the recovery of virtue

After many months of what appeared to be politics as usual, President Obama managed to give me hope again with his speech on Wednesday night. (And I can only hope that his rhetoric is matched with substance—integrity is after all often defined as coherence between the internal and external).

I was especially moved to hear him quote Ted Kennedy towards the end of his speech:

[Ted Kennedy] repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

…

That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
…

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter - that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.) noted back in 1985, the loss of the notion of civic virtue and warned of its potential consequences. Obama’s speech suggests that we recover the value of virtue and character in our national discourse. While the concept of virtue may not give us clear answers about the size and role of government in our technologically complex society, it can atleast be a guiding principle in how we frame our public debate about how this country should be governed.

From Habits of the Heart:

We spoke of the belief of Madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good. Without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and virtue, and probably end in authoritarian rule. Half a century later, this idea was reiterated in Tocqueville’s argument about the importance of mores – the “habits of the heart” – of Americans.

…
As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. As we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen”, the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. And with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group”, our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line. The citizen has been swallowed up by the economic man.

Yet this kind of economic liberalism is not ultimately liberating, for, as became quite clear with the final two visions of the public good described, when economics is the main model for our common life, we are more and more tempted to put ourselves in the hands of the manager and the expert. If society is shattered into as many special interests as there are individuals, then, as Tocqueville foresaw, there is only the schoolmaster state left to take care of us and keep us from one another’s throats.*


* I realize this quote may suggest that one-payer government-run healthcare system would be the perfect example of putting ourselves in the hands of the manager and expert and handing the disciplinary ruler over to the schoolmaster state (you know with the death panels and all). I am not inclined to read the passage in that way, especially not in the context of the book, but I will leave it up to you ponder.

what does it mean to own something?

As Matt and I adjust to renters and new neighbours, we wonder what it means for us to own a house, the pivotal piece of our private American dream. What does it mean to own something? Most would say that owning something entitles you to use it however you wish, as long as you do not harm anyone else or cross certain cultural taboos (e.g. sale of organs etc…).

But as with any concept, our understanding of ownership has been culturally determined. Nowhere is this more evident than our understanding of a corporation. Currently, a public corporation, or more precisely, a for-profit publicly-traded private company exists to increase shareholder value. What is owned serves solely the owner. And what is owned by the corporation must serve the owners of the corporation. But our understanding of corporations and of ownership was not always so, and many wish for a change.

From Habits of the Heart:

Henry Lee Higginson, a leading member of Boston’s business establishment, wrote in 1911, “I do not believe that, because a man owns property, it belongs to him to do with as he pleases. The property belongs to the community, and he has charge of it, and can dispose of it, if it is well done and not with the sole regard to himself or to his stockholders.”

~

The word [corporation] refers to any association of individuals bound together into a corpus, a body sharing a common purpose in a common name. In the past, that purpose had usually been communal or religious; boroughs, guilds, monasteries and bishoprics were the earliest European manifestations of the corporate form… It was assumed, as it is still in nonprofit corporations, that the incorporated body earned its charter by serving the public good… Until after the Civil War, indeed, the assumption was widespread that a corporate charter was a privilege to be granted only by a special act of a state legislature, and then for purposes clearly in the public interest. Incorporation was not yet thought of as a right available on application by any private enterprise.

~ Alan Trachtenberg

Reasserting the idea that incorporation is a concession of public authority to a private group in return for service to the public good, with effective public accountability, would change what is now called the “social responsibility of the corporation” from its present status, where it is often a kind of public relations whipped cream decorating the corporate pudding, to a constitutive structural element in the corporation itself. This, in turn, would involve a fundamental alteration in the role and training of the manager. Manager would become a profession in the older sense of the word, involving not merely standards of technical competence but standards of public obligation that could at moments of conflict override obligations to the corporate employer.

~

There’s a recently-created legal entity, known as the low-profit limited-liability company (L3C) that has been structured to be a business entity for the public good. While reading and hearing about the L3C, I was struck by how the language and the hype surrounding this new legal entity was rooted in pragmatism and lacked a greater moral vision.

The public good is privatized as L3C’s must “significantly further the accomplishment of one or more charitable or educational purposes,” as though “charitable or educational purposes” are but fragmented demands and desires of special interest groups. It is designed to attract program-related investments from foundations and hopefully obtain certain tax benefits.

I have yet to read anything that suggests the L3C could be part of building a moral vision of stewardship. (But if you do see anything, please let me know!) In fact, its very existence reinforces the idea that private companies and public corporations serve the private interests of their owners. That being said, I do commend the creators of the L3C for making a legal entity that could be a better vehicle for improving the common good.

