Digressions&Impressions

On Dutch War Crimes and Perry Anderson on Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot.

    After the debacle of the First World War, and the victory of Bolshevism in Russia, the old political world of landed rulers and limited electorates, modest budgets and stable currencies, had crumbled away. A new kind of mass enfranchisement and expectation gripped Europe, the arrival of a democracy capable of brushing aside, in the pursuit of security or equality, traditional barriers between the tasks of government and the affairs of business - a semi-oligarchic state and a still-hierarchic civil society. Where would popular sovereignty without social liability lead? Communism was, of course, the first and greatest danger. Fascism, which looked to some as if it might be an antidote, proved little better - indeed, in German guise at least, all but identical. But even when these were seen off, there was still the welfare state, a creeping version of the same disease. In the course of six decades, political judgements of this changing scene varied. Strauss and Oakeshott, scornful of liberalism before Hitler came to power, were more circumspect after the war; Hayek, who described himself as a classical liberal during the war, repudiated the term as compromised beyond recovery when he got to America; Schmitt, who never had any truck with liberalism, moved from Catholic authoritarianism to National Socialism, before ending as an informal doyen of the most respectable post-war constitutionalism. But beyond the discrepant local sympathies of these careers - with their splay of temporary identities: Conservative, Zionist, Nazi, Old Whig - they reflected a common theoretical calling....

    But the Stygian cap fits the collective effort of this cluster of thinkers. For these were indeed constructions designed to hold something back. What they all in the end sought to restrain was the risks of democracy - seen and feared through the prisms of their theories of law, as the abyss of its absence: to misterion tes anomias, the mystery of lawlessness.

Each put up their own barriers against the danger. The dichotomies which are the signature of their work - the esoteric and the exoteric, the civil and the managerial, the friend and the foe, the lawful and the legislative - are so many cordons. Their function is to hold popular sovereignty at bay. The different gifts displayed in this enterprise, whatever view is taken of it, were remarkable. For all his later tendency to textual dressage, Strauss's range and subtlety as a master of the canon of political philosophy had no equal in his generation. Schmitt's moral instability never impaired an extraordinary capacity to fuse conceptual insight and metaphoric imagination in lightning flashes of illumination around the state. Hayek could seem tactically ingenuous, but he fashioned a theoretical synthesis out of his epistemology and economics whose scope and strength has yet to be supplanted.
    Oakeshott was the literary artist in this gallery.--Perry Anderson (1992) "The Intransigent Right" in Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas, p. 25-27 [HT Jonathan Kramnick]

The other day (recall here), I quoted the conclusion of Anderson's essay (which contrasts Rawls with the four horseman of the Intransigent Right) in order to introduce my digression on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice. And before I turned to my serious engagement with Forrester, I made a snarky remark about Anderson's 'acrobatics' in order to lump Schmitt, Hayek, Strauss, and Oakeshot together. I don't plan to withdraw the remark here, but I do regret making it for two reasons: first, I wouldn't want to discourage  anyone from reading Anderson's essay, which is, in fact, very perceptive about these four thinkers and their relations. In fact, at times Anderson practices a kind of judicious, esoteric reading to reveal their core commitments. Along the way he draws on chapter 24 of Leviathan in illuminating ways.

As an aside, when Kramnick (a distinguished literary scholar) mentioned Anderson's essay to me he remarked (I am paraphrasing) that Anderson was more charitable of these four than Rawls (something characteristic of certain kind of Marxists more generally). The veracity of Kramnick's remark can be readily judged not just by comparing the quoted passages above with the paragraph I quoted from in my digression on Forrester, but also by reading his self-standing scornful essay, "Designing Consensus: John Rawls," primarily on Rawls' Political Liberalism.  Nothing like the praise of Hayek's "theoretical synthesis" can be found in Anderson about Rawls.

Second, while lumping people together with Schmitt is generally a sign that we're in the ambit of rhetorical delegitimation, it's not true (as I kind of implied) that these thinkers have nothing important in common. For, I agree with Anderson that the specter that haunts all of them, at a certain of level of abstraction is indeed "the risks of democracy," especially if that is understood in terms of "popular sovereignty." And this is not a trivial communality nor is it something that by itself deserves criticism.

It's worth noting that anyone that worries about minority or civil rights and, say the respect for the kind of rights that are associated with human rights or a bill of rights, or the division of powers is ipse facto also worried about popular sovereignty and the risks of democracy. And there is widespread theoretical agreement that such rights ought to be respected. Yet, one problem that pollutes a lot of contemporary theorizing about democracy is that proponents of popular sovereignty, deliberative democracy, and (alas) public reason tend to take for granted, on some fundamental level, that these rights are respected, or that they are in accord -- I am now using the words of Rawls -- with "the most deep-seated convictions and traditions of a modern democratic state."*

Just yesterday, the Dutch government admitted, after commissioning a new formal historical study in 2017,  that the Netherlands had engaged in all kinds of war crimes toward innocent civilians and enemy combatants in what was Indonesia's war of independence (concluded in 1949). And subsequently these facts were covered it up, and for decades public opinion did not permit these facts to be aired (often under pressure of not especially large groups of veterans), or to be taught in history classes (not even by my teachers who were rather progressive by Dutch standards). This despite the steady drip of materials that suggested the official narrative was hopelessly flawed, and the accumulating evidence of the non-trivial trauma for those that actually witnessed and perpetrated the atrocities. The time it took to admit any of this formally, and to offer (modest) compensation to victims, is of biblical proportions: the generations that experienced had to die off first for a sober and truthful discussion to be possible.

A friend of popular sovereignty may well respond that the Dutch inability to acknowledge their war crimes just shows that our liberal democracy -- which tends to get incredibly high marks for democratic freedom --  is fatally shaped by our colonial heritage. I am by no means unsympathetic to the charge. But I see little reason to believe that popular sovereignty unmediated by parliamentary institutions will do much better (given that it public opinion never really wanted to know the truth).

My reason for mentioning the case is straightforward. From afar the entrenched, small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea are often treated as and seem paragons of democratic virtue (with robust proportional representation and reasonably generous welfare states). But even these exhibit the non-trivial democratic risks and rights violations that ought to concern friends of popular sovereignty. (Google, "Compulsory sterilisation in Sweden" or "Denmark xenophobia.") While it's true that all these places have not abolished capitalism (on the contrary they also tend to do well in economic freedom rankings), they are kind of limit examples that illustrate that even in the best circumstances democracies may misfire greatly. 

To be sure, the claim in the previous paragraph does not require to accept the road to serfdom thesis. While I am not inclined to treat the road to serfdom thesis as an empirical prediction (spoiler: I think Hayek's work belongs in the genre philosophical prophecy), if one were to treat it as an empirical prediction then the small liberal democracies of Scandinavia and the North Sea have clearly falsified it. And while I am much less sanguine about the state and character of British liberal democracy, its current state also stands as a falsification of it 70+ years after the fact. 

The explicit or implicit theoretical denial of the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty strike me as instances of irresponsible theorizing. (When I am polite I call it 'democratic innocence.') And it is a peculiar feature of far left critics of those concerned with the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty, that they then have to treat Leninism and Stalinism as contingent perversions of the ideal  or, -- and now I am speaking of Anderson -- and criticize Rosa Luxemburg, who almost alone among the friends of popular sovereignty recognized its risk, for lacking a "theory of the conquest of power by the proletariat."**

The problem is, of course, that once one has diagnosed the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty it's very hard to avoid solutions that are inimical to democracy (as the example of Mill's Considerations on Representative Government shows). And it is no surprise that those who do emphasize the risks of democracy and popular sovereignty are often reactionaries of some sort or don't reject temporary despotism. But what follows from this is not that a true friend of democracy should wish away the risks of democracy and ignore the dangers of popular sovereignty in order to avoid being tainted by the charge of 'right-wingism.' Rather, it's incumbent to find ways of navigating these risks in ways in accord with if not the letter then the spirit of democracy. But about that some other time other time more.

 

Hume, Lazar, Locke, and the State of Exception, revisited

The protector, the two secretaries, the council of state, with any five or more that the senate appoints, are possessed, on extraordinary emergencies, of dictatorial power for six months.--David Hume, Idea Of a Perfect Commonwealth

Seven years ago (recall) I discussed the quoted passage on this blog, and then eventually published a paper on the material (here). Today, I revisit it because of an extraordinarily fertile book (published in 2009), States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies by Nomi Claire Lazar, which I recently read and had overlooked before. Lazar offers what she calls a 'Lockean' approach to states of emergency amply documented in Locke's Second Treatise, but developed and elaborated by her in very creative ways.

Now, the key move of Lazar's Lockean approach is to insist that states of emergency need not abolish accountability (of the sovereign, the executive, the dictator). In the right sort of political order, accountability is "an ever-present possibility." (p. 149) And one of the neatest chapters in her book shows that this is even so in the case of the institution of Roman dictatorship (made famous (recall) by Livy in his treatment of Cincinnatus). Such accountability can be formal in a political and juridical sense. Or it can be more informal by way of the political restraints of countervailing powers and forces, including public opinion.

