, I am following James here) I think the believer often has cause and effect backwards. Pope Francs has just declared capital punishment unacceptable to believing Catholics; Antonia Scalia, a devout Catholic, was an advocate of capital punishment. So it is hard to see how the belief in god is the source of the conviction about capital punishment. Something else must motivate the position taken. Or, at the very least, the fact of believing in god is pretty radically undeterminative; god’s inscrutability is such that humans have to fill in many (most?) of the details.

It’s the same as Taylor’s revisionist views on hell. Humans keep tweaking their notion of what god wants in order to fit human ideas of what an acceptable god would look like. Even if you want to dismiss that kind of debunking statement about humans creating the god they can admire/respect, many believers (obviously not fundamentalists) are still going to accept that god’s ways are mysterious and not easily known. In relation to that mysteriousness, that under-specificity of actual directives, I want to say choosing to believe in god or not doesn’t turn out to be very momentous—at least not in terms of giving us clear moral/ethical guidelines. Believers have disagreed vehemently about what the implications of their religious beliefs are for actual behavior. Skipping the whole choice, being indifferent to the question of god’s existence (and I think that kind of indifference, not paying much mind to the question of god, is much more common than Taylor thinks it is), doesn’t allow us to escape disagreements about good behavior, but doesn’t handicap us in any significant way from participation in such debates.

I don’t, in fact, think Taylor would disagree about this. He isn’t at all interested in a moralistic religion—and he is also not committed to the notion that atheists can’t be moral, that their moral convictions and commitments rest on air. Instead, Taylor argues that the choice is momentous because of the experience–of “deeper” (a word he uses again and again without ever really telling us what is entailed in “deepness”) meanings and a “transformed” relationship to life, the world, others–opens up, makes possible. Again, the specifics of the transformation are awfully vague. But the basic idea is clear enough; to those who open themselves up to a relationship to the transcendent, the very terms of life are different—and fuller, more satisfying, and more likely to answer to a spiritual hunger that lurks within us. So I guess Taylor’s advice to me would be: give it a try, see what changes come if you believe in god and try to establish a relationship to him. I am free, of course, to say “I pass.” What Taylor finds harder to credit is that my response to his offer could be indifference, a shrug of the shoulders. He thinks my rejection of his offer must be driven by some animus against the believer and some admiring self-image of myself as a courageous facer of the unpleasant facts of existence.

The funny thing about this is how individualistic it is, how much it hangs on the personal experience that belief generates. It is one of the key differences between James and John Dewey that James’s vision is pretty relentlessly individualistic, while Dewey is the kind of communitarian critic of liberalism that Taylor has, throughout his long distinguished career, been. In A Secular Age, however, Taylor is not interested in the community of believers. Yes, he sees the cultural setting (the “background assumptions” that are a constant in his understanding of how human language and psychology operate) as establishing the very conditions that make unbelief even possible in a “secular age,” but he doesn’t read the consequences of belief/unbelief in a very communal way. That’s because he has to admit that both believers and unbelievers have committed the same kinds of horrors. He is very careful not to make the crude Christian argument that unbelievers like Stalin will inevitably kill indiscriminately, as if there wasn’t any blood on Christian hands or as if there have been no secular saints. So he does not seem to say there is any social pay-off to widespread belief—at least not one we can count on with any kind of assurance. But he does insist on the personal pay-off.

Here’s where Slezine’s book comes in. The kind of millennial religion he ascribes to the Bolsheviks is all about communal pay-off; they are looking toward a “transformation” of the world, not of personal selves and experience. In fact, they are oriented toward a total sacrifice of the personal in the name of that larger transformation. So it is to the terms of that kind of belief—in the dawning of a new age—that I will turn in my next post.