Rather, what all this suggests is our collective poverty of language and imagination. We are caught in thinking in categories of for-profit, non-profit and government. And when we think about ownership, we are foolish enough to presume that our property really is ours.


*This was supposed to be a quotes-only post. Oops. I guess I like this topic a lot.
**It feels rather self-aggrandizing to bold your own text. I suppose they are my little delusions of grandeur in this little corner of the interweb. Alternatively, I could also argue that I bold text because I don't actually believe anyone will read this entire blog post...
***Sigh, time to make my mortgage payment. Ownership is only enjoyable when you get to exercise tyranny, not when you assume the liabilities.

life on hiatus

(written last week)

After 14 days on tour with my husband’s band, it’s a bit of a shock to be back home. While the first few day were challenging, I grew accustomed to packing up my bag every morning and moving on to the next location every night. Towards the end, I felt like I could continue indefinitely. Wake up. Walk around and explore. Pack my bag. Get in the van and go on to the next location. Repeat. Again and again.

Life is simple. Everything I needed fit into one bag. The immediacy of each location kept me from worrying about the elusive future. So despite constant change and movement, and little sleep, the trip ended up being mentally refreshing.

And now I’ve returned to my boxes upon boxes of possessions, a 9-5 desk job, a mortgage, and all those other lovely American dream promises that seemed so distant while I was gone.

"centrally-administered materialism"

David Warren wrote an excellent editorial in commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre and D-Day:

The Second World War ended in split decision. There was victory in the West, and nominal victory in the East, but as Churchill said, an Iron Curtain fell, and those to the east of it were abandoned to a Communist tyranny little different from the daily Nazi tyranny that had preceded the war; indeed, worse for being prolonged. Two generations were condemned to slavery: whole lives passed under the twitching thumbs of party apparatchiks, with only the briefest respites, in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Prague. And each of those respites, bloody.

It was a mixed result also within the West, for it seems today that we learned nothing, and the principles for which men and women once died have been progressively abandoned in our public life. Yes we have democracy, of a sort: mass democracy, and rule in the name of numbers. But the numbers have been used to establish Nanny States that deeply impinge our freedom, and to advance the very cause of atheist materialism that once marked Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes as exceptional.

The people of China are now passing out of the third generation of Communist tyranny. Outwardly, it has eased. The Red Chinese state has relaxed its controls over minor arrangements in everyday life, to the extent of permitting the kind of "capitalist" consumerism that can enhance its own power.

We have been left with less to choose than we think, between the two systems, for we now have centrally-administered materialism in both East and West.

The soldiers who fell in Normandy were not fighting for swimming pools and home entertainment centres. They had before them a view of the dignity of man: of things worth more than life itself. The students who stood in Tiananmen Square -- who raised the home-made statue of Lady Liberty -- did not die for the sake of cellphones, and skyscrapers in Shanghai. They faced the tanks and bullets of the "People's Revolutionary Army" with something more substantial in their hearts.

Yet the generation after them, there as here, has been largely bought off with the false promise of material prosperity. There, as here, we have agreed to become a kind of indentured labour, on the promise that we will be taken care of, cradle to grave.

Let us at least celebrate, for a moment in time, men and women who were better than we are.

But perhaps more revealing about modern China was a joke made by a Chinese visiting scholar– “Nobody’s thinking about Tiananmen in China, they’re all thinking about Gao Kao.”

Gao Kao is the National Higher Education Entrance Examination that takes place over 3 days in China every year. It is basically SAT on steroids. If I’m not mistaken, it occurs only once a year and it completely determines where one goes to college. It conveniently occurs in and around the week of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.


*On an unrelated note, here are some more encouraging slopes relating to the decreasing incidence of bike casualities in NY.

the slippery slope

Improved technology and more goods and services have raised the standards for what is acceptable in our culture. While there is more to choose from, we also have more to live up to. The introduction of indoor plumbing, electricity and household appliances into our homes have only pressured us to maintain higher levels of cleanliness. While wrinkles were once an accepted symptom of aging, we are now pre-occupied with anti-wrinkle creams and Botox treatments. The greater variety and availability of clothing has only raised expectations for our appearances (It’s not terribly acceptable to wear the same thing every day, unless you’re my husband. He somehow manages to get away with it).

