Category: Virtues and Vices

Shame

From Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011):

‘[Sister Helen] Prejean’s logic rests on the hope that shame, guilt, and even simple embarrassment are still operative principles in American cultural and political life—and that such principles can fairly trump the forces of desensitization and self-justification. Such a presumption is sorely challenged by the seeming unembarrassability of the military, the government, corporate CEOs, and others repetitively caught in monstrous acts of irresponsibility and malfeasance. This unembarassability has proved difficult to contend with, as it has had a literally stunning effect on the citizenry. They ought to be ashamed of themselves! we cry over and over again, to no avail. But they are not ashamed, and they are not going to become so” (32).

I don’t have much to say to this statement—beyond noting how completely it echoes my own experience and sentiments. The administration at my university is just about completely non-accountable at this point. Which made me think that “public shaming” (as I tried to do in the newspaper editorials I wrote about their actions) was the only recourse left. But they have proved immune to shaming, might even take it as proof that they are doing their “tough jobs” of protecting the university’s interests.

It does not make me feel a sap. I realize more and more that a certain self-image of integrity is central to my own serenity. Of course, complacency about one’s self is an ever-present danger. Pharaseeism afflicts us all. But I do abide by the rule of “never say no to a student.” Whatever they ask for, they shall receive—just as the same all-inclusive indulgence is extended to my children. I have no right, given my job and my salary, to turn students down. And abiding by that rule is one way I maintain my self-respect.

So the question about the shameless is: where does their self-respect reside? Where is the line they would not cross, the action they would not permit themselves? I have always liked what I call “Kant’s rule of publicity”: basically Kant argues in one of his political essays that any action is morally dubious if the agent of that action would prefer it being kept a secret. We reveal our awareness of an action’s non-morality when we strive to keep it unknown. (Yes, there is the tradition of keeping benevolent actions a secret—a tradition mostly honored in the breach these days by our publicity-seeking philanthropists—but the existence of this sub-set of good actions needn’t detract from Kant’s larger point.) The attempt to keep things secret is an acknowledgement of shame and guilt. But it does seem Nelson is right: when malfeasance is “outed” these days, the impulse is to brave it out, to never show the weakness of admitting guilt or manifesting shame.

And there is the even more gob-smacking pride in offensive behavior, as politicians compete to see who can most vociferously endorse torture and taking food stamps away from the hungry, and CEOs boast about how far they can drive down wages and take away benefits for their workers. Oh, brave new world!

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.

Despair

“This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.”

This is the opening paragraph of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Elementary Particles (1998). Let me pair it with a passage from John Berger’s Portraits, from a short piece he wrote about the Fayum portraits in 2000.

“The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive.”

I just don’t see it. Do I live in a bubble? I read about the ravages Facebook is causing for adolescents, or the booming market in plastic surgery, or the frantic search for status and wealth among various social sub-groups. And I don’t see it in the world I inhabit. Kiernan and Siobhan’s friends and contemporaries certainly suffer the ills—and anxieties—of economic precariousness and over indebtedness. But they aren’t unstable consumers, with lives dictated by social (or any other) media.

Yes, the future has been downsized and a sense of impotence about society’s general dysfunction and sheer nastiness reigns. But the people I know feel very much alive; the scariness of a world out of control is more than enough to keep the nerve ends jangling.

And in their personal lives—their relations to family and friends and colleagues—they are not indifferent and cruel. Even out in the public spaces of the city, the vibe is infinitely better than it was in the 1970s. Conviviality is palpable—and can pretty much be counted on in most interactions with strangers. It is the disjunct between this face-to-face decency and the nastiness of our politics and the on-line shit that is most striking to me. For the most part, it seems to me people are remarkably resistant to the poison seeping through the system.

But maybe it’s the bubble I occupy, the world of the professional upper middle class. A word with very few divorces, very little domestic abuse, very little drug and alcohol abuse. Maybe under the polite veneer, chaos, anger, and horrors lurk. It would speak of an unbelievable cover-up if such were the case. I am hardly denying that the opioid epidemic or domestic violence or homophobia or racism exist.

