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.

"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 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…

America's welfare state

“the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world… multitude of men… incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives…”

“That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild… It seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking all the trouble of living… It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

“…everyone wants to be free; everyone wants to eat… Everyone does indeed want to be free: free from bureaucratic control, free from burdensome taxation, free to exercise and enlarge the area of private enterprise. Everyone does indeed want to eat: the poor want welfare, the aged want security, the ill and the handicapped want medical care, parents want education for their children, consumers want protection.. The rich, too, want to be fed. They believe in private enterprise and delude themselves that corporations are somehow private rather than the product of very special privileges granted by the state and to be enforced by the state… When coal miners are in trouble they recommend government takeover. When railroads and airlines are in trouble they persuade the government to subsidize them, at least the bankrupt ones… We have developed not only a welfare state with all of its bureaucracy for the poor, but a welfare state for corporations and business interests as well. Clearly the most completely socialized ingredient in our economy is not the poor who are on welfare, but the complex that President Eisenhower first publicly identified as the military-industrial, which we can now see embraces as well labor, banking, the scientific community, and the academy. If these want governmental protection and aid, as clearly they do, they must take for granted big government, big bureaucracy and centralization. Those who yearn to diminish the powers of government must learn to lower their expectations from government, to restrain their demands on nature, to temper their insistence on endless growth and progress that is almost entirely material.”

~ Henry Steele Commager, Commager on Tocqueville, 1993

*I’m really scraping as far as blog posts are. I just can’t bring myself to write anything. I did, however, like my husband, cave in and start a twitter account. I have yet to determine whether or not I will update it regularly or whether or not I like the whole affair. It feels all a bit too suspiciously trendy to me, but perhaps 150 character posts will be more palatable to my creative tendencies. It also fondly reminds me of those good old AIM profiles and away messages I used to check. I guess Twitter is its syndicated version.