That during states of emergencies accountability need not be abolished builds on another key insight of hers: that there is no sharp division between states of emergency and the ordinary rule of law. In particular, first, in both instances rights derogation occur, but the manner in which this happens is different. In fact, her book reminds the reader that even in the most noble liberal democracies, many of our rights can be derogated within the ordinary rule of law (as rights clash or in instances of ordinary punishment). This is recognized in treaties and constitutions that set an explicit limit on which rights can be derogated (see p. 145). Second, these rights derogations reflect the ordinary pluralism, even "pervasive" conflict of values in ordinary political life (p. 89).

And, third, office holders have considerable discretion not just in cases understood as emergencies, but also in ordinary political life. As Locke notes in his "Of Prerogative," which, as noted, is important to Lazar's overall argument, "many things there are, which the law can by no means provide for; and those must necessarily be left to the discretion of him that has the executive power in his hands, to be ordered by him as the public good and advantage shall require." (Second Treatise, Chapter 14, sect 159; quoted by Lazar on p. 116). The cumulative effect of these three points is that states of emergency are part and parcel of what Locke (and Foucault) call the 'art of government.' If Lazar is right -- and she is -- then states of emergency also belong to a distinctly liberal art of government.

However, there is also a complication. And I introduce it by way of Locke. Locke goes on to claim that this discretion is in the service of "public good and advantage" in the context of circumstances "that as much as may be, all the members of the society are to be preserved...for the end of government being the preservation of all." It is notable that Locke puts this not in terms of the survival of society (the effect of, or instituted by, the social contract), but rather in terms of the preservation of  "all" the individuals (the "members") that compose society. On Locke's view, the prerogative, thus, really is in the service of the preservation of (individual) life rather than, say, the preservation of the state.  (This makes sense because for Locke, unlike Hobbes, we can survive just fine outside society and the state.)

The claim in the previous paragraph nicely illustrates Lazar's point that "emergency powers take on the moral character of the end they serve." (p. 138) In Locke, then, the prerogative and the powers it licenses are means toward serving the interests of individuals. Admittedly, Locke often treats this in terms of serving the "public good" -- which is more expansive than mere individual survival --, so I don't mean to suggest that for Locke emergency powers ought only focus on preservation of bare life. But for Locke the proper functioning prerogative is in the service of the same values as those that justify the social contract. And in so far as we can treat these as liberal -- some will object here to my anachronism here -- for Locke emergency powers can be liberal.

The point of my last two paragraphs is to note that Lazar goes beyond Locke in an important way . To be sure, Locke anticipates, as she notes, her claim that public opinion is an important check on the use of prerogative. But rather (and this gets me to the complication), for Lazar, emergency powers are invoked when "the state order through which norms and laws are normally enforced is threatened, the order itself is threatened." (p. 103) As she recognizes the preservation of such order is not self-evidently a liberal value. In her account this is not a bug, but a feature. Because for her, 'extra-liberal values' are also "pervasive" in "the moral life of liberal democracies." (P. 93) She includes "security, order, desert, group cohesion, cultural pluralism, and the preservation and expression of cultural heritage" among the list of pervasive non liberal values, and the source of pervasive pluralism and conflict of values in liberal democracies. 

And the way Lazar handles this conflict -- and this puts her in the camp of political realists -- is to distinguish between the "quotidian ethics animating the day-to-day functions of political order" which are constituted by "liberal values" and the "existential ethics" that govern the foundation and preservation of the liberal democratic order (p. 88; see also p. 12). And such existential ethics "are characterized by their relative uniformity across regime types." (24) So, for Lazar, the ordinary liberal art of government always involves navigating extra liberal values. And this is, we might say, intensified and more noticeable during states of emergency where the existential ethics that guide the preservation of order may be more important.

In a way, Lazar meets contemporary critics of liberalism, often inspired by Schmitt on their own ground (recall this post on Agamben). These tend to insist that the state of emergency is always (and hypocritically) lurking in liberal practice. And such critics have had ample ammunition during the last (say) fifteen years with the ways in which central banks operated during the great financial recession, the ways in which France (and other countries) have tackled Islamic terrorism, and the ways in which the Pandemic has been governed. Lazar shows that the critics are not wholly wrong in calling attention to the phenomenon, but they misunderstand the significance of it. 

As an aside, I take the positing of two such ethics as characteristic of what is now known as political realism, which insists that political life has norms of its own and, if the state is worth having, ought to be governed by them. (For a an important recent paper on this, see Matt Sleat here, which nicely refutes the idea that such political norms must be non-moral a view he associates with my colleague Enzo Rossi.) And Lazar's slender work (but fertile in ideas) ought to have a place in the developing canon of recent political realism.*

Be that as may, as should be clear from what I said above I do not think Locke is committed to such bifurcation between quotidian ethics and existential ethics. Because for Locke the state of nature is livable, the preservation of order is always instrumental to the grounds of (entering) civil society.

Having said that,  Lazar's view does characterize Hume's position nicely. (For recent work on Hume as such a political realist, see Andrew Sabl's book (here), and my paper.) As the quoted passage above makes clear, in his ideal constitutional order, Hume made place for provisions of states of emergency. That order -- it is a federation -- is modeled (and Hume is explicit on this) on Dutch political arrangements improved in light of experience. And, in fact, Hume's construction quite clearly addresses a weakness in the Dutch political order that Hume has diagnosed in his History. That in foreign policy affairs its decision-making process could be too slow and so too vulnerable to foreign influence: 

The articles of this confederacy [viz. the defensive alliance between England Holland negotiated by Temple and De Witt] were soon adjusted by such candid and able negotiators: But the greatest difficulty still remained. By the constitution of the republic, all the towns in all the provinces must give their consent to every alliance; and besides that this formality could not be dispatched in less than two months, it was justly to be dreaded, that the influence of France would obstruct the passing of the treaty in some of the smaller cities. D’Estrades, the French ambassador, a man of abilities, hearing of the league, which was on the carpet, treated it lightly; “Six weeks hence,” said he, “we shall speak to it.” To obviate this difficulty, de Wit had the courage, for the public good, to break through the laws in so fundamental an article; and by his authority, he prevailed with the States General at once to sign and ratify the league: Though they acknowledged,13th Jan. that, if that measure should displease their constituents, they risqued their heads by this irregularity. [Emphasis added]

The emphasized part in the quoted passage nicely illustrates one of Lazar's key points that even in an emergency, a political leader is aware of the reality of accountability and acts accordingly.+

In larger context, Hume presents De Witt as acting for the survival of the Dutch republic which is threatened by (their former ally) France which has just overrun Flanders. And so the alliance with England is negotiated (while England and Holland are still at war with each other!) in order to save "the remaining provinces of the Low Countries could be thereby saved from the danger, with which they were at present threatened." And it is clear that for Hume the survival of the state, the continued existence of order (and property), "the public good" justifies the means. While Hume rejects the social contract, he is in this respect closer to Hobbes than to Locke (as I have argued in a paper with Spencer Pack here).

That, for Hume, non-liberal values can guide the art of government is illustrated by Hume's praise for the De Witt (earlier in the 1665 war with England) "by his management a spirit of union was preserved in all the provinces." This shows that for Hume the conditions that maintain the survival of the state -- this includes among them such a public spirit -- are, indeed, part of the non-liberal art of government. So, I'd like to suggest that Hume (who I am here treating as a key thinker in the liberal tradition) is the historical figure that anticipates Lazar's position.

 

 

Freedom in The Dawn of Everything, Pt 1.

But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
   What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ‘propping-up’ of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force – which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.
    It’s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.--David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, p. 503.

After live-tweeting my impressions of each chapter (see here for links) of The Dawn of Everything, I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog about it. But the last few weeks the book has been popping up in various Digressions. So, it's time to confront it more directly. And since I have actually not seen yet a substantive discussion of their account of freedom (a topic I also have modest amount of expertise), I thought I start there. My treatment is mostly expository, but I will share a few reservations along the way.

The quoted passage is from the conclusion and actually nicely reveals some key features of the (anarchist) political philosophy that is immanent in the work. Just so that you don't think I am cherry-picking, earlier in the book, they called these "the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships." (p. 426)

The first freedom  -- (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings -- is familiar as exit. (It is bit strange that it is not discussed in the terms made familiar by Albert Hirschman in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty back in the early 1970s.)+ Crucially in The Dawn of Everything, when this freedom is discussed, it is in the context of the social infrastructure that makes it possible. An especially memorable treatment is the way in which people can wander in and out of tribes and societies over enormous distances in turtle island (North America). I quote their own summary:

It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism (even if we can’t stand our actual brother and haven’t spoken to him for years). What’s more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we’ve seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety systems across Australia. This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome. (p. 280)

What this shows is that the kind of political/social exit they are interested in requires a pre-existing social infrastructure (a scaffolding in their terms) to allow people to enter somewhere else. And this infrastructure (in this case the Turtle and Bear clans) functions orthogonally to the political units that people are exiting from and entering into. If I understand the larger argument of the book correctly this infrastructure is partially the effect of myths and narratives that generate collective teaching on important political events of the past. (I say partially because other practices must sustain the infrastructure.)