I think what I am trying to say comes down to four claims, all of which I only advance tentatively because I am not by any means convinced I understand what is going on. Here are the claims

Our economics and our politics have become more nasty, but there are strong counter-vailing forces. Those forces widen the gap between public life (the structure of the imagined, non-face-to-face worlds of commerce and politics and the media) and the concrete face-to-face interactions of everyday life (including in the workplace to a large extent). That the strain of this gap has not, thus far, led to serious disruptions is surprising to me. By which, I guess I mean, that the disruptions have only been manifested on the personal level—in domestic violence or drug/alcohol abuse—not in much serious push-back against the inhumanity of corporations treating employees as replaceable parts and subjecting them to increasingly demeaning surveillance.
The impact of the increased nastiness has been felt very unequally. No surprise there since the increased nastiness has been accompanied by huge upsurges in economic inequality. Where people are doing quite well—as they are in Chapel Hill—the social ills of our time are not very manifest. But those class differences do not explain the convivial vibe in America’s cities or the declining crime rates. The “losers” in the next economic regime are, for the most part, still “nice” to others. It is sort of like Charlie Kruzman’s work on the “missing’ Muslim terrorists; given the hordes of losers, it is striking how few of them adopt the kind of indifference or cruelty toward others that Houellebecq claims is general.
So, one the one hand, I incline to an almost economic determinist viewpoint when it comes to domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse, thus explaining why certain classes are more afflicted with these ills than others. (Of course, I am only talking general trends here. The economically fortunate can still be alcoholics, and domestic abusers.) But when it comes to homophobia and racism, I am inclined to say that values other than the economic remain incredibly strong—and perhaps even stronger than—economically driven beliefs and behaviors. This works both ways. Residual decency, the considerate ways we interact with others, prove resistant to the prevailing economic modes of relationship. The economic—for better and for worse—does not carry all before it.
Similarly, let’s no overestimate the effectiveness of media. People have developed all kinds of ways to shut media messages off. The overload of which Berger speaks is itself a disabling factor. Everyone has to create a filter against such bombardment. Confirmation bias suggests that we only hear the messages we are predisposed to hear—which is one way of saying that most messages don’t get through and that the power of messages to change our basic beliefs is severely limited. Conversion is an astoundingly rare experience.

In sum, I just don’t see that generalizations about the despair of our times—and how they have changed basic behaviors tout court—are credible. There is more variety out there than such pronouncements credit. And, frankly, just much more good behavior than they are willing to admit.

Passions, Political and Otherwise

I ended my last post with the observation that the left should be more passionate than the right because the left includes all those being trashed by the current arrangements.

That, of course, is hardly true. The populist right includes many of the “losers” in contemporary society—and various analyses of their “anger” have been produced over the past three, five, ten years.

It is, however, the passion of the winners that perplexes me. Where does their anger, vindictiveness, and general nastiness come from? To cite just current news, what motivates someone who is doing quite well to vote for tax relief for the wealthy but refuse to extend health insurance to poor children? What story could you possibly tell yourself that would make such an action virtuous? Partisan passion, the need to get a “win,” overrides all other values (it would seem) in voting for a tax bill that is manifestly, in fact quite absurdly, a bad deal for the country and most of its citizens. And laziness, the disinclination to do anything that requires a modicum of effort, might explain the inaction on renewing the children health insurance program.

Certainly, the indignant outrage the privileged feel when their privileges are threatened—or when others clamor for access to the same privileges—should not be underestimated. But the tax bill, after all, is not a response to a threat. It is just piling more privilege on top of already extreme privilege. It looks much more like greed than self-protection from the rabble.

Greed, yes, but greed disconnected from any sense of reality. There is, quite simply, nothing that could be done with that extra money. You couldn’t spend it all if you had four lifetimes. Even an idiot as big as Donald Trump, with his basketful of bad business deals, couldn’t spend himself into bankruptcy given the massive amount of money with which he started.

So then the greed seems connected to a different pathology: the comparative sickness that boils down to some male game about having a bigger one than the other guys. Crude. But there it is, and Donald Trump is nothing if not crude. The depressing thought is that there are millions more like him, driven by the same need to dominate through accumulation.

But let’s outsource this discussion to a true misanthrope: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Here is his description of the pathologies of civilized man (the use of “man” is well-advised here). The source is the long footnote IX in his Discourse on Inequality:

“For man in society, there are very different concerns [then for the savage as Rousseau portrays that mythical figure]; there is, in the first place, the matter of providing for the necessities and then for the superfluities; next come the luxuries, then immense riches, then subjects and slaves; he does not have a moment of respite. What is most remarkable is that the less natural and urgent his needs, the more his passions grow, and, what is worse, his power to satisfy them, so that after lengthy prosperity, after having swallowed up many treasures and having destroyed many men, my hero will end up by slaughtering everything until he is the sole master of the universe. Such is, in brief, the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret aspirations in the heart of every civilized man.”

