Category: Social Cooperation

Unintelligible

The world no longer makes sense to me.  Boltanski and Chiapello (in their superb book, The New Spirit of Capitalism [Verso, 2005]) talk about the need for intelligibility and, crucially, insist that intelligibility, which underwrites motivation, must include some standard of justice.  Only such a standard makes judgment possible, thus creating ways to select between possible courses of action and different assessments of people.  Justice is not the only standard.  Efficiency and profit (cost/benefits analysis) are also standards employed in making decisions.  But pure cynicism is very, very rare.  Some notion of justice always acts as a “constraint” upon efficiency and profit.  Pure greed is not a motive many are willing to embrace—and fewer are willing to publicly announce as their sole purpose.  Crucially, Boltanski and Chiapello insist that the standards of justice provide real and effective brakes on capitalism’s search for profit.  It is not true that anything goes.  Some kind of working compromise—one that is intelligible and deemed legitimate—between justice and capitalist exigencies has to be in place.

Just what compromise exists at any given moment varies.  That is the burden of their book.  The think that we have, since 1990 (or so), entered a new “spirit of capitalism,” a new way of understanding (and internalizing) its justificatory bases.  The justification of capitalism is both the  way it publicly explains itself and the source of personal motivation for individual actors.

And here is where I run into my current trouble.  In terms of the academy, the demand of “publish or perish,” and the assignment of status (among other rewards) on those who publish the most, now seems to me insane.  Society is paying for us (the academics) to fill up libraries with books and journals that are mostly not read and which are incredibly redundant.  The only possible justifications that I can see are: 1. You need to seed the field prodigally in order to get the 2-3% of work that represents real advancements of knowledge.  Research is just inherently a very wasteful process, and we should just accept that fact—although it is one that is almost never acknowledged.  And certainly this justification of the whole academic edifice is never offered in public as the primary one.  2. You need to have all that mediocre research in order that educators remain up to date with the advancement of knowledge in their fields.  Since it is important for the educated (i.e. our students) to know what is the current best knowledge, their teachers have to be au currant.

I really don’t see any other convincing account of the whole research apparatus of the universities.  In my field especially, picking over the carcass of Moby Dick seems particularly pointless—even while having students read Moby Dick still seems to me a very good idea.  Which means we have our priorities exactly backwards, emphasizing the “research” over the teaching.

At the societal level, it seems to me that we have entered an age of cynicism that calls Boltanski and Chiapello’s view of justice as a real constraint overly optimistic.  What has been so discouraging about the past year (from the election through to the efforts to repeal Obama-care and alter the tax code to favor the rich and corporations) is that appeals to justice are simply off the table.  “Winning” is enough justification.  We need to make America “more competitive” and we need to insure that we are economically better off and militarily stronger than every other nation.  This looks like fascism because the average citizen is expected to identify with the nation’s “win” even when no benefits of that winning accrue to him.  It’s sacrifice for the average Joe in order to secure the national victory.

Sure, there is some claptrap about freedom and some gestures toward meritocracy.  But they are so obviously claptrap (how is getting cancer a matter of merit, of failed individual effort?; for that matter, what did the laid-off worker do to deserve her fate?) that no one, in this age of cynicism, is taken in.  Rather, it is sauve qui peut and the devil take the hindmost.  And that’s why the world no longer makes sense to me.  Such naked disregard for others, such straight-forward hostility to any notions of justice or of the common good are, quite simply, incredible.  Especially since people, in their face-to-face interactions, don’t act this way.  Yet they vote for politicians whose cynicism and venery, whose lack of commitment to the people they are supposed to serve, are on vivid display every day.

All the polls show that people want government guaranteed health care, want the rich taxed more heavily, want the “dreamers” granted legal status, want sensible gun control.  But then they vote for representatives who refuse to deliver any of those things.  That makes no sense to me.  I don’t understand this world anymore.

American Decline

I have never had much patience for the kind of universal history that trades in ideas like “decline and fall.”  I look at Italy or Spain in 2018 and don’t really buy that life for the ordinary Italian in 1470 or ordinary Spaniard in 1570 was better than life for a comparable person today.  Power and empire have their obvious pathologies—and their perhaps a little less obvious costs.