In fact, one of the neatest elements on the book is how often what I would like to call longue durée memory is salient. (See, especially, their treatment of Teotilihuacan in chapter 9 and Cahokia in chapter 11.) Their longue durée can be centuries long! The politically salient memory is often encoded in myths and shared narratives as a reservoir for important political choices.  This is one way in which (1) enters into (3). 

In this sense, Graeber and Wengrow contribute to the overcoming of what I once called (recall) two classical conceptions of myth: first, myth is associated with superstition and something to be overcome by modernity and rationalization. On this view, which takes myth seriously as the necessary stepping stone toward a political or ethical decision that removes us from the state of myth. The other, second, classical conception is that myth just is the stuff of everydayness, an ordinary comportment or way of being in the world. But as they show myth can also be constitutive of debates involving rational political choice. And those of us trained in the classical conceptions of myth have to unlearn our biases against myth. As regular readers know I came to the view through my encounter with Aaron Tugendhaft's beautiful (2017) Baal and the Politics of Poetry,* which nicely complements their chapters 7-8.*

But to have a shared myth and to share in social infrastructure orthogonal to political units means one shares significant features of (ahh) a culture. So, one does not get this kind of exit -- Neil Levy alerted me to this -- simply. Admittedly this is a feature not a bug of their approach. Today, too many states are creating lots of severe obstacles to entry and exit. (Strikingly more than in, say, the nineteenth century.) 

Before I move on to the second freedom, it is worth noting that some of  the most interesting features of the book for political philosophy are the way these collective choices are themselves effects of a process of large scale cultural schismogenesis; that is, the tendency of whole peoples to define themselves against each other. And while I was sad they ignored all the modern political science literature on polarization, I thought their examples truly fascinating and will discuss them again in the future (see also below).

The second freedom (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others -- is rather important to the anarchic project of The Dawn of Everything. It is also really a breath of fresh air. For, one annoying feature of the scholarly debate within political philosophy (about liberal democracies) is that many bread and butter journal articles basically involve arguments about what and when states and their officers may legitimately compel their citizens (and even more their non-citizens). The impulse behind these articles is basically noble -- they always involve arguments that conclude considerable limitations on what folk can be compelled to do --, but I have to admit these discussions prevented me from self-identifying as a political philosopher for a long time. It basically turns our devotion to our disciplinary projects as ahh the nicest functionary of the modern state. (This is also visible in discussions on civil disobedience and immigration.)

The second freedom is really incompatible with statehood. Even the freest modern states compel lots of actions (not just taxation), and raise enormous costs to even relatively trivial disobedience. Much of this is completely internalized by their citizens. In part because they thereby solve endless coordination problems and avoid unpleasant friction with their neighbors. The small number of commands that are politicized and matters of controversy should not obscure these facts. That is to say, while I think (public) opinion is far more important in such matters than Graeber and Wengrow allow, one should not ignore the violent underpinnings (including the many small fines) of the system.

It's pretty clear from The Dawn of Everything that in societies in which one may ignore commands, there are fewer of them and that they involve considerable pre-existing discussion. But these come at a cost they themselves note (about all kinds of local governments), "resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair." (p. 426) As I noted yesterday (recall here; which includes a section on their book, but is not presupposed here), societies in which the division of labor is advanced tend to avoid this approach. And, in reasonably well functioning liberal societies, the right and luxury to ignore politics are one of its great blessings. Of course, this comes at the price of bureaucracy.

Throughout The Dawn of Everything, there is a polemic against bureaucracy. I don't think they ever have a nice thing to say about it, and they often say bad things about it. And this is because at bottom they see it as a species of "domination" grounded in "knowledge," and buttressed by a domination based on (state) "violence." Interestingly enough, the word 'impartial' or its cognates never appears in the book! So, what fairness  (decoupled from norms of impartiality) means for Graeber and Wengrow always involves some kind of local, particular judgment. In most contexts I myself prefer impartiality over particular judgment, but since bureaucracies are themselves shaped by unequal background conditions, I can understand why others might demur. 

The third freedom -- (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones -- is a collective one. For those who are entirely unfamiliar with the book (and the discussion about it), the book is full of examples in which whole societies switch major social organization (often seasonally). As I noted on Twitter, such collective switching when it really matters (so not traditions of carnival) are familiar to early twentieth century Europeans, who switched dramatically between collective mobilization and peace-time economies.

But the more important point is that for Graeber and Wengrow this third freedom also involves the collective rejection of the trappings of statehood (and its violence and hierarchy) altogether by particular groups. For readers of the Hebrew Bible this is not unfamiliar because the early narrative is (as Yoram Hazony notes in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture), all about shepherds trying to avoid empire a theme discussed with scientific rigor in James C. Scott works. But they add huge number of examples, and -- most interestingly -- also point to large urban settlements as examples.  

In fact, their understanding of such collective freedom to shape new social realities often comes close to what we political theorists call, republican features of self-governance familiar from (ahh) Rousseau and Machiavelli. (Rousseau's Discourses on Inequality is mentioned a lot to motivate the discussion (about that some other time perhaps), but The Social Contract isn't at all.) In fact, as the book proceeds popular assemblies are mentioned with greater frequency and as a positive alternative to democracy as understood in modern representative/elected democracies. A key passage is this one: "Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlooker." (p. 367)

They go on to explain that the 'larger-than-life' individuals are modeled on the (anti-urban) aristocratic values. They present this as wholly original, and indeed their discussion is fresh. But the eighteenth century scholar in me is amused; in my introductory lecture courses on the history of political theory, I always make a big deal about the contrast between direct and indirect democracy, and I always add for good measure that what we would call 'democracy' would have have been called 'aristocratic' by the Greek ancients (sometimes mentioning Madison in passing). [Update: on twitter David Wengrow pointed out, correctly, that on p. 311-312, they credit the idea to Munro Chadwick and their "contribution is to trace the opposition back to the very origin of cities (and aristocracies) in the fourth millennium BC." My presentation misrepresents their view here, and so I am happy to correct it.]

Kidding aside, the significance of the quote from p 367 is that it kind of offers a window into the ways they view assemblies which oddly sound like Habermasian affairs and -- while I enormously respect Graeber and Wengrow -- is wholly at odds with what we know about most documented urban assemblies from literary sources not just in the ancient world but also medieval European world (or the New England town hall). They rightly reject the idea that we should treat reports of indigenous assemblies as plagiarisms from Livy. But it is worth reading Livy (amongst others), who is (for all of his inventions) a pretty useful source on the ways in which assemblies are turbulent and raucous affairs. And even when calm, often such assemblies are dominated by a few figures (often aristocratic in some pertinent local sense) in which many others have a much smaller role to play. In fact, their own (again fascinating) treatment of the decision by the Ayuntamiento (city council) of Tlaxcala to ally itself with Cortés fits this pattern.

I don't mean to deny that sometimes assemblies can avoid results that involve winners and losers, but that's true of representative parliaments. To put the point conceptually, assemblies and parliaments are mechanisms for collective decision-making and they both have features that promote ways to avoid zero-sum outcomes, but they also have features that generate it. (For example, in popular assemblies without secret ballot, it is very difficult to stand against 'the consensus.') That is to say, I was not at all convinced they have started to offer a compelling argument here. What they have done, and this is no mean feat, is to sketch the anarchist position in lively and appealing colors (see Justin Smith's essay on the book). But they do not offer a sober comparative analysis.

The previous paragraphs may hide what's crucial here. The freedom to shape entirely new social realities is not itself incompatible with liberal democracy (as I already remarked above with the terrifying example of the world wars). To illustrate this I quote an anecdote apparently due to Élie Halévy, but which I read in Ortega y Gasset. I use this anecdote because thanks to BLM the topic is highly salient again, and in their terms the adoption of a real police force is a major disaster for a community (see the quote at the top of this post).  I use Ortega y Gasset because he is an elitist liberal (I have not edited away his class biases), and so far removed from Graeber and Wengrow. Since at the time France and England were great rivals, I think the anecdote also illustrates their notion of schismogenesis:

It might be well to take advantage of our touching on this matter to observe the different reaction to a public need manifested by different types of society. When, about 1800, the new industry began to create a type of man- the industrial worker-more criminally inclined than traditional types, France hastened to create a numerous police force. Towards 1810 there occurs in England, for the same reasons, an increase in criminality, and the English suddenly realise that they have no police. The Conservatives are in power. What will they do? Will they establish a police force? Nothing of the kind. They prefer to put up with crime, as well as they can. "People are content to let disorder alone, considering it the price they pay for liberty." "In Paris," writes John William Ward, "they have an admirable police force, but they pay dear for its advantages. I prefer to see, every three or four years, half a dozen people getting their throats cut in the Ratcliffe Road, than to have to submit to domiciliary visits, to spying, and to all the machinations of Fouche."  Here we have two opposite ideas of the State. The Englishman demands that the State should have limits set to it.--The Revolt of the Masses, 123-124.

