Time, Capitalism, and Philosophy

In America the great battle cry of the anti-capitalists is, "I want my time back." Whenever some young person says, "capitalism sucks," the underlying meaning seems to be a struggle over time: capitalism sucks because it requires people to work long hours to have any kind of decent life. A desire to control our time is at the root of the push for Universal Basic Income, summed up by a squatter I once met as, "Rent is just stealing. You shouldn't have to pay to live." If people had their basic needs met, most would probably choose to work for something better, but that would be their choice; nobody would have to work.

This desire to break the hold of work over our time goes back at least to Karl Marx, who thought the future workers' paradise would feature more leisure and much less work. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes wrote a famous article arguing that by 2020 we should only have to work about 15 hours a week to maintain a middle class standard of living. In 2013 I wrote here about a book by two contemporary economists called How Much is Enough?, arguing that if we could just get off the treadmill of wanting ever more we could focus more on the things that actually make for a good life.

Last year Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale and was vaguely connected to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, wrote a book called This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom that makes the struggle over our time the central concern of philosophy. Hägglund shares the belief of all the young anarchists that capitalism is bad because it forces us to spend our time on things we hate, which spiritually destroys us.

Hägglund starts from the question of what it means to value something:

Whether I hold something to be of small, great, or inestimable value, I must be committed to caring for it in some form. . . . is a question of devoting my own lifetime to what I value. To value something, I have to be prepared to give it at least a fraction of my time.… Finite lifetime is the originary measure of value. The more I value something, the more of my lifetime I am willing to spend on it.

Hägglund extends this argument into both religion and politics. Hägglund is an atheist who accepts the old existentialist argument that belief in god strips our lives of meaning. If we are really going to live forever, then it doesn't matter what we spend our time on, and therefore it is impossible for us to really value anything. It is the finitude of our lives that gives our choices meaning. Therefore, positing anything eternal – god, heaven, life – demeans us rather than exalting us.

What I do with my time can matter to me only because I grasp my life as finite. If I believed that I had an infinite time to live, the urgency of doing anything would be unintelligible and no normative obligation could have any grip on me.

The part of Hägglund's work that has gotten the most attention is his advocacy of socialism over capitalism. To him, having to work at things we do not value is death to our souls, and the very opposite of freedom. Jedediah Purdy summarizes:

To take free choice seriously, he argues, we need a conception of freedom that is not tied to selling our time and talents at the market rate just to go on living. We are in “the realm of freedom,” writes Hägglund, when we can act in keeping with our values. By contrast, we are in the “realm of necessity” when we adopt an alien set of priorities just to get by. A great many of the choices most people face under capitalism fall within the realm of necessity. How do you make a living in an economy that rewards predatory lending over teaching and nursing? Or how do you present yourself in a workplace that rewards competition and often embarrassing self-promotion?

Economic thought treats these choices as if they were just as “free” as Bill Gates’s next decision to channel his philanthropic spending to this group or that. Hägglund sees it differently: Our economy keeps its participants locked in the realm of necessity for much of their lives, draining away their time in unfree activity. In the realm of necessity there is very little opportunity to spend our lives on the things we care for, to devote ourselves to what we think most worthwhile. Economic life may be a tapestry of choices, but as long as it directs its participants toward goals they do not believe truly worthwhile, a life of such choice is a grotesque of freedom.

The market presses some people closer to the bone than others, but it drives everyone, because it is a system for determining the price of things, among them time itself, and substituting that price for any competing valuation. You cannot exempt yourself.

There is certainly a sense in which this is true; if there are things you have to do, you are not really free.

But how, exactly, is that the fault of capitalism? Even the hunter-gatherers we like to imagine living in a lazy utopia had to work. Lions have to hunt; chimpanzees have to search for fruit and fish for termites. I simply do not understand these socialists who think that under a change of regime we could avoid doing things we don't want to do. Does anybody like cleaning bathrooms or repairing tar roofs? Hägglund recognizes that this is a problem, but he waves it away in the maddening style of all anarchists. Under democratic socialism, he insists, we will deliberate about all these things democratically and learn to value each other's needs and end up wanting to do things like rebuild sewers and change bedpans. Even Purdy, who is something of a left-wing utopian himself, finds this dubious:

There is always some work that not all that many people really want to do, unwelcome but socially necessary labor. There is no way around emptying bedpans, caring for the severely demented, sorting recycled goods, providing day care for other people’s children, picking lettuce, cleaning up after concerts, and so forth. Hägglund writes that under democratic socialism “we will be intrinsically motivated to participate in social labor when we can recognize that the social production is for the sake of the common good and our own freedom to lead a life,” making such labor “inherently free.”

Readers who have these doubts, Hägglund writes, “should consider their lack of faith in our spiritual freedom.”

