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.

Direct Ways to Combat Economic Inequality

Social democrats are spurned by hard-core leftists because the former do not espouse the complete overthrow of the market. Rather, the social democrat accepts that market economies have various things to recommend them, including efficient production of goods and provision of economic well-being to large numbers. That economic well-being is also a crucial source of countervailing power against the potential tyranny of the state.

The point is decidedly not some claim that the market is perfect. Far from it. Like all sublunary things, it is very imperfect (hence its efficiencies are far from ideal, but are still a real thing given that we do not live in a frictionless world). But non-market processes and institutions are far from perfect as well. The idea is 1) to have checks and balances so that the worst tendencies of any and all human arrangements (from the family to the market to the state) are prevented, and 2) to use what powers we have to move from the negative goal of preventing harm to the positive goal of promoting well-being (or “flourishing” to use the term Martha Nussbaum has appropriated from Aristotle).

Central to this debate on the left is a kind of fatalism adopted by the non-social-democratic left, a fatalism that echoes the fatalism of the market fundamentalists on the right. Right-wing fatalists, famously in Margaret Thatcher’s words, tell us that there is no alternative. We are doomed to the market—and the market just means one thing. Any tampering with that market, any regulation or interference, sets us on the road to serfdom. Everything—from the EPA to state ownership of the steel factories—gets tarred with the same brush. In Hayek’s bracing, macho, vision, there isn’t even much pretense that the market enables good lives. It gives us freedom—and Hayekian freedom is about as conducive to happiness as Sartrean freedom. It’s a grim world and you should just take your medicine like a man.

On the left, this becomes the doctrine that any form of capitalism is disastrous—with no distinction of any merit to be made between 1850 Manchester and 1950 Pittsburgh. Both are equally evil, equally soul and body destroying, equally to be consigned to the dustbins of history. No remedial action is worth a damn; it all must be torn down.

Under current conditions, this view underwrites the assumption that capitalism inevitably leads to extreme inequalities in income and wealth. Yet, as Dean Baker argues in this superb piece, such a claim flies in the face of historical and contemporary evidence. The extreme inequalities of the Anglo-Saxon world are both only recent (ramping up since 1970) and are not found in non-Anglo-Saxon capitalist economies.

Which means that are various things the state can do in order to follow Robert Kuttner’s injunction (discussed in the last post) to use politics to tame the market. Yes, left to itself, capitalist markets tend toward inequality (that is the major point of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). But markets needn’t be left to themselves. In fact, Baker’s point (and one that Karl Polanyi always insisted on) is that markets are never left to themselves. There is no such thing as “the free market.” The market is always structured, always a political and legal creation. The issue is whether it will be structured such as to benefit the wealthy or to benefit the many.

Baker, then, admirably lists a series of ways to counteract the current movement toward increasing inequality. He advocates for a Financial Transaction Tax; for a revamping of the current patent and copyright laws; for direct intervention in the ways that doctors, lawyers, and dentists are compensated; and a number of other measures. And these are separate from more aggressively progressive tax rates and the kind of wealth tax that Piketty advocates.

Hardt and Negri declare themselves sympathetic to such proposals, but are also pretty clear that they consider them only half-measures, not likely to cure what ails us. My own position is to be suspicious of any search for cures. The struggle between rich and poor for control over resources and wealth is not going to be ended by an entrance into the utopia of the perfect social arrangements. I think the left needs to abandon its dream that some permanent solution to social and economic conflict is on offer. I think the left’s addiction to theory stems from this idea that we can think our way to justice. I don’t think we lack the right ideas, the right formula. We have just been getting beat. The other side has out-organized, out-spent, and out-flanked us. And what is true now has been what is always true. They have the money and the power, we have the numbers. Our organizational challenge is much greater than theirs—but so should be our passion because we are the ones being trashed.

Thinking about that passion issue will be the next post.

Democracy and Capitalism

Lots of backlog of things to write about. But let’s start with Robert Kuttner’s superb article on Karl Polanyi in the most recent New York Review of Books. (Behind a paywall.)