What is worth reflecting on, in light of their book, is why such large scale social decisions seem so rare in liberal democracy.  And this is connected to what they describe in terms of the question "How did we get stuck?" That's actually a very important question for political philosophy.  To be continued.

Cancel Culture Just is the Market-Place of Ideas

1. Free expression is probably at an all-time high right now, at least in the West. There is a huge variety of different venues for your writing, there’s a whole new world podcasts for speeches, and an ever-increasing supply of video outlets. The availability of these platforms and publishers doesn’t guarantee you an audience, but that’s not what free expression means.
2. Related to that, some of the technologies that have enabled easy speech have made counter-speech extraordinarily easy as well.
3. There are a lot more people who are not you than there are people who are you, and so easy counter-speech means that it’s entirely possible to get inundated with unpleasantness.
4. Because of (2 and 3), people are often careful about what they say, and may feel burdened by this.
5. It is hard to get (1) without (2). The ability to broadcast to others means that they can broadcast back.
6. (4) may hit socially well-positioned people, but it hits vulnerable people far more.--Ryan Muldoon "Free Expression and Evolving Standards" @Radical Classical Liberals

By 'cancel culture' I mean the organized efforts to silence others (e.g., their invitations rescinded, and their honorary doctorates denied, moved to assignments with other duties, etc.) without recourse to violence and state authority (that would be censorship).* I have defined it like this to be permissive to efforts that would also be classified as civil disobedience. In this sense cancel culture just is the marketplace of ideas at work. The currency in this market is approval/disapproval (or credit/discredit in the old sense). There is, thus, nothing especially new in cancel culture, although thanks to social media the mechanisms by which it operates are more virtual than ever before. Obviously, for some this is a reason to reject markets; these are the very people that still pine for Betamax.

That is, cancel culture is a disorderly market. It is very much at odds with a picture of democracy that emphasizes reasoned (and civil) debate. And so on a certain (deliberative) conception of democracy cancel culture is problematic as a mechanism of public opinion formation and preparing of collective action. This is why (they treat it as a virtue not a bug) deliberative democrats spend so much time on the pre-conditions of deliberative spaces. 

But cancel culture is one of the ways in which otherwise dispersed and often disorganized individuals can make the more powerful take notice of their views. Sometimes it is very intimidating. I have been on the receiving end of such efforts, and it is no fun (especially when you realize the folk filling your inbox are affiliated with neonazis).  And there is no doubt that cancel culture can shade into threats of violence or misfire at targets who are in no sense worthy of public opprobrium (just unlucky). 

The previous two paragraphs elide a distinction; marxists (see William Clare Roberts) view cancel culture as crowds in action whereas the critics (e.g., Dan Crenshaw, who is one of the more thoughtful Republicans in the House) use 'mob'. I prefer to see cancel culture (and here I am indebted to Tyler Cowen) as a thin association--sometimes there is coordination, mostly -- in the headline grabbing cases -- it seems to be individuals who come together to express their indignation. If the association is durable, we start (recall) calling it a faction or a party.+ (I return to this below.)

So far I have given a broadly Millian interpretation of cancel culture. He thought (recall here and here) that public opinion was needed to check the abuses of the powerful. But the price for that is, as he worried, the danger of conformism (policed by "vituperative" speech). And, there is no doubt that the cumulative effects of cancel culture, like all widely used preference aggregation mechanisms, may be conformism (yes, VHS displaced Betamax). So, while cancel culture is a possibly effective means in breaking up a cozy cartel, it may lead to a homogeneous landscape.

Now, one may think that indignation is the problem here. Indignation seems inimical to liberal political life. Yet, as Adam Smith reminds us, such sense of "sympathetic indignation" is at the root of justice. In its institutions this sense is sublimated and through the rules of evidence and reason redirected to proper ends. (Recall this post on Srinivasan and the aptness of anger.) But this pushes the problem back because such sympathetic indignation may well be corrupted, and is often corrupted, by other commitments and interests. So, perhaps, on balance, and this is my own inclination, liberals should be weary of anything that encourages the crowd? 

This is too easy because such indignation may well be at the root of political life. As Spinoza puts it in his Political Treatise: "men are led...more by passion than reason, it follows, that a multitude comes together, and wishes to be guided, as it were, by one mind, not at the suggestion of reason, but of some common passion...or the desire of avenging some common hurt." (6.1)  Somewhat surprisingly, as Chantal Jaquet has noted, this very desire is at the root of political authority  "the right of the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude" and it is ground in the "desire to avenge some common hurt." (3.9) Political life is a kind of sublimation and domestication of this subsisting indignation. The effect of righteousness is social peace.

What is noticeable in nearly all the critics of cancel culture is that they refuse to engage with the grounds of indignation. Tactically, one understands this move because it helps ferment polarization (and so opportunities for profit) and cement group identity. Morally it is a mistake because one fails to heed the call of justice. Strategically, it is a worse mistake because one, thereby, misses the causal forces that shape the changing directions of the tectonic plates, which are the sediments of and constraints on the marketplace of ideas, of political life.

In December 2015 (look at that date!) I noted that Trump's rise to power within the Republican party was clearly an effect of the sense of indignation in that tribe and a loss of faith in its elites. I tend to view cancel culture in American public life as doing something similar to the intellectual opinion leaders of our time. Since our for profit public culture and media feed on indignation, we should expect a turbulent time ahead.**  The market giveth and taketh away, and it dances to the tune of fortune.**  

 

On George Stigler and the "Problem of the Negro"

The leaders of Negro thought in America have done the members of their race one substantial service and one much greater disservice. The service was to arouse discontent with the pace at which the social, political, and economic status of the Negro was rising. That the Negro has been becoming wealthier, better educated, more fully enfranchised, and less improperly treated by his white brethren is not seriously arguable. But the distance still to be covered is immense, and no man may say that the pace of 1940 or 1950 is the maximum that should be aimed at in raising the Negro's status.

Nor is the raising of discontent an easy or an uncourageous act. Long slumbering inequities become almost foreordained in their persistence, and a conscious and sustained and even dramatic challenge to the inequities is required. Nor will the leaders of the challenge, who disturb the comfortable flow of customary events, be treated with civility or respect—they are indeed deliberate trouble-makers.

For trouble is apparently the threshold of progress. A society does not respond quickly, or sometimes even at all, to calm rational arguments or to powerful ethical principles. The drama of personal injustice, the presence of devils (or at least of villains or prejudiced holders of privilege), full membership in the righteous, marching columns— these seem to be essential in any basic reform in the United States today (and perhaps in all countries always). So indignation must be produced, and remedies provided in catechism form.

Wrong Target

The great disservice of the leaders of Negro opinion was to direct the discontent at the white population. It was proper to demand political rights that only a majority could confer. It was proper to ask the white population to assist in the rise of the Negro—a small enough restitution for the unreversible [sic] mistakes of the past. Rut [sic] it was a terrible disservice to identify the white man as the main obstacle to the rise of the negro.

It was a disservice because it must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance of the white mean. [sic] Could the stream of demonstrations, growing in size and in insolence, approved or at least tolerated by the political, intellectual, and religious leaders of the nation, have any other message for a semi-literate Negro teenager in a slum, than that evil prejudice of the white man was the fundamental cause of his low estate? Was he to be a metaphysician, distinguishing carefully the demonstration of the principle of the dignity of all men from the proposition that every inadequacy of his life was due to white opposition?

But the disservice was terrible for a more dreadful reason: it was false as a guide to improvement. The past is not for us to relive, and no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end. The task of our time has been to make the Negro discontented with himself, not with the white man.

Educational Needs

Consider education. It would be easy to vote a Ph.D. for every young Negro in America—such a handsome restitution for past denial of educational rights! Good educational facilities, better facilities than whites have, are indeed a moral responsibility of the community to the Negro. The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth. Schools beyond any need can be built in a few years: the love of knowledge and the willingness to work hard and achieve it are the product of cultural evolution. The Negro leaders should be helping the emergence of this cultural tradition, when instead they are diverting Negro energies to better school buildings.

Inferior Workers

Consider employment. The Negro boy is excluded from many occupations by the varied barriers the prejudice can raise, and these must and will be struck down. But he is excluded from more occupations by his own inferiority as a orker, again on average. Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers' competition. What leader of Negro thought is fostering the ancient virtues of diligence and honesty and loyalty? It is so much easier to seek quotas for Negroes,

Consider the Negro as a neighbor. He is frequently repelled and avoided by the white man, but is it only color prejudice? On the contrary, it is because the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group, and brings with its presence a rapid rise in crime and vandalism. No statutes, no sermons, no demonstrations, will obtain for the Negro the liking and respect that sober virtues commend. And the leaders of Negro thought: they blame the crime and immorality upon the slums and the low income— as if individual responsibility could be bought with a thousand dolllars a year.

It is not easy or popular to place the Negro's discontent upon himself. People will insist upon speaking of the previous or present faults of the white community, which numerous and deplorable—and now unimportant to the Negro problem. People will denounce any talk of the Negro's cultural and economic inferiority as racism, thinking no doubt that to ignore the heritage of past ignorance and vice and folly of the white man and the black man will eliminate the heritage.