Well, I have considered it, and I find that my lack of faith in our spiritual freedom is entirely justified. It could well be that under a different system we might enjoy our jobs a little more, or dislike them a little less, but I think a world where people freely do all the work that an advanced civilization requires is a straight-up fantasy.

There is an alternative to our way of living, but I think it necessarily involves being materially poorer than we are. If we did not apply pressure to people to work harder, and relied on everyone's spiritual freedom, we would do less materially productive work and end up with less stuff. I think this is so obvious that I cannot fathom how so many anarchists dispute it. We could have a world with more free time and less pressure to to economically productive work, but that world would have to be less posh than this one.

And to me, this world where we have more freedom but less stuff is within our grasp. We could have it if we wanted to; in fact, plenty of people do have it. All over the world millions of people work less than they could and live materially poorer lives because of that choice. I know people who have opted out of the system, live in poor communities where housing is cheap, do just enough work to get by, and devote themselves to what they really enjoy. This is entirely possible for most Americans and Europeans without any change in the system at all.

The fact that most people do not choose to do this, but choose instead to chase more money or more prestige by investing tons of effort in their careers says to me that Marx and Hägglund and all the rest of them are simply wrong about human nature.

Capitalism is not forcing anybody to do anything. It is the basic rules of mammalian life that force us to labor for our livings, and our own ambition that drives to work harder than we have to for nicer stuff and a higher slot on the totem pole.

So to all the young people out there who want their time back I say this: make it happen. Move somewhere cheap, learn a skill that allows you to earn a sustenance in 20 hours a week, and live your dream. Nobody is stopping you, certainly not "capitalism." As for assertions that we could have a world that is as materially splendid as this one without surrendering our time to the capitalist monster, a world in which we could all be both rich and free, I say, baloney.

In Troublous Times

French mystic Charles de Foucauld:

There is a phrase of holy Scripture that we must, I believe, always remember. It’s that Jerusalem was reconstructed in angustia temporum (Daniel).

Which the King James version renders as in troublous times. Foucauld continues:

We must work all our life in angustia temporum. Difficulties are not a temporary state that we let pass like a squall so that we can set to work when the weather will be calm. No, these are the normal state. We must count on them being so for our entire life, for all of the good things that we want to do, in angustia temporum.

A Buddhist Monk on Death

George Yancy interviews Geshe Dadul Namgyal, a Tibetan monk and Buddhist theologian who also holds an MA in English:

Namgyal: We can reflect on and contemplate the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it as a part of the gift of life. If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, appearance and disappearance, we can come to terms with and make peace with it. We will then appreciate its message of being in a constant process of renewal and regeneration without holding back, like everything and with everything, including the mountains, stars, and even the universe itself undergoing continual change and renewal. This points to the possibility of being at ease with and accepting the fact of constant change, while at the same time making the most sensible and selfless use of the present moment.

Yancy: That is a beautiful description. Can you say more about how we achieve a peaceful mind?

Namgyal: Try first to gain an unmistaken recognition of what disturbs your mental stability, how those elements of disturbance operate and what fuels them. Then, wonder if something can be done to address them. If the answer to this is no, then what other option do you have than to endure this with acceptance? There is no use for worrying. If, on the other hand, the answer is yes, you may seek those methods and apply them. Again, there is no need for worry.

Obviously, some ways to calm and quiet the mind at the outset will come in handy. Based on that stability or calmness, above all, deepen the insight into the ways things are connected and mutually affect one another, both in negative and positive senses, and integrate them accordingly into your life. We should recognize the destructive elements within us — our afflictive emotions and distorted perspectives — and understand them thoroughly. When do they arise? What measures would counteract them? We should also understand the constructive elements or their potentials within us and strive to learn ways to tap them and enhance them.

Yancy: What do you think that we lose when we fail to look at death for what it is?

Namgyal: When we fail to look at death for what it is — as an inseparable part of life — and do not live our lives accordingly, our thoughts and actions become disconnected from reality and full of conflicting elements, which create unnecessary friction in their wake. We could mess up this wondrous gift or else settle for very shortsighted goals and trivial purposes, which would ultimately mean nothing to us. Eventually we would meet death as though we have never lived in the first place, with no clue as to what life is and how to deal with it.

Other Values Trump Honesty

Thomas Edsall:

In their 2017 paper “Liars, Damned Liars, and Zealots: The Effect of Moral Mandates on Transgressive Advocacy Acceptance,” two psychologists at the University of Illinois, Allison B. Mueller and Linda J. Skitka, cite “transgressive advocacy” — which they define as “norm-violating means, i.e., lying, to achieve a preferred end” — as an critical aspect of contemporary political competition:

People’s perceptions of others’ transgressive advocacy were uniquely shaped by their moral convictions. Although honesty was positively valued by all respondents, transgressive advocacy that served a shared moral end was more accepted, and advocacy in the service of a non-preferred end was more condemned, regardless of its truth.