The odd thing about the constancy of (housework) hours is that it coincided with a technological revolution in the household. When the early studies were done, American homes had little sophisticated equipment. Many were not yet wired for gas and electricity. They did not have automatic washers and dryers or refrigerators. Some homes even lacked indoor plumbing, so that every drop of water that entered the house had to be carried in by hand and then carried out again.

By 1950, the amount of capital equipment in the home had risen dramatically. Major technological systems, such as indoor plumbing, electricity, and gas, had been installed virtually everywhere. At the same time, many labor-saving appliances also came into vogue- automatic washing machines and dryers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and freezers, garbage disposals. By the 1990s, we had added dishwashers, microwaves and trash compactors. Each of these innovations had the potential to save countless hours of labor. Yet none of them dead. In terms of reducing time spent on domestic work, all this expensive labor-saving technology was an abject failure.
…
Laundry provides the best example of how technology failed to reduce labor time... Laundry that had previously been sent out began to stay home. At the same, standards of cleanliness went up… In the (colonial) days, washing would be done once a month at most and, in many families, much less—perhaps four times per year. Nearly everyone wore dirty clothes nearly all the time. Slowly, the frequency of washing rose… Standards have crept up for nearly everything that housewives do—laundry, cooking, care of children, shopping, care of the sick, cleaning…

One 1920s housewife realized: Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for daily immersion. If our consciences don’t prick over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking.

But we were not always like this. Contemporary standards of housecleaning are a modern invention, like the vacuum cleaners and furniture polishes that make them possible. (The culture of cleanliness) was delayed because it was expensive. The labor of colonial women was far too valuable to be spent creating spic-and-span…

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American

Likewise, more freedom around what parts of our body we can display has resulted in more concern for how those parts of our body appear.

By the 1920s, both fashion and film encouraged a massive “unveiling” of the female body, which meant that certain body parts-such as arms and legs- were bared and displayed in ways they never had before. This new freedom to display the body was accompanied, however, by demanding beauty and literary regimens that involved money as well as self-discipline. Beginning in the 1920s, women’s legs and underarms had to be smooth and free of body hair; the torso had to be svelte; and the breasts were supposed to be small and firm. What American women did not realize at the time was that their stunning new freedom actually implied the need for greater internal control of the body, an imperative that would intensify and become even more powerful by the end of the twentieth century… cultural pressures have accumulated, making American girls today, at the close of the twentieth century, more anxious than ever about the size and shape of their bodies, as well as particular body parts.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project

No doubt we have made progress since the early twentieth century. And while most of these accomplishments have materially improved our quality of life, we continue to expect more. Improved technology designed to make life more convenient has not given us more leisure and rest time. And more freedom to choose what we wear and how we appear, may have only increased anxiety and worry.


* Somehow I feel a bit better that my apartment is not Real Simple-worthy. There are piles of books and papers stacked up in the corners collecting dust. Our bathtub is developing a ring of soap and scum residue and I believe our sink is building a lovely layer of grime. Yes, I would like my home to be cleaner, but I’m just too damn lazy to do it myself or to nag my husband to do it. But now I can say something elitist like I’m intentionally being counter-cultural and protesting the absurd standards of hygiene in our society… or tell everyone that I’m saving the environment. But don’t we often discover that our practical decisions end up being political? We didn’t buy a car, because we’re cheap. We line-dry our clothing, because there was no room in our apartment for a dryer. We try to reduce our meat consumption, because I don’t like cooking meat…
** Did you see this study that asked households to rank appliances as luxury or necessity? Fascinating!

I'm yellow!

and I like yellow butterflies

I have neglected this blog. I suffer from on average month-long writer’s block and this recent one has lasted longer than usual. Perhaps I’ve been distracted by more immediate things—work, house-buying ambivalence, obsessive knitting and hemming my ten gazillion skirts that are too long and hit me at the unflattering mid-calf length. Garbage in garbage out, so I suppose I can complain about nonprofit bureaucracy or ramble at length about the lengths of my dresses, but I won’t put you through that torture. That’s reserved for my husband (who is quite wonderful in case you were wondering).

Today I stumbled upon the Circle Ventures (somehow related to Circle of Hope church) blog post on white guilt concerning this history of the United States with regards to African Americans. It reminded me of how foreign America’s history is to me—the American Revolution, the westward expansion, the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, the Vietnam war – all this could be the history of another country. The history of my “nation” is a jumble of Communist and Cultural Revolution stories, the fall of the Berlin wall via our TV set in British Columbia (mildly upsetting because I wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons), Quebec separatism and a president south of the border notable for his extracurricular engagements. When I watch British or American period movies, I might as well be watching a movie about Sri Lanka, or Chile or Malawi.