One would think that the lesson of the Jews in America would have been taken somewhat more to heart. The Jewish immigrants were on average poor. with meagre education. and confronted by a vast panoply of prejudice. They brought with them precisely the virtues that should be instilled in the Negro: a veneration and irrepressible desire for learning; frugality; and respect for the civilization of the western world. They have prospered amazingly, not only economically but educationally and socially and culturally, and in the process have enriched and adorned our society., They are in the rapid process of losing their identity—at the present pace in a few generations wee shall all have a little, but only a little Jewish blood.

The direction of the Negro's discontent to himself is an unthankful task. How much easier to march on the mayor than to teach industry to a boy: how much simpler to keep the children home to coerce the school board than to instill in them a love of art and literature and science. The task does not allot a large role to the prominent leaders, and calls for different traits. Knowledge is more valuable than anger, and love more valuable than generosity in the task that faces us.

The leaders of Negro opinion are benevolent men, caught in the belief that the only arm of social improvement is the state. The Africans are poor and ignorant? Out with colonialism! The American Negro ids a lesser citizen? To the barricades! No—to the home and church and school.--G.J. Stigler (1965)* "The Problem of the Negro" New Guard, [HT Calvin Ter Beek via Brad deLong]

I am unsure when I first decided to try to face squarely the racist and eugenic elements in the authors I study. I do know that in the late 1990s, it was David M. Levy and Sandra Peart that repeatedly alerted me (and others) to the significance of these themes for the (joint and separate) history of economics and history of philosophy and that how this history is handled also matters to the future of these disciplines (and their interactions). So, alerted I increasingly started to notice eugenic and racialized themes in places I least expected when I was still a PhD student (e.g., Berkeley's Querist; young Neurath; Voltaire; Hume and Montesquieu; etc.) Over the years I have tried to alert my readers to these sordid facts and their conceptual and philosophical significance. 

Prompted by a chance encounter with Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, I have also come to see that universities today struggle to own up to their eugenic past and ongoing eugenic commitments (recall here; here; here; here). I don't think that struggle is a contingent matter. By this I do not mean that universities today are primarily still interested in advancing racialized or cultural hierarchy -- although undoubtedly some faculty don't see why this would be problematic --, but rather that in the very ideas of bildung and emancipation, improvement of humans is baked in. This shows up in all kinds of ways in the  efforts of bio-medicine-technology at human enhancement. I don't need to remind my audience how frequent universities tie themselves in knots over their inability to convey a consistent approach to academic freedom and, say, minimum respect for all.

Even so, I was really shocked by Stigler's essay. (Stigler won a Nobel in economics in 1982.) I have frequently blogged and published in scholarly journals about Stigler and been reading him on and off for about twenty five years now. This is not a coincidence. Levy was one of George Stigler's few PhD students in the history of economics. And his son, Stephen Stigler (an eminent historian of statistics) was on faculty at Chicago. I remember my nervousness and pride when I took on the father's interpretation of Adam Smith in front of the very kind son (who since has given me permission to work with his father's archives and even checked his library on my behalf once). 

As an aside, I was in the audience, when Stephen Stigler presented a version of his interpretation of the debate between Pigou and Pearson to Chicago's philosophy department. The debate is of interest because of the way they handled what came known as the amalgamation or Simpson's paradox. But the background is the scientific status of eugenic ideas. Only later did I realize how much of modern statistics was developed to enhance or make rigorous eugenic reasoning. For a while I was very fond of Pigou until I realized how immersed in eugenics he really was, too.

Okay, let's turn to Stigler troubling piece. First, he starts by acknowledging that "calm rational arguments" and the enunciation of "powerful ethical principles" have little impact on public opinion and tend to be impotent in generating welcome, even necessary reform. Echoing Machiavelli, he recognizes

that dramatic challenge and turbulence may be required to prompt social reform. And Stigler here anticipates his later, more famous claim (that helped him win the Nobel) that to influence policy one must understand (recall) “the political forces which confine and direct policy.” Stigler clearly believes, with Madison, that politics is the realm of opinion. This is also evident in (the title of) his essays, in which he reflects on the relationship between economics and politics, The Economist as Preacher, and Other Essays.

But it does not follow that there is no method in the political madness. In fact, in one of his most famous papers, he explicitly rejects the then popular idea "that the political process defies rational explanation: "politics" is an imponderable, a constantly and unpredictably shifting mixture of forces of the most diverse nature, comprehending acts of great moral virtue (the emancipation of slaves) and of the most vulgar venality..."' (Note the example.)

Unlike other critics of the civil rights movement, Stigler is, thus, not tempted by tone-policing. Anticipating contemporary philosophers (who (recall) draw on Lorde; and here; here), he thinks indignation in public life may not just be fully justified, but also instrumentally necessary to produce reform. And, in fact, his idea of politics is not idealized at all. He fully expects that the "courageous" leaders of the civil rights movement will not be treated with "civility or respect." Given that he recognizes this, his use of "insolence" is odd to say the least.

But despite this stance, Stigler's attitude toward civil rights leader is not just unsympathetic, it's contemptuous (note the repeated "disservice"). This is all the more remarkable because Stigler does not deny that it is true that "the white man" is an "obstacle to the rise of the negro." Rather, he demands from the subordinated that they do not offend the sensitivities of the majority because it "must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance." And the contempt here is not just for the civil rights leaders and their followers, but also for the non elite white majority. For it is assumed that their response to the truth must be hatred and violence. It does not occur to Stigler to explore that hatred and violence may be engineered by local white elites who fear that their power will be undermined. (This would fit his rent-seeking view of politics.)

At this point, I need to note something. Stigler's economics was, despite the clear political preference for free markets, in this period data-driven. His studies of monopoly and even the sociology of knowledge are data rich. His style of economics, especially in the 1940s-1960s, was neither like the highly mathematical work that was dominating general equilibrium modeling nor like the back of the envelope calculations of consumer surplus pioneered by his Chicago colleague Harberger. It was also little like the work he later did with Becker. So with that in mind, we can see how things go really off-rails, when Stigler notes that "no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end." 

First, as one of the pre-eminent historians of economics of his generation, Stigler was familiar with both Adam Smith's denunciations of slavery, and the 19th century debates in political economy over how to use compensation principles to rectify injustices.** So, it is astonishing that he takes for granted that restitution would not contribute greatly (let alone) solve the basic problem.

Second, and undeniably racist, he makes gross generalizations without any evidence about the psychological disposition of a whole population ("on average). Since Adam Smith is Stigler's hero, it is worth noting that for Smith it is axiomatic that there is "uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived." And as I have noted elsewhere this is part of Smith's anti-hierarchical conception of human nature.

Third, since in the very period African-Americans were subject to violence while trying to access education, it is appalling to read Stigler assert that "The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth." And no less appalling are the fact free claims that "the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group." And so on. Whatever merit, if any, Stigler's underlying economic criticism of the solutions pursued by the leaders of the civil rights movement might have had, it is completely overshadowed by his willingness to engage in racialized stereotyping and victim blaming.+

Let me close. I was sincerely shocked when I read Stigler's essay. I want to explain why. This shock is, in part, because I intend to understand Chicago economics as opposed to the state-centric eugenics tendency they loath in Keynes (and Pigou). And, in part, because I understand them as heirs to the cosmopolitan and anti-racist tendencies evident in the founders of neoliberalism--many of them outspokenly antiracist (even if their modern critics tend to overlook this or very grudgingly acknowledge this). 

I am by no means an uncritical admire of Stigler in my own work. Despite admiring some of his sociology of knowledge, I have long argued he is partially response for the abuse of Kuhnian ideas as a means to silence alternative viewpoints in science. But because of his fondness of pithy phrases and institutional centrality, I have often used his writings (in this blog and my scholarship) to illustrate or illuminate debates within economics or in the philosophy of economics.  But this does not get to heart of the matter.

Stigler was (recall) centrally involved in articulating, the Kalven report, one of the most thoughtful reports on the mission of higher education and the role of academic freedom in it. (I have critically discussed this report in a number of blog posts.) This is somebody that clearly took his task as an educator seriously, and he wrote non trivially on the economics of education. Yet, when given the opportunity to educate the "Young Americans for Freedom" (The New Guard was its house organ, and the organization was influenced by  of William F. Buckley, Jr.), he pandered not their best instincts, but to their worst prejudices. 

Workers are neither Investors nor Citizens of Firms

Working humans are so much more than “resources”. This is one of the central lessons of the current crisis. Caring for the sick; delivering food, medication and other essentials; clearing away our waste; stocking the shelves and running the registers in our grocery stores – the people who have kept life going through the Covid-19 pandemic are living proof that work cannot be reduced to a mere commodity. Human health and the care of the most vulnerable cannot be governed by market forces alone. If we leave these things solely to the market, we run the risk of exacerbating inequalities to the point of forfeiting the very lives of the least advantaged.