So if you want to know why people accept Trump, there it is: because they believe that cheating to win is not just ok but admirable when the stakes are high.

The Tale of Two Monks and a Woman

An old Buddhist parable, via Kottke:

The story goes that two monks were traveling together, a senior and a junior. They came to a river with a strong current where a young woman was waiting, unable to cross alone. She asks the monks if they would help her across the river. Without a word and in spite of the sacred vow he’d taken not to touch women, the older monk picks her up, crosses, and sets her down on the other side.

The younger monk joins them across the river and is aghast that the older monk has broken his vow but doesn’t say anything. An hour passes as they travel on. Then two hours. Then three. Finally, the now quite agitated younger monk can stand it no longer: “Why did you carry that women when we took a vow as monks not to touch women?”

The older monk replies, “I set her down hours ago by the side of the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

Roger Scruton's Conservatism

Conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton, about whom I have written here several times, died last year. His old friend Robert George wrote a piece for the Times to explain what Scruton's "conservatism" consisted of. Scruton was a staunch anti-communist, but he differed in many ways from other anti-communists:

First, he believed that the free-market enthusiasm of Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman made economic policy too central, relying on it too much to solve social problems and shape society. In this respect, he thought, it shared an error with its great foe, Marxism.

Second, though Roger believed in market mechanisms and fervently opposed central planning and what he saw as a dependency-inducing welfare state, he denied that the outcomes of free exchanges are automatically just. Liberty, while important, was for him only one important value among others like community and solidarity, order and decency, honor and faith.

And so he thought a variety of regulations may be needed, and therefore justified, to protect persons and valuable institutions of civil society. . . . Here, Roger joined the iconic American neoconservative Irving Kristol in giving capitalism only “two cheers” — perhaps no more than one and three-quarters. . . .

Central to Roger’s disagreement with his more libertarian allies was his belief in unchosen (and in that sense “natural”) obligations — duties we have simply by virtue of being human and born into a certain family, community, or nation. We do not come into the world as bare individuals who can develop an identity entirely from scratch.

Indeed, Roger was the leading philosophical defender of love of home and one’s own, what he called “oikophilia.” . . .

Roger’s oikophilia, and his rejection of “multiculturalism” (which he considered anti-cultural in that it melted the different cultures into a monoculture of contemporary upscale progressive ideology), provoked ignorant and excitable people to accuse him of xenophobia and racism. In fact, Roger respected other cultures a great deal more than most progressives of my acquaintance do. He learned Arabic in order to read the Quran, and he admired the tradition-transcending contributions of the great medieval Islamic philosophers. He made careful, in-depth studies of Hindu and other Eastern traditions of faith precisely in search of the wisdom he regarded them as possessing.

Scruton was also an environmentalist in the same way as Prince Charles or Wendell Barry, with a revulsion against chemical poisons used in the name of greater efficiency, or pouring concrete onto ancient woodlands.

My readers know that I am attracted to this strand of conservative thought but can't embrace it. For one thing it has an impracticality about it that troubles me. I actually agree that economics is not the most important thing, and that people need friends, families, communities, and spiritual succor more than they need extra stuff. But there is something off about rich men tut-tutting when other people worry too much about money. Easy for Roger Scruton to oppose paving over farms or forest for new housing, since he already lived in a lovely old farmhouse on an estate worth a million pounds. Any real vision for human thriving has to balance the desire to preserve against the need to provide decent homes and decent livings for the millions who lack them, and I never got the sense that these conservatives had thought of a way to do so. Indeed they sometimes come across as anti-human, sharing with radical Greens a revulsion against the human mass, and a wish that a few billion people would conveniently disappear.

Scruton's “oikophilia.” also has an appealing side. He really loved traditional rural England, but he also loved other traditions and other places – Morocco, Italy, India. In practice, though, this made him a strong opponent of immigration. He did not want to see those traditions he admired mixed up together; we should all stick to our own and celebrate what we inherited. Like the men of the French Nouvelle Droit (see here and here) he abhorred the corporate sameness of the modern world. I sometimes agree, but when these ideas form policies the victims always seem to be poor immigrants rather than rich capitalists. Although Scruton himself does not seem to have had any feelings against Jews, you can see how easily these attitudes can be shaped into a hatred of those wandering people who insist on their separateness and refuse to join wonderful local communities.

I believe in democracy in a deep sense: that our vision for the world has to be based on giving people what they want. I understand the philosophical, moral, and ecological dangers of such a view, and I have never thought that most humans can really be trusted to choose rightly. The alternatives, though, all come down to some sort of elitism, and I don't think elites can be trusted, either. All people matter. Simply waving ones hand at the billions who are not your sort or your neighbors, wishing they would just go away, will not do.

