This will be the penultimate entry in the series on liberalism. I do want, in the final installment, to say something about liberalism and violence—which gets us back to Dustin Howes’s book, Freedom without Violence.
But today I want to talk about liberalism and solidarity (which leads onto democracy). In one of the more confusing developments in the tangled history of liberalism, the extreme individualism that critics of liberalism usually ascribe to it as one of its chief sins has actually become a hallmark of conservatives. It is liberals—as the term is used in common parlance—who are now the communitarians. That explains why liberals, not conservatives, look to the social determinants of behavior—and it explains why liberals, not conservatives, advocate for “public goods,” for various social insurance schemes, and for the general responsibilities captured in a term like “social justice.” Liberals, in short, try to inculcate a sense of the social whole that calls for attention to the needs of the most vulnerable. And liberals have not been shy to use the vocabulary of “rights” as the lever by which to push states and societies to provide medical care, housing, food, minimum wages and other workplace protections, etc. etc.
Basically, the liberal sensibility, it seems to me, is that we are all in this together—and that human life can be made less terrible, more palatable, if we work together for providing, as far as is possible, the means for flourishing of all. That’s why I value Martha Nussbaum’s (and Amartya Sen’s work) on capabilities so highly. I think the effort to articulate what people require to live a good life is extremely important. It tells us what, as a society, we should be aiming towards.
There are problems, of course. I want to just suggest two of them here. The first is the boundary problem. Back to Rorty’s wish to expand the circle of concern. Conservatives are communitarians insofar as they are nationalist. They are willing to have the circle of concern extend to those like me. Liberals usually shun nationalism because it functions as a mechanism of exclusion—telling us which people are not entitled to health care, social security etc. (Of course, in the current American version of conservatism, a white nationalism co-exists uneasily with a meritocracy based notion that the poor deserve their fate. It is far from clear that today’s ascendant conservatives are going to offer any protections against poverty for their poorer white supporters.)
Still, even if liberals manage to eschew nationalism, there is still the border problem because there is not one world society, but multiple societies. By what mechanism or principle are we going to decide which people qualify for benefits and which do not? How far, in practice, can we expand the circle as Rorry wishes us to do? (And expanding the circle could also mean reaching out toward non-human life and its needs—something that seems more and more ecologically necessary and not just some act of moral grandeur.) There are no easy answers here, just pragmatic makeshifts, all of which are, to some extent, unsatisfactory. We are in area of trade-offs and compromises that Berlin’s value pluralism–married to a sense of what is currently possible–tells us is our fated habitation. Liberals are routinely condemned for not occupying—either theoretically or in practice—the land of perfection.
The second issue is the vexed relationship of liberalism with democracy. Leftist critics of liberalism have, especially in the last 25 years, liked to use appeals to democracy as their weapon of choice against liberalism. Liberals, they charge, fear the demos because liberals are, in the final analysis, on the side of the status quo and of order. Liberals fear the wide-sweeping changes that giving democracy its full head would bring into the world. I guess it is a sign of my liberalism that I think the leftist proponents of democracy are far too sanguine. They seem to assume to a fully unleashed demos would vote into place their leftist vision of how the world should be. But the liberal is always haunted by the thought that one “should never put rights to a vote.” Liberalism wants democracy tempered by a bill of rights that places certain guarantees beyond the simple will of the majority. Some things are established as changeable only through a more arduous process of amendment.
My state, North Carolina, voted in 2011 (by a 60 to 40 % margin) to install as a constitutional provision the illegality of any marriage not between a man and a woman. Installing discrimination into the state constitution is the exact opposite of how liberals desire constitutions to function. But it is absolutely right to claim that constitutions are not democratic—if by democracy we mean that all social arrangements are decided by the vote of the demos. A constitution establishes some basic rights and some basic procedures (rules of the game) that are meant to be immune to “normal” democratic processes. So, yes, liberals can be accurately accused of not being fully democratic. But, to the extent that a constitution prevents those currently in power from completely shutting the opposition out from competing in the political sphere, a non-democratic constitution is required to keep the partial democracy—its contested elections, its non-censored public sphere discussions–afloat.
Which circles us around to solidarity. A sustainable democracy requires a baseline solidarity that acknowledges the equal right of every single one of us to be here and to be full participants in the agonistic contests that characterize democracy. Suppression of anyone’s right to equal participation is antithetical to democracy–and the point is that you cannot count on the good will of today’s majority to keep them from stacking the deck in their favor as time moves forward. You need to have some institutions, some agreements (constitutionally established, often in the form of prescribed rights) in place. So it can’t be democracy all the way down. Not a neat–or even especially happy–conclusion, but the neater idea of all democracy all the time is a recipe for the fairly swift end of democracy.
Another installment in my ongoing posts about liberalism.
I am continuing here my discussion of liberalism as a sensibility—as contrasted to a set of principled, non-contradictory, propositions or policy commitments.