How to avoid this unacceptable situation? By involving employees in decisions relating to their lives and futures in the workplace – by democratising firms. By decommodifying work – by collectively guaranteeing useful employment to all. As we face the monstrous risk of pandemic and environmental collapse, making these strategic changes would allow us to ensure the dignity of all citizens while marshalling the collective strength and effort we need to preserve our life together on this planet.

Every morning, men and women, especially members of racialised communities, migrants and informal economy workers, rise to serve those among us who are able to remain under quarantine. They keep watch through the night. The dignity of their jobs needs no other explanation than that eloquently simple term “essential worker”. That term also reveals a key fact that capitalism has always sought to render invisible with another term, “human resource”. Human beings are not one resource among many. Without labor investors, there would be no production, no services, no businesses at all.

Every morning, men and women, especially members of racialised communities, migrants and informal economy workers, rise to serve those among us who are able to remain under quarantine. They keep watch through the night. The dignity of their jobs needs no other explanation than that eloquently simple term “essential worker”. That term also reveals a key fact that capitalism has always sought to render invisible with another term, “human resource”. Human beings are not one resource among many. Without labor investors, there would be no production, no services, no businesses at all.

To the question of how firms and how society as a whole might recognise the contributions of their employees in times of crisis, democracy is the answer. Certainly, we must close the yawning chasm of income inequality and raise the income floor – but that alone is not enough. After the two world wars, women’s undeniable contribution to society helped win them the right to vote. By the same token, it is time to enfranchise workers.

Representation of labour investors in the workplace has existed in Europe since the close of the second world war, through institutions known as works councils. Yet these representative bodies have a weak voice at best in the government of firms, and are subordinate to the choices of the executive management teams appointed by shareholders. They have been unable to stop or even slow the relentless momentum of self-serving capital accumulation, ever more powerful in its destruction of our environment. These bodies should now be granted similar rights to those exercised by boards. To do so, firm governments (that is, top management) could be required to obtain double majority approval, from chambers representing workers as well as shareholders

In Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, different forms of codetermination (Mitbestimmung) put in place progressively after the second world war were a crucial step toward giving a voice to workers – but they are still insufficient to create actual citizenship in firms...  https://democratizingwork.org/ "Coronavirus shows why we must democratise work.   @The Guardian, May 15, 2020

A few weeks ago I was asked repeatedly to co-sign the widely translated and circulated petition partially quoted above. Since some influential thinkers were already signed up, and I am (here and here) a friend of virtue signaling (for a nice argument see here), so the temptation to join in a noble cause was great. But I also knew that the text -- undoubtedly a messy compromise among the early drafters -- could not be changed anymore. And while I shared in the eloquently expressed concerns, in particular that badly designed and hasty bail-outs will just reinforce a flawed status quo, I could not in good good conscience co-sign. I have a number of conceptual and empirical reservations, and as I reflected on these I realized that I find the whole underlying vision of this document misguided.

 

Workers and employees are not "citizens" of firms and their "top management" is not a "government," and they should not be. Just as we should resist the corporate newspeak which turns every customer or client into a 'friend,' 'family-member' or 'patron,' we should resist (the corporatist-democratic-speak) turning our employee status into one one of citizenship. As a metaphor it's misleading as an aspiration fearsome.

 

If a worker is treated as a citizen of a company then you open the door for a company or bureaucratic organization to view itself as a sovereign over these 'citizens'. This is undesirable if only because plenty of states that insist on continuing a whole series of claims on and obligations to emigrants (that is, former citizens) and exiles who want nothing to do with these states. If companies start viewing themselves as sovereigns there is little conceptual space to prevent the increasing encroachment of their power over the lives of employees. 

 

You may think that citizenship is the answer to the very real existing problem of corporate tyranny and arbitrary powers over workers. But this is an instance where the solution is worse than the problem. Once one has sovereignty and, say, a subsidiary principle (common in federative polities) then rather than treating the state as a countervailing power to corporations and non-profits and non-profits and corporations as a countervailing powers to the state, these will become delegated powers. In states that are politically weak and poor, this will merely accelerate the power of corporations against the government. In states that are rich this will only increase the legal space for corporate control over employees' lives outside work hours. Sovereign power is, in principle, unlimited.

 

As an aside, it is notable that the petition wishes to 'decommodify' work by rejecting the conceptualization of workers as “human resource,” and conceptualize these "stakeholders" as "labor investors." Evidently human capital theory has -- despite talk of "dignity" -- a firm grip on the imagination of the drafters of the petition. But to treat workers as labor investors is a disastrous move because it encourages firms to shift their risks even more onto the backs of workers. This has already happened with many workers' pensions and is correctly treated as an instance of neoliberalism gone amok.

 

Strikingly the petition does not address the problem by calling for rights of individual employees against their new sovereigns. (Oddly, the petition only recognizes  "collective rights;" I return to this below.) Rather it calls for  more 'democracy' within firms. What's fascinating to me is that the very institution that has failed to provide the relevant protections at the national level (democracy), which is responsible for the existing status quo in most rich countries, is now called upon to rectify the problem at the individual firm/organization level. But why think that genuine democracy would work better within firms?  We are never told. I close with two observations on this.

 

First, the petition kind of pretends as if the status quo, or at least "human health and the care of the most vulnerable" is "governed by market forces alone." At one point it says "that market mechanisms alone cannot be left in charge of the choices that affect our communities most deeply" and implies this is the case "in the health sector." This may have been true in the nineteenth century, but we are very far removed from this situation today. Democratic legislation governs most of the pre-conditions of and constraints on economic life directly through licensing, zoning, health and safety regulations, subsidies, etc. and indirectly through taxes and trade regulation. The health sector, in particular, is among the most regulated of all industries at all levels even in the United States. (In many other places, the provision of care is either in government hands or under substantial government control.) That is to say the current situation is itself the outcome of the multi-faceted and open-ended play of political and market forces.  To pretend otherwise does not help solve the problem. What's really needed is education and, in particular, mass political mobilization at the national and international level (including, I agree, strengthening of union rights).

 

Second, I agree with the petition that the rich have been winning too many of the political battles in government. But why think they won't do so more in corporations? In particular, why think democracy will do a great job protecting the most vulnerable workers? Odds are that left to their own democratic devices within corporations, management and the educated and wealthier workers will combine against the most vulnerable. That's what democracies tend to, after all. (Even unions, alas, do not have a stellar record on this score.) Similarly, judging by our existing democratic politics, there is also no reason to expect that democratic firms will be green in virtue of being democratic. And once legitimated by and understood as sovereign power, the space to resist, to exit, or to experiment with alternatives has been narrowed which is welcome to the corporate class, but nobody else.

 

 

 

 

[Guest Blogger Amy Olberding on] Corpse Display and Anger

[This is an invited guest post by Amy Olberding.--ES]

Eric’s recent post about anger and corpse display left me unsatisfied with how anger is typically and traditionally addressed.  There’s no tidy way to trace out the concatenation of ideas Eric’s post inspired – it starts with Xunzi talking about how to treat a corpse respectfully, turns then toward Plato considering Leontius’ viewing of a desecrated corpse and, more broadly, what looking at a desecrated corpse is meant to inspire, and then ends up at Agnes Callard on anger.  Maybe the simple explanation is this: display of desecrated corpses is an especially vivid case of human anger, and it often does interlock with moral sensibilities in curious ways.  As Eric notes, the display of the corpse summons the eye and then a response to what is seen.  Anger would standardly inform the reasoning to display the corpse in the first place, and some of that anger is likely meant to transmute and become the witness’ own.  So display of the desecrated corpse is clearly a case that invites consideration of anger. 

But maybe it’s also useful as a way to think about the limitations of our philosophical discussions of anger.  That, at least, is what occurs to me. 

Callard’s recent article divides philosophical accounts of anger into two broad types: pro-anger or anti-anger.  Both sides inevitably need more nuance than this.  Recognizing the moral perils of anger unchecked, the pro-anger advocates are left to argue for management and regulation, lest anger run away with us.  Likewise, recognizing anger’s motivating power where moral ills are concerned, the anti-anger advocates are left to argue that we still need (the far more bloodless) indignation to respond to injustices.  The “sides” here, Callard argues, inadvertently converge because both are trying to recognize a morally palatable anger (or anger-ish?) response when injustices demand some moral-emotive response.  They’re both engaging in moral reasoning that aims to tame and domesticate the wild in us – to encourage measured or regulated abhorrence at wrong without licensing the brute unreasoning stuff that inspires revenge and grudges.  Callard’s argument then pivots to considering the simpler, less attractive conclusion that efforts to purify anger overlook that anger’s impulses – revenge and grudges – are rationally justified. We are left then, with the conclusion that “anger implicates all of us in moral corruption.”  The purified forms of anger moral philosophers are ready to endorse are “a philosopher’s fiction” that work to “distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger, which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood.”