My ethnicity, my family culture, whatever convenient label you might want to use, pops up in surprising but subtle ways. My husband and I have a now-resolved dispute about the “magic realism” in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my favourite books by the way…), most notably the yellow butterflies that follow around a character in the novel. These yellow butterflies offend my husband’s rational, INTJ sensibilities! For him, they are excessive ornamental flourishes because insufficient information is given to determine what they might mean or symbolize. And I know of a few others who feel the same way. But for me, it completely makes sense that this magic is embedded in the way of narrating a story or of seeing reality and no explanation is needed. While my family did not subscribe to Chinese folk stories, my mother practiced Chinese medicine. In the world where I grew up, sticking needles in a person’s face can relieve paralysis, too much “yang” in my system caused my colds and feeling one’s pulse could discern temperaments and long-term illnesses. And for the most part, I hold that all of this is true. Not true in the Western, rational, scientific sense, but true in another sense. We believe in truths in different ways. And so the fact that the yellow butterflies in the Marquez’s novel didn’t mean anything per se, never bothered me, because it corresponded with my cultural hybrid way of seeing (I can’t believe I just used the word hybrid...).

It’s funny how I’ve come to embrace my Chinese-ness recently, as I generally dislike acknowledging my ethnic background. I’ll smile if someone asks me about China, but the moment someone says something along the lines of: “Maybe you do that because you’re Chinese”, the smile becomes forced and my irritation becomes palpable. I will stiffen even more if someone says something like “You need to understand how being Chinese impacts who you are.”

This annoyance may stem from reading far too many “What’s my identity” “I’m a hybrid” minority novels in college (some of which were actually excellent), but it is primarily a strong reaction against the expectation that I must understand who I am in the context of my ethnicity. White people are not confined to conceive of their identities in terms of their ethnicity, then why must ethnicity be my starting point? What if my race is not the defining characteristic of who I am? Why must we limit the driving factors of our formation to race, gender and class when there may be influences that matter far more?

But I’m lucky. Because though I might occasionally receive awkward comments and rude questions, I have not been significantly marginalized because of my ethnicity. Fortunately for me, the privileges of education and wealth were also handed down to me along with my skin colour at birth. And so I am here and not elsewhere. And this is who I am, not someone else. Mostly Canadian-American well-educated wealthy Christian but with bits of Chinese weaved into the holes.

~

There I did it! My crowning contribution to minority literature. New genre: Chinese Canadian American. CCA literature. Memoirs of my childhood amongst huckleberry bushes, chopsticks, francophones, and ice rinks. Maybe they will even have a CCA studies department!

the inverse kingdom

Traditionally, creditors wielded more power than debtors. Creditors charged exorbitant interest, resorted to intimidation and violence, and seized land and possessions of their debtors.

Strangely enough, today in America, if you’re willing to take a loose definition of creditor and debtor, the debtors often wield more power than the creditors. This idea was suggested in Jacques Ellul’s Money and Power in application to the modern corporation: … the ancient reality of the superiority of the creditor. Obviously in our society, the debtor is often much more powerful than the creditor. The corporation cannot be compared with the hundreds of shareholders who compose it.

To further complicate matters, the corporation is not an individual and a corporation does not just consist of its shareholders or its board of directors or its employees. It takes on a life and a spirit of its own. And then we find ourselves faced with an unwieldly monster whose actions and decisions can have enormous impact on our lives.

The injustice of the debtors’ superiority is what angers us so much about the AIG bonuses as billions of taxpayer dollars trickle into the banking system.* I feel sympathy for Edward Liddy and those who received bonuses who were not directly responsible for credit default swap transactions that were the downfall of AIG.** Yet I am also outraged at the debtor’s entitlement—but it’s not Edward Liddy nor the bonus recipients who are the actual debtors to America, it’s AIG the corporation. And how do we understand how AIG’s employees are both part of and yet distinct from the corporation? And as a result, though they may have no personal wrongdoing related to the credit default swaps, they may have to uphold the moral responsibility of a powerful debtor before less powerful creditors.