Liberalism is Augustinianism, or, Politics and Models of Human Nature

Modern politics as ancient theology, or, liberal philosopher John Rawls was an Augustinian:

Nelson opens his book by placing Rawls’s recently discovered Princeton University senior thesis, written in 1942, in the long Augustinian tradition of Christianity that denied that sinful humans could save themselves. For Augustine and his followers, Pelagianism—named after a late-antique theologian who was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church—overstated the extent to which human beings can earn their salvation. Such a belief verged on an ideology of self-redemption of individual sinners or of humanity itself that (as Rawls put it at age twenty) “rendered the Cross of Christ to no effect.” For Rawls, at the time a committed Christian who planned a career in the Episcopal priesthood before World War II service in the Pacific caused him to lose his faith, it followed that “no man can claim good deeds as his own.” To contend otherwise inflated human capacity and courted sacrilegious idolatry of humanity itself.

Nelson contends that this Augustinian response to Pelagianism lurked in Rawls’s defense of fair distributional justice long after he had moved on to secular philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls remarked that “no one deserves” their social ascendancy and the natural gifts—intelligence or industriousness—with which they achieved it. The fact that one person was endowed with them and another not was “morally arbitrary.” A theory of justice aiming at fairness rather than fortune would reject any sense that people deserved their class position. Some redistribution from the rich to the rest was therefore just.

In other words to Rawls the poor are not capable of making themselves rich without lots of help, just as sinful humans are not capable of reaching heaven on their own.

I find this fascinating, because in general belief in free will has been considered the "liberal" position, while predestination seems to us conservative. Obviously the ideologies of one age can never be mapped adequately onto those of another, but this does raise a question: what theory of human nature lies behind contemporary liberalism and conservatism, or any other ideology?

Many anarchists still subscribe to the old communist idea that the Revolution would change humanity; I have read several times that I only recoil from anarchist depictions of their utopia because I was raised under capitalism, and those growing up after all hierarchies have been abolished will feel differently. I say, no, everybody will always hate attending neighborhood meetings where consensus has to be reached over where to put sewers or power lines. I suppose this means I believe in a human nature that is not easily transformed by different conditions.

I share Rawls' view of natural gifts. If you ask me, some people work harder than others mostly because they were born hard workers. I accept that this is somewhat malleable and some people will work harder for the prospect of a great reward, or just because everyone around them is working hard. But like Rawls I consider differences of intellect and industriousness to be “morally arbitrary.” I do not think anyone deserves to be a billionaire no matter how much they achieve. And our system should, I think, work better for those who just show up and complete their tasks.

Against this I would set, not an argument that talent and effort should be rewarded, but a sense that attempts to level society all have prices, and any scheme that would lead to a truly equal world might have a cost completely not worth bearing.

As I see it modern conservatism is based on a skepticism that most people can build a good life on their own, without the guidance of tradition. This is a sentiment I share, I just think that the traditions we have inherited and the elites that want to maintain them are too bankrupt to be much use. (E.g., Catholic teaching on sexuality, or Trump-loving megachurch pastors denouncing corruption, or university professors against institutional hierarchies.) I therefore think what we need is new traditions, of which the best model so far is our much more equal practice of marriage.

What, I wonder, is the psychological model of the Woke? I am puzzled. It seems to me that the Progressive left is best explained theologically, by belief in Gnosticism. These folks seem to think that the mass of humanity suffers from a delusion that keeps them from understanding how grotesquely unfair our social, political, and economic arrangements are, and that once they have seen the light they will understand the tragic unfairness and – what, exactly? I'm not sure. Treat each other justly? And that, I suppose, implies that people's deep natures are tied to beliefs that we cling to, and that we can be transformed if we can be torn away from those beliefs and shown the truth. Hmm. I'm making this up as I go here, so help me out if you can.

Anyway the notion of John Rawls as a Puritan (they were big on predestination) has sent my brain in all sorts of directions.

John Locke

The discovery of a new John Locke manuscript lying in a library cupboard, apparently a very early version of what became his famous Letter on Toleration, provides me an excuse to explain why I like him so much despite his being (sometimes) such a narrow-minded wighead. He wrote a lot, some of it heated political arguments, and he regularly fell back on conventional-sounding biolerplate about order and property and what all. His imagination was limited, and by "humanity" he often seemed to mean property-owning Englishmen. He considered the divinity of Jesus to be Manifest and Reasonable, and his idea of toleration seems to us remarkable intolerant. But sometimes he did much better, and reached much farther, and I think he really tried both to understand how we can learn about the world, and how we can set up a government that will work best for everyone.