My concern, I suppose, is that it’s all a philosopher’s fiction – that the way philosophy’s methods typically oblige us to speak of anger clarify (if they do) because the phenomenon of anger is severed from other elements with which it may interlock.  This was Eric’s reservation too – if I can put what he said in my own idiom.  He is effectively arguing that we won’t get a satisfying account of anger if we neglect to register its social aspects.  State violence and social norms may have anger embedded in them and, indeed, it may be an important function in some norms that they transmit or summon anger in citizens.  This is why displaying a desecrated corpse to raise the “spirited” in witnesses can be important, in Eric’s example.  So, we might end up with philosophers’ fictions every time we analyze anger as a phenomenon of individual agents.  This was, I take it, Eric’s point.  Mine is similar:  Insofar as our accounts of anger conceptually isolate it from other emotions, they isolate our analyses from the world and from at least some of the people who exhibit anger. 

Because Eric was discussing corpse display, my thoughts turned to the corpse of Emmett Till, a young boy of 14 beaten, mutilated, and shot to death in 1955 by white men who justified their brutality by accusing him of flirting with a white woman.  When Emmett’s corpse was sent home from Mississippi, where he was murdered, to his mother in Chicago, she gave him an open coffin service so that his beaten, distorted, unrecognizable face was visible to all who came to mourn.  Mamie Till-Mobley deliberately displayed what had been done to her boy, displayed his battered dead body and, as Plato’s analysis might suggest, commanded the eyes of all upon him in a way that would summon in them emotional reactions kindred to her own.[1] 

Whatever a philosophical moral account of anger can do, I want it to explain Mamie Till-Mobley.  I am tempted even to say that Till-Mobley is my pre-theoretical constraint for an adequate account of moral anger, such that I take an analysis of anger that I cannot apply to Emmett Till’s mother to be missing something important.  And I don’t think most of our classical accounts or Callard’s can explain her well.  The trouble here, I think, is that we philosophically talk of anger in isolation.

Mamie Till-Mobley is not only angered, she is grieved.  Her action – displaying her son’s corpse – cannot be understood apart from both anger and grief, to an emotive response in which these are profoundly, inseparably joined.  To separate her anger from her grief, to analyze one without the other or lay claim to understanding one without the other would be, to borrow phrasing from Dostoyevsky, false to the fact.  Till-Mobley’s anger and grief are one body and they unite in the display of her son’s body.  Because of this, accounts of anger that seek calibrated, domesticated forms of anger or that would “dark side” our nature in anger just sit ill here.  There is nothing tame in Till-Mobley’s display of her son’s body – it is an action primevally wild and raw – but neither, I think, is there the moral corruption of which Callard speaks.  Contra Callard’s analysis, at least, I think Till-Mobley is exactly “responding rightly to being treated wrongly.”

Some angers are not unmixed but still fully, even emphatically, need to count as forms of anger morally necessary to consider.  Mamie Till-Mobley’s emotive range and reach, evident in the symbolic aching grief and anger in her son’s display, is richer than I think philosophical analysis gets. It is undeniably and potently anger but it’s not only anger, and that seems to me not only what we’re missing in such analyses, but thereby also what we risk missing in our moral-emotional civic cultivation.  To speak of what we ought do with and about anger, we have to speak about the rest with which it often comes – the grief.  What morally angers us can also and often grieve us.  Perhaps, even, what morally angers us ought to grieve us.  But highlighting that alignment changes the kinds of things we ought be saying about anger and, more particularly, anger at injustices.  The thing we call anger is a thing more complicated than “anger” captures.

The methodological claims I suppose are implicit in what I’m stumbling after here are three.  First, I often counterfactually wonder about how different our philosophical work would be were it not lodged too deeply in the traces of its past.  Western philosophical accounts of anger were inaugurated by men who took as their exemplars and standard-bearers for understanding the concept other men, typically men involved in martial contexts.  There is a lot of anger in the world that plainly is not this.  The world is also full of angry, heartbroken mothers.  Were they the original exemplars, I can’t help thinking the philosophical history of anger would look different. 

Second, when we seek to isolate discrete concepts in order to philosophically clarify a phenomenon, we often pre-emptively set aside too much of how the phenomenon operates in the world.  We end up with conceptually cleaner concepts, but lose the moral world we’re trying to track with them.  In short, it’s not obvious that the tidy concepts that make for good, focused, and clarifying philosophy map the messy world.  Anger treated apart from grief will only capture some of anger, and perhaps only the simplest, least experientially vexed kind. 

Finally, where moral improvement of the world is concerned, concepts that don’t answer to the mixed nature of human experience won’t be effective at steering that experience.  Presumably, the motivation for talking about anger at all is figuring out what to do about it and with it.  What to do about it, I hazard tentatively, might require talking about the stuff with which it mixes, all the stuff we’ve left aside to focus on anger alone – not just grief, but perhaps also disappointment.  I can’t defend this – here or even in my own head yet – but if it turned out that some moral anger inextricably involves a richer capacity for grief, we are unlikely to see that and thus to say it and make use of it.  I am quite tempted by the thought that were we more attuned to grief, our understandings of anger would be richer, better, and more useful.  But while anger and grief can be inseparably wedded in a person like Mamie Till-Mobley, our philosophical analyses of both anger and grief live in different conceptual worlds.  So we can’t explain her or direct well toward a world where responses like hers are understood, much less cultivated.

On Public Philosophy and Transgender Rights Campaign

During the past year professional philosophers have struggled with controversies pertaining to transgender issues (recall the Tuvel/Hypatia affaire here and here; and again involving language in journal articles [recall my piece on the open letter to the editors of PPR at Dailynous here;] the debate between Talia Mae Bettcher and Kathleen Stock;[1] the language of the APA philosophy blog [see Leiterreports]), etc. These debates have intersected with wider society and have even led to campaigns to to have faculty removed from their positions in the UK. While I am no friend of calls for civility in debate (recall this post among many), the way this debate is conducted is unedifying and I have already expressed despair that even the philosophers party to the debate seem to be unable to recognize explicitly each other's vulnerabilities. 

I start this post with two preliminary comments. First, as regular readers know, I support so-called public philosophy (recall; which comes in many varieties [see here]) and philosophical activism (which comes in many flavors and in support of many different kinds of causes) of society and the profession. I have long admired the service philosophy of Kristie Dotson (recall), Hugo Bedau's activism against the death penalty, and John Corvino's work on same-sex marriage. (I am sure readers can add to this list their own favorites.)* Such cause/ideal-promoting political activism is both self-justifying and a useful means of discovery of truth. While philosophy can benefit from a measure of distance, cool reflection, and impartiality, it's also the case that engagement with the messy details of lived experience and the arguments generated by political conflict can also be a useful constraint on and source of creativity for philosophical discovery of the nature and properties of an ideal. 

However, I have  long thought that it seems unwise, or at least imprudent, when philosophers qua being philosophers support active politicians and political parties. (That's compatible with doing so qua being citizens of a particular polity). It seems best if one's pursuit of truth and the good is not sullied by and subject to the many tactical compromises and fatal injustices that accompany political life pursued by imperfect beings like us. I rarely see philosophical excellence in support of a politician or party,+ and much that I find cringe-worthy.

Second, transgender people are subject to bigotry, discrimination, harassment, and violence. This is well documented in the UK and US. The evidence also suggests that many transgender victims are also (intersectionally) members of other historically discriminated minority groups, I assume here that the violence occurs in virtue of their being transgender, and that belonging to it means one belongs to (all other things being equal) a vulnerable category of people. So,

• I wholeheartedly support the campaign for transgender rights and protection under the law.***

Regular readers know (recall this post on MLK Jr.) that I also think that human imperfection, self-interest, and bigotry often undermine enforcement of the law and can even make the most beautifully written laws a tool of oppression. What's needed is, thus, also sufficient popular support or opinion and the right dispositions in favor of such rights. Political campaigns are, therefore, crucial to generate such support.** Of course, there is something of a paradox lurking here, because where such support exists the right would not be necessary.

One important feature of new rights is that the costs and (new) down-side risks of these need not be distributed evenly on the population. That's of special concern if these fall on other vulnerable groups. I understand the present campaign against trans rights, which includes some high profile self-described feminist philosophers -- where not informed by or leaning on bigotry -- as aiming to articulate some such risks to vulnerable women, especially those in prisons and among the homeless. I think such concerns eminently reasonable, but that's because there is a reasonable fear of violence and degradation within prisons and fear of violence against the homeless (see here). But rather than fighting transgender rights, the proper response to such concerns for the very vulnerable is, I would think, to join the coalition for thoroughgoing prison reform and better/more resources and conditions for the homeless.++ 

So my preliminaries have turned into a blog post, which was prompted by my momentary reconsideration of my stance on public philosophy.+++ It's true that there is no reason to believe that philosophical activism will always be beneficial. And I am reminded of the fact that even in the pre-internet age (which, let's stipulate, can make any bad thing worse), there was and never is a golden age of civility (as those of us old enough to recall philosophical debates over abortion, LGBTQ rights, or if one pays attention to debates over Zionism/BDS, etc.)---I have often remarked upon the fact that as a discipline we have an all-too-human fondness for philosophical debates as blood-sports and the delicious take-down.