So for better or for worse, the 90% tax may get passed and we may feel a little bit better.*** But the larger problems still remain unsolved…



* Compared to the total amount lent to AIG, the bonuses were a drop in a bucket. Dealing with large amounts of money can have two contrary psychological impacts—either you start penny pinching and counting every little cent or you figure since the debt is so large, little savings won’t make a big difference in the long run. Clearly in this case, the American public as the creditor feels the former. No creditor would like to see a debtor living the good life if there is no evidence of repayment.
** I’m sympathetic to the fact that many of them are the wrong target of the angry mob. That being said, I personally find large bonuses rather distasteful wherever, but that stems from a larger critique of American capitalism and compensation.
*** Has it been passed already? I don’t think I’ve been paying that close attention to the news in the last few days.

the tyranny of private enterprise

History has always been one of the hardest subjects of me to understand. It’s either a muddle of events that I cannot understand or a simplistic narrative that I do not believe. Perhaps I relate to how Hayden White sees historical narrative: “translations of facts into fictions” as “the events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and highlighting of others”.

The motives and actions of presidents and prime ministers, of ambassadors and representatives. The handshakes made behind closed doors and the secret chain of command through bureaucractic institutions. What story can you spin out of the sparse paper trail of letters, memos and communiqués? Or out of Obama’s Blackberry log? What do you believe?

I have been making an effort to learn history better, since I have been, historically, rather ignorant of it, precisely because I couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until I read two books, the Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills and funny enough, the children’s book , A History of US All the People that history finally began making sense.*

These books presented history or insisted that we study history from a more sociological standpoint—looking at the impact of historical events on the consciousness of individuals in society. I don’t really care about what country was a world power or what conferences and negotiations took place, but I am fascinated about how people living in that country felt amidst the whirlwind of headlines and changes. And recently, I’ve also become intrigued by what history has to say about various philosophical questions: How do you reconcile order and liberty? Equality and freedom? Justice and law?

This newfound fascination came as a result of a book recommended to me by my husband, called Commager on Tocqueville (one of the benefits of marriage is that you get more books and if you’re lucky, your husband has similar tastes to yours). Despite a somewhat self-preoccupied and unenticing title, the book is excellent. Commager assesses American history in the last century through the set of questions raised by Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French aristocrat who wrote about America in Democracy in America (who I vaguely recall having to read in my US AP History class). Tocqueville primarily was concerned with democracy – especially the tensions raised between liberty, order and equality. In Commager’s words:

Would democratic majorities destroy liberty? Would centralization of power, which democracy made almost inevitable, prove incompatible with liberty? Would individualism—so ruthlessly being exercised on the vast North American continent- be compatible with either democracy or with liberty? And what of justice? There can be no liberty without justice and no justice without order. Can individualism tolerate order? Can democracy be trusted to safeguard justice?

Published in 1993, Commager’s conclusions still speak relevantly to what is happening today:

... in the interaction between two forces that (Tocqueville) himself thought the most powerful: majority rule and individualism. He was fearful that majoritarianism would take over the surrender to its natural propensity for tyranny with catastrophic consequences. In that event, it was not the majority that imposed its will on desperate minorities, but the spirit of individualism and private enterprise that permeated majorities and persuaded or seduced them into supporting even the most extreme manifestations of private enterprise. The danger today is no more from majority tyranny than it was in the 1930s when Tocqueville first sounded the alarm. It is rather in that excess of virtue of individualism that we now call private enterprise, but which is no longer private but public, and which, for that matter, is no longer very enterprising. The operation of military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific complex is an example of this. This group or complex does not constitute a majority, but it appears to represent a majority. And to speak for it, it does not formally exercise what we call tyranny, and as for all its triumphs and conquests, these have been brought about legal means and are not therefore tyrannical. But its character and conduct takes on more and more the character of tyranny. In all this, Tocqueville’s fears may yet be vindicated.

I wonder how history will write this past year—the demise of banking as we know it, the economic crisis, the first black president, the new uneasy alliance between banks and government.... What is happening? What does it mean? And how does all of this make us feel? Do we feel powerless as each company announces its own round of layoffs? Do we feel hopeful because there is now a president who seems to be intelligent and concerned about the people and because we may be able to rebuild new and better institutions? Or do we feel angry, ready to charge forth with our pitchforks and flames, because this military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific-governmental complex has failed to demonstrate that it knows what it is doing, though it has justified its privilege and power on that very basis?



*So I am attempting to link to Goodreads more often, rather than Amazon. After all my ranting and railing about large corporations and all my lamenting about the demise of small bookstores, I really should stop giving Amazon free advertising. At the very least, I should sell out and have them pay me.
** For a progressive/liberal reading of American history, I recommend Commager on Tocqueville over Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America. This post was originally intended as a rant against Howard Zinn, but I decided to write something more positive instead…