The term ‘bleeding heart liberalism” was embraced by Richard Rorty in order to emphasize the liberal response to suffering. For Rorty, liberals are most easily recognized as those who wish to use the political order to alleviate suffering. It is sympathy with those who suffer and the willingness to understand that suffering comes in many forms—from economic deprivation to various kinds of social humiliation—that marks someone as “liberal.” Conservatives, by way of contrast, will excuse suffering as “inevitable” or “necessary”—or, even worse, will look to identify reasons why the sufferer deserves his or her fate. Conservatives at their worst are eager to inflict pain; at their best, they are mostly indifferent to the pain of others. As someone recently said in the comments section of Brad Delong’s blog, the amazing and upsetting thing about current conservatives is that they are not happy with the rich in this country garnering more and more of the nation’s wealth. Getting the lion’s share is not good enough for them. They have to go out of their way to make the poorer 50% suffer. It’s as if they cannot enjoy their own prosperity unless they know that others are in dire straits.
William James, in the first lecture of Pragmatism, famously distinguished between the “hard-headed” empiricists and the “tender-hearted” rationalists when he was arguing that “temperament” (a good synonym for “sensibility”) is the chief determinant of one’s philosophical outlook. (He proposed pragmatism as a way to split the difference between the two.) The empiricist looks to the facts, and does not believe that values are underwritten by the world. It’s a jungle out there—and the chips fall where they may. So buck up—and eat or be eaten. James, with his obsession with “striving” and “zest,” could be attracted to this masculinist version of Darwin, even though James was also appalled by its more extreme embodiment in Teddy Roosevelt. The rationalist, on the other hand, asserts that the universe itself is just—and thus guarantees that human dreams of justice will bear fruit. Reason will prevail (in some long term) and reason is on the side of the angels.
The pragmatist alternative (at least as Rorty portrays it) is to say the universe is neither for nor against human desires. Suffering is not inevitable—except in so far as we are creatures who die. We are also creatures who are vulnerable to pain (the very basis of the problem of violence as Dustin Howes so crucially reminds us). The issue is how we, as social beings, respond to that vulnerability. The liberal ideal is to use human collective action and the institutional arrangements of human society to minimize suffering.(I will take up this theme in a subsequent post.) Non-liberals exploit vulnerability to augment their own power and their own share of resources. Non-liberals dress up their appropriation of more than their fair share with various kinds of appeals to “merit” or “desert”—or by the demonization of those who end up with a lesser share.
At the end of the day, a liberal like Rorty and a liberal like Martha Nussbaum end up in the same place. But Nussbaum, like Kant, is a rationalist insofar as she believes that reason will lead us to take a liberal position. (Rawls is also a rationalist, but of a rather different strips. I am going to stick to Nussbaum for the moment.) Nussbaum wants to ground her liberalism on universalism, on a version of Kant’s categorical imperative. Only on the pain of self-contradiction (a pain that seems to bother very few in fact) can I gather to myself benefits that I deny to others. And Nussbaum believes, following Aristotle, that she can identify as indelible features of human nature the “needs” that all humans share as well as the requisites—beyond need—of full human “flourishing.” In this way, she can list the requirements a just society, a truly good society, must meet. It’s an attractive vision, at least to this liberal. But I am with Rorty when it comes to the foundational issue.
Rorty basically says that you can’t derive (in that rationalist, Spinoza-like, way) the lineaments of a just society through a rational thought process. Rather, our sense of justice, of what a good society should provide, is an historical development, a set of responses to specific events and crises. So, just like our various political institutions and our laws and notions of rights, are ad hoc expedients developed in response to various ills and opportunities, so our notion of what each citizen should receive has developed over time. The very notions of parental leave or of homosexual marriage were unthinkable (quite literally) 150 years ago. And the “rational” basis for advocating either of them is different from the “rational” basis of trial by a jury of one’s peers. It doesn’t all hang together in some grand vision.
That doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that we should not attempt to define for ourselves what “human flourishing” means. But we shouldn’t expect that our definition of flourishing will be endorsed by the universe or will be so “right” that it is valid for all time and all places. Instead, we should fully expect “flourishing” to be a moving target, for new “needs” and “goods” to come to the fore. Our understanding of flourishing is as fallible as any other piece of human knowledge—and the effort to identify some core “human nature” is misguided and vain.
Furthermore, Rorty is saying the appeal of liberalism is not to our reason. It is to our sympathies. So Rorty is on the side of Hume and Adam Smith, not with Kant and Nussbaum. (Admittedly, the case of Nussbaum is complex, since her rationalist universalism is joined uneasily by her emphasis on the emotions.) What liberals should aim to do is to expand the circle of those for whom we feel sympathy, those to whom we feel an obligation to alleviate their suffering. The biggest obstacle to liberalism is parochialism, the seemingly stubborn tendency of humans to only care about the well-being of those fairly closely connected to them.