It's a familiar fact that the pursuit of a worthy cause can turn into fanaticism and unpleasant and vindictive (moral) righteousness. And it is known that friends of worthy causes will find it difficult to condemn the excesses because they do not wish to be seen as undermining the worthy cause. For, it's also all-too-common that critics of the worthy cause will use such excesses as a tactic to undermine a cause, and shift debate away from consideration of the underlying evils. Savvy intellectuals recognize the temptation they may benefit from escalation and from hyping an otherwise unworthy critic, inviting abuse from their anonymous followers, with the cycle being renewed etc. And so it can often happen that wisdom is pushed aside or found crouching unnoticed in the margins of the arresting debates. 

In light of such facts people of good will may prefer to retreat to the ivory tower, and pursue their worthy work in undisturbed quiet. Others will note that these facts are part of the eternal return of life's carnival, and will will them...one tweet at a time eternally.  

 

 

On Solana's Civic Anarchism; or a liberalism for free spirits

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.--Valerie Solanas (1967) SCUM Manifesto [HT Petra Van Brabandt]

The second paragraph is so arresting, as revolutionary transitions are wont to be, that it is easy to overlook, or deliberately pass over, the first sentence of SCUM manifesto. To do so would miss the extraordinary ambition of the text: it aims to establish the conditions of life worth living within a true society. The whole text is structured around two kinds of societies; the false or unauthentic one -- denoted 'society'-- and the true one to come after the civic-minded females have done their revolutionary work. The manifesto sharply distinguishes among three stages: the boring status quo; the thrilling revolution, which makes possible, a grooving society (society is the repetition that holds the manifest together). But it does it in the name of life and (thrilling) civic-mindedness. 

For, a true "society" consists "of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other." Today I wish to articulate the nature of such a true society. In so doing, I pass over what is most exciting in her work: the critique of patriarchy, the unmasking of the art industry, the stinging attack on the corruption of science for life-destroying ends (go read SCUM Manifesto for yourself). This society, which is essentially "complete" and lacking competitive principles is anarchic in character without "a government, laws or leaders." Solanas associates philosophy, not unfairly, with pompous prattle, but she echoes (recall) Socrates' true city and Spinoza that the best political community is one with true companionship and no hierarchy (she also refers to it as "eternity and Utopia"). For in a true society, true community is possible: 

A true community consists of individuals -- not mere species members, not couples -- respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally -- free spirits in free relation to each other -- and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of `society' is the family; `hippies' say the tribe; no one says the individual.

I do not wish to irritate more radical readers of Solanas (they can console themselves that before long my type is dispensable), but what she advocates here is the liberal good life.* She just thinks that men as they have been bred are incapable of it. Of course, she is not a thoroughgoing liberal; she embraces illiberal even thrilling means to solve the transition problem. But in this she is little different than those liberals who pine for Enlightened despots to help escape the cul-de-sac that is everyday politics. 

The point for Solanas of stressing the individual is not to make possible possessive individualism, but to promote the better kind, "to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else." And "like conversation, love can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent groovy female females, since friendship is based upon respect, not contempt." Of course, the material conditions  for this better kind of individualism "requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship."

Not unlike Keynes, Solanas thinks the material conditions to make a true society possible are easily within reach. In fact, she advocates big data computing half a century before it became fashionable ("There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all.")

Before I close, I wish to prevent two misunderstandings: first, I do not mean to minimize Solanas's rejection of reform. Hers is a revolutionary program. As she writes, "SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it."**  The destruction is menacing for those attached to the status quo.

Second, I do not mean to suggest that for Solanas the best community is only love and conversation. Near the end of her manifesto, she points to a range of activities presupposed in it "to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world."

There is, thus, a lush gentility in Solanas's vision. In fact, it is so gentle that one wonders how the civic thrill-seekers will adjust to it once they can repose from their revolutionary work.  

Le Guin (and William James) on Sacrifice; on Political Aesthetics and Truthful Ideology

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.

This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no real doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.--Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

The narrator of this "fable" -- Le Guin hesitates calling it that  -- at times situates her (his?) own description in the history of utopian thought: she contrasts the citizens of Omelas with the "bland utopians" (of More). Le Guin, who takes categorization  of her fiction rather seriously (in the playful way in which the serious is properly addressed) may be right to insist it is not a utopia because the narrator also admits not knowing "the rules and laws of their society." But it is possible that we learn more than the narrator realizes (as is often the case in the best utopian writings). Rules and laws are intrinsic to utopian reflection, when considered as a species of (what I call) Socratic political theory [recall here and here]. One might easily be confused about  this point because the narrator describes Omelas as "happy" (without being "stupid" or "naive and happy children") in a way that is often associated with utopian thought.

In order to show that they are genuinely happy, the narrator claims that the Omelasians (the Omelians?) are (i) capable of distinguishing and discriminating among "what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive."  And (ii) they have  chosen to live beyond necessity and allow technology that is "neither necessary nor destructive," but simultaneously to reject the (potentially) destructive kind. That is to say, Omelas is a society with metaphysics (or philosophy) and capable of taking, what we would call, inductive risk seriously. (In some respects -- especially the fact that there is a religion without priests -- it is like the true city of Plato's Republic.) Some other time I hope to reflect a bit more carefully on the logic of modality in which necessity and destructiveness are contraries.* (One would also like to know more about how they apply their knowledge.)

Above, I have quoted the central element of the story, or a necessary ingredient, that is supposed to make the 'joy' and the 'city' believable.** This reveals that a criterion for a happy city is some trade-off or some discordant element.  This element is a sacrifice.+ The happiness of the city is founded in a contract (James calls it a "bargain") which has three clear terms: (a) a miserable child; (b) no talking to the child; (c) "the happiness" of the citizens of Omelas.  Before one complains that this contract is obviously invalid say on the Hobbesian ground that the child is thrown back into the state of nature (really worse--she is deprived her use of reason), it is worth noting that from the perspective of the contracting parties the child is a mere externality. This is true of all contracts in which beyond the contracting parties and the arbiter/sovereign who enforces it, there are always parties who are effected by the contract, but not included (as contracting parties or in its language). The contract would be invalid if the sacrificed child were itself one of the contracting parties. But as Hobbes reminds us (recall), in the state of nature mothers have supreme dominion over their children and can dispose them at will (on my interpretation this justifies right to abortion in his view). This right need not be given up in the bargain. So this is a legitimate contract.

It is tempting to discuss here the question if it is a moral contract. If the child were spoken to -- and so readmitted to community, and so made part of the contract -- its objections and pleas would have to be taken into account. But today I am going to resist the casuistry (although I am quietly relying on your eagerness to do it yourself), and the familiar debates between consequentialists and deontological perspectives, we would have to enter into.[1] For prior to the question of morality, there are two, all too easily ignored, issues that are explicitly raised in the fable. One is a question (with a nod to Hannah Arendt [recall my valedictorian pieces at NewAPPS, here and here]) connected to politics of aesthetics: "the treason of artists," which is a "refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." One of the narrator's points on this issue is that modern artists self-limit in such a a way such that a skill has been lost (or at least 'almost lost')++ that is, the skill to represent joy and happiness without, simultaneously, thereby turning it in a moral tale or a political message. As such artists are incapable of conveying the full richness of human life. (This is something Coetzee also worries about.) The narrative situation of the fable is made complex because our narrator ends up performing what she decries. Part of the issue then is to what degree there is space for non-acceptable and non-believable art. That is to say, by bringing in the question of acceptance and belief, the narrator obliquely reminds us that her art is not isolated, but itself part of a larger political community; our expectations and standards are implicated in her representation.

I emphasize the obliqueness of this issue because, second, the representation of Omelas shows how an ideology that is grounded in the truth, in a society in which philosophy and knowledge exist, is possible.  For, everybody in Omelas (above a certain age) knows of the child sacrifice performed there. (Perhaps, this is even a fourth publicity requirement in the contract!) There is no noble lie here. And it is this knowledge that grounds a lot of the best features of the activities that bring (let's stipulate) true glory to Omelas ("nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science.") That is, this is a society in which its best activities do not require -- something familiar to us -- the effacement of the ugly foundations of flourishing. This is, indeed, a "responsible happiness." (How this connects to "barbarism" -- the narrator introduces the contrast -- is actually a tricky matter, but we can't do everything at once.)

Even so, I insist that their self-understanding is a form of ideology. By 'ideology' I mean (without pretending to have offered an analysis or to be at all precise) a discourse that (i) justifies a status quo -- in which some are subjugated (made miserable, exploited, etc.) -- and (ii) which prevents from conceiving alternatives to the status quo. Only (i) is necessary for something to be an ideology, but (ii) is an important function. This (i-ii) is precisely what happens when the children begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom." What they say is (let's stipulate) all true, but it ends up justifying continued misery for the child. 

Now, the story shows that two alternatives in play are (i) continue to agree to terms of the social contract, or (ii) quietly leave town (that's the closing "incredible" paragraph of the story) and end one's complicity with known misery from which one benefits.  One may grant that releasing a child after such degradation may cause as much wretchedness as staying in confinement because she would be released into a collapsing society. But it is notable that they do not seriously contemplate ending the practice when this child dies. That is, in virtue of accurately describing the world they inhabit, they do not prepare for an alternative, communal future path, beyond Omelas.***