Is the US today worse off than it was in 1955?  Not for blacks and gays, it would seem obvious to say.  Or even for leftists, one might add, given the rather terrifying impact of Joe McCarthy’s ravings.  For the grand American middle class, things generally are worse.  We can tell ourselves a story about how, coming out of the collective effort and collective sacrifice of the War, we entered the most egalitarian moment in US history, the moment when a grateful nation rewarded all its citizens for what they had done for the war effort.  It is certainly true that Harry Truman’s embrace of civil rights (as far as it went) was driven partly by electoral calculations, but also partly by his outrage that black veterans could be treated so shabbily at home.  Truman’s ah-ha moment came with the killing (not quite a lynching, but damn close) of a black Army veteran in Georgia in 1947.

American confidence—and rude health—in the post-War years can also be seen in its investments.  The interstate highway system, the airports, the public universities and health care facilities were all products of a positive outlook on society and its future.  American decline can be measured, it seems to me, in the growing refusal to invest in the future—either in infrastructure or in our children’s health or education—since the 1970s recession.  The contrast to China (as illustrated in the most recent issue of The New Yorker) could not be more stark.  While they are building universities, roads, high speed trains, we are letting our infrastructure decay all around us.  Our subways and highways are falling apart—and our universities are being left to rot.

Of course, this is a story about privatization, about the evils of neoliberalism, about the loss of any sense that the public coffers should finance such things as education, health, or transportation.  But we can also tell a story in which it stems from the on-going (and seamlessly endless) backlash from the 1960s, the interminable culture wars.  The right has insisted on an “us” vs. “them” narrative since 1968 (at least), where “them” are the uppity blacks of the civil rights movement and the hippies of the anti-war movement, later joined by feminists and gay activists.  The right will be damned before spending public money (“our taxes”) on these god-forsaken folks.  Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face it all too often is, but to hell with the consequences.

It’s the loss of any sense of fellow-feeling with whole cross-sections of one’s fellow Americans that makes abandonment of infrastructure investment so easy to countenance.  We know it is not for lack of funds.  So we all get to live in a crumbling physical environment in which higher education and decent health care become increasingly unaffordable.  Each day present day America resembles

Corporate Enterprises

A short addendum to my last post.  It is striking that war and revolution unite people in destruction, in tearing things down, in fierce opposition to some foe.  Is the bliss of cooperation possible in more constructive, creative endeavors?  Sports and business don’t fully count here since are so wrapped up in competition, in having an opponent that must be beat.  How about art?  The making of a film or a play, or of a Gothic cathedral, requires many hands working in concert.  Certainly, that’s where Ruskin located his utopia, in the corporate effort to create Notre-Dame.

In his famous and influential “Nature of the Gothic,”  Ruskin imagines a perfect Hegelian society, where unified purpose also enables individual distinction.  It is precisely not about everyone moving in lock-step, but about each contributing according to his talents—with that contribution being recognized, appreciated, and honored.  A sense of individual satisfaction in work well done and, crucially, work self-directed is joined to an over-arching project.  I get to work on my small piece in freedom, but am also driven by the knowledge of how it contributes to the whole.

The vast body of scholarship is constructed along similar lines.  Yet for those of us immersed in it, it hardly seems ideal.  How did the stone-mason in 13th century Paris feel about his work from day to day?  Surely Ruskin idealizes.

Still, one’s scholarship depends on and is in conversation with the work of others.  And one’s own work is certainly pointless if not contributing to something that we represent, vaguely enough it is true, as “knowledge.”  Without that, where would we be—just seekers of prestige in our designated circle of Bourdieuian hell.

All of which is to say the Hegelian/Ruskinian dream is a beautiful, even a worthy, one.  We do well to keep trying to make it real.  And while alive to all the imperfections that inflict its semblances in our daily lives, we should also suspect the cynicism that would undermine those efforts entirely.  Hence my desire to avoid simply scorning the Hardt/Negri book or the efforts of our “prefiguative” democrats.