Later in the same footnote, Rousseau writes:

“Luxury, which is impossible to prevent among men who are greedy for their own conveniences and for the consideration of others, soon completes the harm done by societies, and under the pretext of supporting the poor, who need not have been created, it impoverishes all the rest, and sooner or later depopulates the state.”

The illness, in Rousseau’s view, goes back to the loss of self-sufficiency. Let’s grant that Rousseau’s notion that humans in the state of nature were self-sufficient, had no need of others, is completely absurd. (Rousseau himself admits that the “the state of nature” describes “a state which no longer exists, which has, perhaps, never existed” [p. 5 in the Norton edition of Rousseau’s Political Writings].) However, even if we are materially dependent on others in order to survive, i.e. if we grant that no person in isolation could actually produce the necessities for sustaining life, that doesn’t necessarily entail our deep psychological dependence on others’ opinions of us. It is that vulnerability to what others think that is the real poison that Rousseau sees society as introducing.

It is civilized man’s terror of contempt—and his resentful and vengeful—response to perceived contempt that underwrites his fury toward his fellows.

“Anyone who sang or danced the best, who was the most handsome, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded, and this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences vanity and contempt were born on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens finally produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. As soon as men had begun to appraise each other and the idea of esteem was formulated in their minds, each claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to deny it to anyone with impunity. In that way, the first duties of civility arose, even among savages, and in that way, every intentional wrong became an open insult, because along with the injury which resulted from it, the offended party saw in it a contempt for his person, which was often more unbearable than the injury itself. Thus, as each person punished the contempt shown to him by others in proportion to the degree to which he valued himself, vengeance became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel” (p. 38).

The vindictiveness of the tax bill is direct. The coastal elites and the over-educated (produced by universities) are deliberate targets. The Republicans know that such people hold them in contempt. What we might say that Rousseau misses are two additional factors: one, those who seek esteem often can only enjoy it if they also know that are others are being denied their privileges, their marks of status. This is a game that requires the existence of losers to assure me that I am winner. All the better for my sense of self-righteousness is those losers can be characterized as lazy, corrupt, immoral etc. (which is where racial stereotypes prove so useful.)

Second, those afflicted with status anxiety of this type don’t only need to punish those who withhold their approbation, but must sycophantically seek out the approval of their betters. I don’t think we should underestimate the extent to which Republican members of Congress want to be counted among the “real men,” who can be identified as either the party leaders or the rich donors. Those are the guys with “real power,” the ones who are self-evidently the big winners—and I want to be in with that “in crowd.”

All of this is so crude, so reductionist in a Bourdieu type fashion, that I want to repudiate it even as I articulate it. Of course, such status anxiety afflicts academic life just as pervasively and perniciously as it does politics or the business world. But I 1) think lots of other motives are at play, so hate suggesting the search for status is some kind of master motive and 2) am daily impressed with the extent to which people don’t let their lives be ruled by the search for status and have devised any number of ways to be content with their lot, with where they have landed after their struggle to find a foothold in this cruel society of ours.

Which is a way of saying that ambition comes in all sizes. Lots of people don’t aim very high—and all honor to them. All the more praise since I am inclined at this point to ascribe the lion’s share of our society’s ills to those with outsized ambition, to those who play the status game with deadly intent.

I have heard businessmen say that “money is only a way of keeping score.” It’s not really about the money, it’s about proving something else, although they usually fight shy of describing just what that something else is. What I object to is their insatiable need to run up the score. When is enough enough? Especially if it’s a game where the actual money is secondary.

And, finally for today, there is also the question of how you play the game. If the money reveals your competence, your innovative chops, your managerial skills, OK. It’s something like an objective scorecard, albeit (can’t we admit this?) an imperfect one. But if the money comes because you gamed the system, along with buying a few politicians to write in your favorite tax loophole, what exactly is being measured? Not anything that should win you esteem—unless “sharp practice” is esteem worthy.

Once I start thinking that way, the whole value system, the whole scale on which esteem is measured and won, seems so utterly out of whack, that some fundamental perversity becomes the only explanation. Maybe Rousseau is right to locate the causes of that perversity in the human animal’s social being. But the fact that some people do seem immune to the illness makes me suspicious of any claim that the fault lies in our nature or our society, since such general accounts leave the actual perpetrators off the hook.