Locke's whole philosophy of knowledge revolved around uncertainty. Against the Christian Platonists who thought that Truth was God and accessible through religion, and against the Aristotelians who thought it could be derived with logic, Locke always argued that the truth was hard to find and very easy to get wrong:

No man's knowledge can go beyond his experience.

For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask.

I have always liked this line, which I think concerns the usefulness of our limited human understanding:

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.

In politics Locke was a pioneer of a kind of thinking that has been influential ever since. He believed that the goal of our politics ought to be maximizing human freedom, but at the same time he believed that the biggest threat to freedom was chaos. So he thought that to protect freedom we need a state strong enough to preserve order:

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

The interesting part of his political theory, which had such a big influence on the authors of our constitution, was about how to design a state strong enough to maintain order that would not immediately use that power to destroy freedom. Maybe his ideas (separation of powers, enumerated rights) have not worked perfectly, but what has?

And these:

Wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the Name.

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

He that will have his son have a respect for him and his orders, must himself have a great reverence for his son.

Humanistic Education

After writing my post about Emily Wilson I have decided to launch a discussion about what humanistic education is for, and what sort of things it should include. I am putting my own ideas out mostly to find out what others think on the subject.

Things I want a person who claims to be educated to know:

I want people to be familiar with the recent history of the world, especially in terms of ideology and how that led to World War: nationalism, fascism, communism, anti-communism, World War II, the Cold War, Maoist China, anti-colonialism, the conservative resurgence led by Nixon, Reagan, and Thatcher, the collapse of the Soviet system, the transformation of China. This seems to me essential to understanding what is happening in the world around us today.

I also want people to understand how old and diverse humanity is. Through some combination of anthropology and history I want people to get a sense of how different some human societies have been from their own, and some inkling of the very different ways people have thought and lived.

I want people to be immersed in beauty and to spend some time contemplating things that are amazing to behold: art, architecture, poetry, music.

I want people to read some fiction and think a little bit about the problem of how we know other people: can a novel or memoir really give you insight into another person's mind? If not, what could? (This is of course my personal obsession: how can we bridge the gaps between people?)

I want people to have some understanding of the basics of science: what scientists do, what counts as scientific evidence, what we know, think we know, and don't know. I would teach evolution, atomic theory, and plate tectonics. This may be the thing on this list we are best at right now, and I suspect many Americans graduate from high school knowing what I consider the essentials here, but I didn't want to ignore this.

I think people should learn another language.

I think people should take a serious class in ethics that would be taught as discussion. Some notion of how complex the most basic notions of right and wrong are, when you look closely, seems to me important.

I think people should practice expression in writing and speech.

What else?

Siberian Shaman with a Cloak of Bird Beaks

Archaeologists in Siberia have excavated the burial of a man who went into the ground wearing a cloak made of bird beaks. A section of the cloak is preserved below his left hand in this photo. Mor was piled into a pillow behind his head.

Detail of the beaks; analysis is not complete but they look like herons or cranes. This is one of the most shamanistic things I have ever seen. Via The History Blog.

Advice

If you are told that someone is talking badly of you, don’t defend yourself against the story but reply: “Obviously he didn’t know my other faults, or he would have mentioned them as well.”

–Epictetus

Lesser Bird of Paradise

Photo of tail feathers by Kenji Aoki, from a pretty good Times piece on sexual selection and beauty.

I have always found the power of beauty over us to be deeply puzzling. I mean, a revulsion from ugliness or deformity makes evolutionary sense, because those things might signal other genetic problems, as does a generalized attraction to health and fitness. But our obsession with the right sort of nose or eye or breast goes far beyond this; and that's before we get to our mania for gold, silver, and gems, for bright fabrics, for flowers evolved to attract bees.

Our sense of beauty has come unmoored from the practical and stalked off on its own, claiming a huge part of our consciousness for its domain. Maybe this can be explained by sexual selection, genetic drift, or some such. But maybe not. Maybe it is a sign that our minds are expressions of a force for life that permeates our universe and drives us to wonder at creation, to be aware that we are part of the astonishing cosmos, and to be thrilled by that belonging.

Jordan Peterson and Tough Guy Humanism

Jordan Peterson continues to be a big subject of discussion in my house, where some think he has much to teach us and others think he is just the patriarchy all over again. This keeps me reading about him, and if nothing else his constant engagement with the oldest texts and the biggest themes provides an opportunity to revisit philosophical and religious fundamentals.

Peterson is fascinated with religion and teaches a whole course on the Bible, but he doesn't seem to have much faith. If Peterson believes in a God, it must be an abstract sort of spirit who set the universe in motion but otherwise has better things to do than worry about us. For all practical purposes, we are on our own. Micah Meadowcroft, a religious traditionalist, sums up Peterson's theology like this:

There is no grace, and Jesus is just an "exemplar of human strength."