So, against the conservative scorn for bleeding heart liberals, Rorty says we would all be better off if the number of bleeding hearts were much greater—and if those hearts bled for more and more people, with the goal of finally embracing every member of the species.
My previous post on some good books I have read recently is here.
Now I am going to talk about three old hands.
First up, Ward Just. An American realist, author of some 18 novels, and the four or five I have read are all excellent. Just finished Rodin’s Debutante, about Chicago just after World War II. About race, class, and corruption. It’s Chicago, right?
Next up, Thomas Mallon. A favorite of mine, who has embarked on a series of novels about our recent presidents. I haven’t read the ones on Reagan and George W. Bush—and don’t know if I can bring myself to have to relive those years, even in fiction. But Watergate, his novel about the Nixon scandal, is excellent, while Henry and Clara, about the couple who were in the box at Ford’s Theater with Mary and Abraham Lincoln the night of the assassination, is one of the best novels of the past twenty years. The story of Henry and Clara Rathbone is unbelievable from start to finish—but it’s all true. Credit to Mallon to finding this tale that was hiding in plain sight.
Finally, the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, known as the author of Schindler’s List, but strangely neglected otherwise. He’s also an historical novelist, writing about both the US and Australia. The ones I just read are set in Australia during World War II: Office of Innocence and Shame and Captives. The first concerns the encounter between the Aussies and American troops who arrived in early 1942 as Australia braced for what seemed the inevitable invasion by the Japanese. The second is set in 1944 in a prisoner of war camp where the Japanese internees mount a suicidal escape attempt. (This one is based on—and follows closely—the historical incident that is its inspiration.) Also highly recommended by Kineally are Daughters of Mars (about Australian nurses during World War I), The Playmaker (about the use of Australia as an open air prison by the English), and Confederates (about soldiers in Stonewall Jackson’s brigades).
Another recent read: John Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story. Kaag joins his discovery of a treasure trove of books left by a Harvard philosopher who was the last torch-bearer for the greats—William James, Josiah Royce, and Charles Sanders Peirce among them—who founded American philosophy in the late 19th century with his own personal journey toward a rejuvenating love. A sweet book.
One sign of my advancing age is that I have a hard time finding books to read. I go to the public library and bring home seven or eight novels. I begin to read five or six of them, and put four of them down in boredom or irritation or worse. I search around for non-fiction as well, but don’t find much that appeals to me. I can’t get overly indignant about this. Writing a good book is hard to do—and so we should expect good books to be rare. That so many mediocre to bad books are published is no cause for outrage either. As with any endeavor, you need the mediocre for the excellent to float upon. If there weren’t a critical mass of people invested in the effort, despite their not being very good at it, the enterprise would fade away altogether.
In any case, for whatever reason, I’ve been on a winning streak. I have read a number of very good books over this past month. So it’s great to be able to share good news.
First up, David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Mitchell is such a great straight-forward writer that I can only regret his sliding into the fantastic in his novels. But that’s just the price of admission. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a great novel that captures the feel of colonialism tied to an absurd science fiction/adventure story. Bone Clocks has as good a description of what it felt like on the ground in Iraq in 2005-2006 as one is ever likely to find. And it has an equally compelling post-apocalyptic vision of our world after global warming and other disasters has destroyed it (circa 2040). All of this great stuff mired in a complex fantasy world about some people who get to me immortal—with long tedious explanations of how it all works. Still a great book—complete with the following stern warning:
“Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent. The comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Plague, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, pg. 560-61 (New York: Random House, 2014).
Next up: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. This book, of course, has been receiving raves all over—and won the National Book Award. It took me three weeks to read. It is so intense that I had to put it down for four or five days before I could bear to pick it up again. Whitehead, too, has his fantastic elements. But, unlike Mitchell, he doesn’t feel compelled to explain them. They are just there, another feature of a narrative that is, very often, disorienting. Quite deliberately so, since that disorientation mirrors the predicament of the protagonist. I won’t say anything more; it’s a great book.
Two more to mention now—and then I’ll be back with more in a future post.
Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside. I quoted this book a few days back. It’s about black on black homicide in Los Angeles—and not only details that horror, but also shows how most of our received ideas about it and its causes are wrong. It’s a sad tale about racism, about our society’s failures, and about the dreadful trap into which many blacks, especially black males, are born. Her story also has a few heroes—dedicated police detectives who need to fight an apathetic system, woeful underfunding and understaffing, and hostility form just about everyone they encounter in the attempt to bring killers to justice.
Finally, a novel called The Midnight Choir by Gene Kerrigan. I very rarely read this type of book. It’s best described as “noir.” It’s about a number of policemen in Ireland, mostly Dublin. As intricately—and perfectly—plotted a novel as you will ever read. But it’s the characterizations and the setting of the scene that makes this novel so superb. Absolutely compelling and convincing even as it plays fast and loose with the reader’s sympathies. It’s such a pleasure to read a book so well-crafted while also so thoughtful and clever.
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