Here’s Kuttner’s first paragraph:

“What a splendid era this was going to be, with one remaining superpower spreading capitalism and liberal democracy around the world. Instead, democracy and capitalism seem increasingly incompatible. Global capitalism has escaped the bounds of the postwar mixed economy that had reconciled dynamism with security through the regulation of finance, the empowerment of labor, a welfare state, and elements of public ownership. Wealth has crowded out citizenship, producing greater concentrations of extreme inequality and instability, organized less for the many than for the few.”

All to true. As various commentators have said, at least Stalin and Hitler claimed to have an ideology that justified their murderous ways. For Trump, it’s just power. Take that you underlings—and like it! It’s just power. Who, after all, is going to stop them?

And here’s Kuttner’s last paragraph:

“Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism. Polanyi wrote that fascism solved the problem of the rampant market by destroying democracy. But unlike the fascists of the inter-war period, today’s far-right leaders are not even bothering to contain market turbulence or to provide decent jobs through public works. Brexit, a spasm of anger by the dispossessed, will do nothing for the British working class; and Donald Trump’s program is a mash-up of nationalist rhetoric and even deeper government alliance with predatory capitalism. Assuming democracy holds, there could be a counter-mobilization more in the spirit of Polanyi’s feasible socialism. The pessimistic Polanyi would say that capitalism has won and democracy has lost. The optimist in him would look to resurgent popular politics.”

The first point is that Hitler was a Keynesian. Economic growth and stability insured by massive government spending. Profits to the manufacturers, sure. But jobs for the masses as well.

The second point is that Kuttner is a social democrat of my stripe. Market and state must be balanced, each one working to tame the potential abuse of power by the other. The time is out of wack because that balance has been destroyed.

This doesn’t mean a blind commitment to current political institutions—or to the state as currently configured. But it does mean seeing politics, as Kuttner puts it, as fundamentally required to tame the market. (My next post will feature some wonderful suggestions from Dean Baker about how to do jus that.)

Against this social democratic vision can stand the work of various leftists who say social democracy is a dead letter, a form that no longer fits the reality of our times. Such is the position of Hardt and Negri. I am working through their most recent book, Assembly, right now and it will be the subject of subsequent posts.

So Little Time

In an early David Lodge novel (I can’t recall its title), the narrator asserts that the difference between characters in novels and people in real life is that the characters have way more sex and less children.

I am hardly going to deny that contemporary novels usually feature more and better sex than most of us get to enjoy. But the more striking wish fulfillment embedded in the novels I read is the abundance of time.

In A Little Life, the main character Jude is an accomplished pianist, an astounding cook (especially of pastries), takes long walks around New York City (at least until he loses his legs), works long days and most weekends at his law firm, maintains a variety of friendships, goes to art openings, the movies and plays, and oversees the renovation of at least two apartments and one house. Not to mention the frequent trips to Europe, especially London and Paris. If only . . .

There was brief period to time in my life when I was lonely and had time on my hands, basically the first few years of graduate school. I did, in some ways, get more done in that time than I can, in memory, credit as possible. The amounts I read and wrote are staggering to recall at this late date. But even at that time I always felt pressed for time, always felt I was giving things a lick and a polish on the idea that I would return to them and give them their proper due, my full attention, at some later date.

That time in my life came to an end with the formation of some close friendships—and then my first marriage and my first job. From that day until this, I have been deeply entangled in a network of obligations and commitments that leave little time to breathe. Not that I am complaining. I wanted desperately in my “out” years to move to the center of my time (a phrase from Thomas Hardy that has always been a touchstone for me). But this busyness is always haunted by the sense of things not done, of interests left unexplored, or of tasks done in a half-assed way because of time constraints. And it is that sense of constant hurry, or a total lack of leisure, that novels fail to portray.

Like the dyer’s hand, my nature is subdued. I don’t think, at this point, that I am capable of doing something slowly, with pain-staking care. I have become habituated to doing things quickly, to an ingrained sense of what is “good enough,” thus leaving time to move on to the next thing. Just as I know that moving to the country in order to secure peace and quiet would be crazy for someone of my temperament, so the notion that I could settle into one or two activities pursued at length is most likely delusionary. My attention span might be longer than that of our perennially maligned millennials, but I don’t want to disconnect any more than they do, even if my connections are not as often virtual. I crave the constant input, the pace that is a little too fast for comfort, but frantic in ways that make me feel energized and alive. Better manic than depressed any day.