No one has come to save you; you will have to save yourself.

Freedom is everything; the one thing we have, or at any rate the one meaningful thing, is the freedom to choose.

Peterson's world is suspended between order and chaos and our choices and responsibility allow us to navigate that tension, to walk the narrow way between them in our fullest participation in Being.

I would call Peterson a humanist, in the basic sense that he thinks "man is the measure of all things." Like many humanists, Peterson thinks that the lack of a God who regularly intervenes in our lives is an opportunity. Since it is ultimately up to us, our choices have a deeper meaning than they would if God were in charge; I suppose that is the fundamental teaching of Existentialism. Freedom can be bleak, but it is not meaningless. You are on your own, but your very aloneness is the secret to your significance.

As with everything else about Peterson's teaching, I connect this to his role as a therapist. The two thinkers I think he most resembles are M. Scott Peck and Judith Viorst, two other therapists with a philosophical bent. All three focus on you – the patient, the person, the hero of your own quest – and your confrontation with a world that feels cold, dark, and hostile. Well, they all say, maybe it is cold and dark, but that means any spark you can strike shines all the brighter. Maybe it is hostile, so sharpen your weapons and stand up strong to fight it. The emptier the void around you, the more freedom you have to act and the more important your actions; the greater the obstacles you face, the more glorious your victories.

As Meadowcroft says, Peterson's particular take on our situation has to do with order and chaos. It is sometimes hard to parse out exactly what he means by these words, but it seems related to a belief in work. What you should be doing, says Peterson, is working hard to make your world better. Symbols of this effort include proper posture, a clean room (common retort in my house: "go clean your room!"), a regular schedule, financial independence, and a sense of direction based on goals you are working toward. More deeply this could include seeking love and building a lifelong marriage, raising children, a successful career, working as an activist on causes that matter to you. If you think about Peterson's patients, who seem to include lots of young men doing nothing and going nowhere, I think you can see where this is coming from. On the one hand is an adult life of action and responsibility, on the other a listless drift through depression and addiction to drugs, porn, or video games. It also exactly replicates the main teaching of Peck in The Road Less Traveled, where he says among other things that love is work, that is, you love someone to the extent that you are actively working to make that person's life better. Peterson's teaching also has the vaguely political implication that life is more meaningful when it is built around rules and clearly defined roles, which provide some of the clarity that keeps everything from being a sad muddle.

This all resonates with me. I am an agnostic about the sort of God who wrote the equations for the universe, or who just is the equations of the universe, but I have never had any sense of a supernatural presence so I agree that in practical terms we are alone. With respect to God, that is; the thing that bothers me most about all three therapists I have mentioned is that they focus so much on the lone person. I personally think that we are social beings as much as anything else, and that a good life has to involve deep and lasting relationships with others. Peterson's models of the lone hero is I think a flawed one, because it implies we could win these cosmic battles on our own. He seems to think that there is us, and then outside us somewhere are society and other people, but I think other people are part of our inmost existence, and that a good life in one in which we are fundamentally not alone.

The Problem with Ideology

Will Wilkinson used to be a fairly rigid libertarian, but several years ago he decided that his ideology was blinding him to reality and stopped calling himself by that label. I just discovered an essay he published in October 2017 in which he argues that any "ideal theory" of politics – libertarianism, communism – is a fantasy:

Many political philosophers, and most adherents of radical political ideologies, tend to think that an ideal vision of the best social, economic, and political system serves a useful and necessary orienting function. The idea is that reformers need to know what to aim at if they are to make steady incremental progress toward the maximally good and just society. If you don’t know where you’re headed—if you don’t know what utopia looks like—how are you supposed to know which steps to take next?

The idea that a vision of an ideal society can serve as a moral and strategic star to steer by is both intuitive and appealing. But it turns out to be wrong. This sort of political ideal actually can’t help us find our way through the thicket of real-world politics into the clearing of justice.

To illustrate why this is so Wilkinson compares two lists of countries, one the "Freedom Index" of the libertarian Cato Foundation, the other the Social Progress Index, which is based on progressive assumptions. It turns out that these two lists of the top twenty countries in the world, based on what purport to be radically different notions of the Good, are very similar. The top twelve countries on the Social Progress Index are:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Iceland
4. Norway
5. Switzerland
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. Sweden
9. Australia
10. New Zealand
11. Ireland
12. United Kingdom

Nine of those countries also rank in the top 12 of the Freedom Index, and Sweden and Norway rank 13 and 14; only tiny Iceland fails to make the Freedom Index top 20. So while libertarian theory predicts that a large social welfare state should limit freedom, the libertarians' own list shows that Social Democratic countries have more freedom.

The world is just far more complicated than your theory, whatever it is, can comprehend. And the farther your ideal world is from things as they are, the less you actually know about how it would work.

The crazy thing about the current political climate is that millions of people are losing faith in both democracy and mixed capitalism despite overwhelming evidence that this is the best system humans have ever devised. The distance that our world falls short of utopia seems to grate harder and harder on our psyches, and the longing for some kind of radical change swell.

All the evidence, though, argues that revolution is usually a disaster, and maintaining systems that have proved to work so well, with a bit of tinkering, is the best course.

Simone Weil

There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.

Revolution does not necessarily correspond to a higher, more intense and clearer awareness of the social problem. The opposite is true. . . . In the torment of civil war, principles lose all common measure with realities.

More here.

Jason Stanley on Fascist Rhetoric

Sean Illing of Vox interviewed Yale philosopher Jason Stanley about his new book on Fascism:

Sean Illing
Your specialty is propaganda and rhetoric, and in the book you describe fascism as a collection of tropes and narratives. So what, exactly, is the story fascists are spinning?

Jason Stanley
In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.

This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative. . . .

Sean Illing
There’s a great line from the philosopher Hannah Arendt, I think in her book about totalitarianism, where she says that fascists are never content to merely lie; they must transform their lie into a new reality, and they must persuade people to believe in the unreality they’ve created. And if you get people to do that, you can convince them to do anything.

Jason Stanley
I think that’s right. Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.

Sean Illing
This is partly why I think of fascism as a kind of anti-politics. I remember reading a quote from Joseph Goebbels, who was the chief propagandist for the Nazis, and he said that what he was doing was more like art than politics. By which he meant their task was to create an alternative mythical reality for Germans that was more exciting and purposeful than the humdrum reality of liberal democratic politics, and that’s why mass media was so essential the rise of Nazism.

Jason Stanley
That’s so interesting. The thing is, people willingly adopt the mythical past. Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.

I think this is interesting but I would say that it misses something big about Fascism: the fascists' love of strong emotion and distrust of cool reason. Fascists especially seem to love dark emotions like hate, anger, and cruelty. Much of Fascism is shot through with sado-masochistic sexuality. Fascists have also tended to love "action" and dismiss reflection; the thing is to act, preferably with speed and violence. So to me it is not just that Fascists focus on enemies of "the people", it's the deliberately cruel, sneering way that they do it; it's not just that they are creating an alternative reality, it's that the alternative reality they create is one that celebrates kicking people in the face.

Scott Sumner on Meaning

Economist Scott Sumner responds to a question about meaning:

Compared to most people, I probably find less meaning in success and fame, and more in art. At least that’s how it seems to me. I’m probably about average for seeing meaning in friends and family (although given my Northern European cultural heritage, perhaps a bit less than average for family.)

During my career, I noticed that some colleagues cared a lot about things like promotions, whereas I didn’t care at all. I did get some satisfaction from the positive press I got in September 2012, but probably less than most people would. I’m not ambitious in a career sense. If given the opportunity to be Fed chair, or a senator from California, or CEO of Goldman Sachs, I’d immediately turn down the opportunity. If not for this Mercatus position, I’d already be retired—at age 62. I’d rather make $20,000/year and have the health I had at age 31, than $200,000/year and have the health I have today—and I don’t even have any serious health problems, just chronic annoyances. That’s why the income inequality debate doesn’t really resonate with me; it just doesn’t seem that important. (That’s my impression; I’m not trying to defend it.) On the other hand, extreme poverty in developing nations such as North Korea seems like by far the most important problem in the world.

I also find much less meaning that usual in ceremonies such as funerals, weddings, graduations and other such events. I’m not a social person.

When I was a young academic, my research was meaningful to me. As I got older, I realized that people simply didn’t care and it lost meaning. What made my depression book so hard to write is that I did it after I’d become disenchanted, after I realized the book would be ignored. Fortunately, the hardest part (all the research) was done by the time I reached that view, but it was still an agonizing process to write the book.

Conversely, I got a lot of meaning out of a brief summer course I taught at Cato this summer. I was great seeing younger students from really good schools that were interested in market monetarist ideas. My blog also gave me meaning, especially during the early years when I still had new things to say and the readership was larger and more engaged. I still have modest hopes for my blog book, but I don’t think book length projects are my forte. If I were actually able to influence Fed policy, that would seem meaningful to me.

For me, the greatest meaning in life comes from art, broadly defined to include aesthetically beautiful experiences with nature, old cities, and scientific fields like astronomy and physics. The most meaningful experience in my life might have been seeing the film 2001 at age 13. I’ve never tried LSD, but after reading about the experience it reminds me of this film, and indeed the director was someone who experimented with acid. (It might also be the only “psychedelic” work of visual art that’s actually any good. Whereas pop music from the 60s is full of good examples.)

To me, art is “real life” and things such as careers are simply ways of making money in order to have the ability to experience that real life. After art, I’d put great conversation second on the list. And the part of economics that most interests me is the ability to converse with like-minded people (such as at the Cato summer course.)

I’m sort of like a satellite dish, receptive to ideas and sounds and images. My ideal is Borges, who regarded himself more as a great reader than a great writer (of course he was both, and a great conversationalist.) I’d rather be a great reader than a great writer. I’d rather be able to appreciate great music than be able to produce it.

I think Sumner's life course is a common one for those who are ambitious when they are young. For a while climbing the ladder of success energizes them and feels like the most meaningful thing. Eventually they realize that they are not really going to shake the world – notice that Sumner still fantasizes about influencing real monetary policy – and settle back into a quiescent enjoyment of the things they love most, preferably in the company of like-minded people. Because of all that youthful drive they have plenty of money for an ordinary life and no longer care about getting more. Instead they brace up their self-esteem by insisting they would not even want the jobs they will never be offered.

Realizing that they are never going to win the game, they take their winnings and cash out, abandoning the Stoic for the Epicurean. Which actually seems to me like a pretty good way to live.

A Statement of Belief

From a letter to William James from a friend, which James discusses in Lecture 8 of Pragmatism:

I believe in pluralism; I believe that in our search for truth we leap from one floating cake of ice to another, on an infinite sea, and that by each of our acts we make new truths possible and old ones impossible; I believe that each man is responsible for making the universe better, and that if he does not do this it will be in so far left undone.

And from the same lecture, William James summation of his own beliefs:

But this talk of rationality is a parenthesis and a digression. What we were discussing was the idea of a world growing not integrally but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts. Take the hypothesis seriously and as a live one. Suppose that the world's author put the case to you before creation, saying: "I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own 'level best.' I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust the other agents enough to face the risk?"

Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough? Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter's voice?

Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort. There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit. We would therefore accept the offer -"Top! und schlag auf schlag!" It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no. The world proposed would seem 'rational' to us in the most living way. . . .

Of course as human beings we can be healthy minds on one day and sick souls on the next; and as amateur dabblers in philosophy we may perhaps be allowed to call ourselves monistic pluralists, or free-will determinists, or whatever else may occur to us of a reconciling kind. But as philosophers aiming at clearness and consistency, and feeling the pragmatistic need of squaring truth with truth, the question is forced upon us of frankly adopting either the tender or the robustious type of thought. In particular this query has always come home to me: May not the claims of tender-mindedness go too far? May not the notion of a world already saved in toto anyhow, be too saccharine to stand? May not religious optimism be too idyllic? Must all be saved? Is no price to be paid in the work of salvation? Is the last word sweet? Is all 'yes, yes' in the universe? Doesn't the fact of 'no' stand at the very core of life? Doesn't the very 'seriousness' that we attribute to life mean that ineluctable noes and losses form a part of it, that there are genuine sacrifices somewhere, and that something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of its cup?

I cannot speak officially as a pragmatist here; all I can say is that my own pragmatism offers no objection to my taking sides with this more moralistic view, and giving up the claim of total reconciliation. The possibility of this is involved in the pragmatistic willingness to treat pluralism as a serious hypothesis. In the end it is our faith and not our logic that decides such questions, and I deny the right of any pretended logic to veto my own faith. I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous, without therefore backing out and crying 'no play! I am willing to think that the prodigal-son attitude, open to us as it is in many vicissitudes, is not the right and final attitude towards the whole of life. I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no total preservation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin, and as an extract, not the whole. When the cup is poured off, the dregs are left behind forever, but the possibility of what is poured off is sweet enough to accept.

As a matter of fact countless human imaginations live in this moralistic and epic kind of a universe, and find its disseminated and strungalong successes sufficient for their rational needs. There is a finely translated epigram in the greek anthology which admirably expresses this state of mind, this acceptance of loss as unatoned for, even tho the lost element might be one's self:

A shipwrecked sailor, buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship, when we were lost,
Weathered the gale.

Truth and the Truth

William James:

What hardens the heart of everyone I approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture is that typical idol of the tribe, the notion of the Truth, conceived as the one answer, determinate and complete, to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound. For popular tradition, it is all the better if the answer be oracular, so as itself to awaken wonder as an enigma of the second order, veiling rather than revealing what its profundities are supposed to contain. All the great single-word answers to the world's riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular rule. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter - from a gifted friend who died too young - these words: "In everything, in science, art, morals and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong." How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of youth! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question 'what is the truth?' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truth in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin Language or the Law.

–Pragmatism, Lecture 7: Pragmatism and Humanism

Professorial Universes

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use.

–William James, "Pragmatism"