Achieved and ascribed identities

Here's an interesting piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the first recorded bar brawl over Kantian philosophy: two men in Russia got into a pub brawl over Kant, and one shot the other.

Kant cropped up again earlier this week while I was having coffee at my house with David Goodhart, the director of Demos, a thinktank that describes its mission as "to bring politics closer to people". We were recording a programme about community for Radio 4, in the course of which he said something extremely interesting: that the problem with the political class, and the reason they are often so emotionally and politically distant from many ordinary people, especially in settled working-class areas, is that their identities are often achieved, not ascribed.

What he means is that politicians, like many "successful" people, have achieved success by finding a route beyond the limitations of their background. They have come to define themselves not by where they are from, their community, but through what they have achieved in terms of education, qualifications, career and personal aspiration. Community is thus often a nostalgic background hum for many successful people, but not something they are completely embedded within. And if they find a new community, it is one they have chosen, not one ascribed to them by birth.

This, in a sense, is the Kantian ideal. "How recognisable, how familiar to us is the man so beautifully portrayed [by Kant]," wrote Iris Murdoch. "Free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy.For Kant, the human being is at his or her best when they have successfully self-authored. It's all about self-determination. For such as these, freedom is about breaking free of allegiance, of the restrictions of the local and the particular. In such a world, loyalties are simply a temporary convenience.

Autonomy is not the whole of ethics.

 

Waves of ethical and religious change

I'm looking at Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, starting here.

So Fogel argues the main challenge is no longer material inequality, but spiritual inequality. He adds a theory of cyclical evolution of ethics in responses to changes in technology and the economy. This is quite intriguing.

While economic growth since 1700 has been relatively steady and technological change has accelerated, there has been a recurring lag between the vast technological transformations and the human adjustment to those transformations. It is this lag which has produced the crises that periodically usher in profound reconsiderations of ethical values, that produce new agendas for ethical and social reform, and that give rise to political movements that champion the new agendas. p8-9.

People must evolve new ethical perspectives to cope with technological transformations. Exactly, and it seems obvious when put like that. He does not appear to adopt a vulgar Marxist-type approach, however, where ethics and culture are simply superstructure above the real economic base. People adapt their ideas ro suit circumstances when external events force them to reevaluate their perspectives and needs. And those ideas in turn create political and legislative programs.

Interestingly, he argues that this revaluation shows up in religious movements first, long before electoral politics, which, because of its compromise and balancing tends to lag behind. For example,

The greatest of all reform movements in American history, the abolition of slavery, was for decades almost exclusively a religious movement until a number of religiously inspired Northern politicians developed brilliant tactics and strategies necessary to create a winning antislavery coalition. P7

So he has a theory of how and why ethical transformations occur, which is fascinating. Why should religious movements be more responsive? Because in the frenetic competition of American religious denominations, indepedent congregations are likely to evolve responses to new ethical needs far quicker than political parties. The Awakenings are more political than relgiious, but they show up more quickly in relgious reaciton to new technology and new circumstances.

The religious response has been more rapid because of the high degree of independence of specific evangelical congregations from hierarchical control and from the restraints imposed on political parties, which must often trim their policies to maintain coalitions. P9

 

Great Awakenings

Evangelical religion reacts more quickly than more hierarchical and less populist churches. It means there have been a series of "Great Awakenings" in American religious life, which spilled over into politics after a generation or two.

These Great Awakenings are reform movements with an ethical/programmatic phase followed by a legislative/political phase, both of which arise out of the lag between technological change and institutional adjustment. Each Awakening lasts about one hundred years, including a declining phase in which exponents of one great awakening clash with those of the next. The First Great Awakening began in the 1730s and ripened into the American Revolution against the British Crown. The Second Great Awakening began about 1800 and produced the crusade against slavery that eventuated in the Civil War. The Third Great Awakening arose at the end of the nineteenth century and led to the rise of the welfare state and policies to promote diversity. The Fourth Great Awakening, which began about 1960, has recently entered its political phase and is focused on spiritual reform. p9-10

Importantly, the Awakenings mostly came from the margins of society.

The Great Awakenings have not usually originated from the top; generally, they have welled up from below and have often been given voice by ministers and novice leaders on the fringes of the establishment. p42

The First Great Awakening eroded older Puritan beliefs and emphasized individial rights. The Second Great Awakening emphasized equality of opportunity, and moved even away from Calvinist ideas of predestination towards a sense , influenced by Methodist theology, that people could work towards their own salvation.

 

Individual sin versus Social Corruption

The third Great Awakening arose in large part because of the challenge of industrial development and the growth of huge enterprises. That produced a move away from emphasis on individual sin and corruption to social reform, as well as economic and social egalitarianism. Equality of condition mattered more than equality of opportunity.

The Third Awakening rejected the idea that poverty was the wages of sin, and came to terms with Darwinism and science. The innate depravity of man was abandoned in favor of a conception the innocent young corrupted by society.

Modernists in the mainstream denominations evolved into the Social Gospel movement.

Its leading figures argued that, if America was to realize itself, it would have to change not only its creed, its theory of man's relationship to God, but also its ethics. It would have to make poverty not a personal failure, but a failure of society, and evil would have to be seen, not as a personal sin, but as a sin of society...The victory of the modernists and the Social Gospellers laid the basis for the welfare state, providing both the ideological foundation and the political drive for the labor reforms of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, for the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, and for the new feminist programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s. p24-5

The first three awakenings are part of mainstream historical scholarship, but Fogel is more isolated is seeing a fourth awakening, including the rise of the religious right in recent decades. Logically, however, major shifts in technology and transformation of the economy would entail some sort of Fourth Awakening in due course, however. And it is undeniable, as he points out, that the mainstream Protestant denominations have shriveled, and evangelicals have risen to over a third of the electorate.

Meanwhile, the Third Awakening forces have been secularized.

As modernist theory grew stronger, the supernatural aspects of religion diminished among those creating the New Theology, and conversions ceased to be central to their missionary work. Social reform increasingly replaced personal reform as the center of the struggle to perfect American society... The essence of religion became the elimination of poverty and inequality. p121

The rise of the professional classes has been one of the main economic transformations, and they tend to be secularized, along with a liberal mainstream media. The universities were originally founded largely to train one profession - the ministry. But the growth of new professions and vast increase in demand for skilled graduates transformed them. Academic disciplines which generally had their modern origin in 19th century theological disputes (such as economics, as founded in the American Economic Association) tended to forget the history of their disciplines.

It would be easy to quibble with this scheme of revivals and awakenings, and some would be uncomfortable putting religious feeling so close to the heart of economic and political life. Nonetheless, it is a viable and interesting theory of how and why changes in ethical perspective come about, and I had not read about these movements in any detail before. It is a story of how deep changes in the assumptions about human nature and possibility ramified through theological debate and into practical political outcomes over a period of generations.

The story is now more secularized, as ethical debate now takes place on a much wider sphere than it did one hundred years ago. But it is equally clear that purely secular perspectives can overlook much of the deeper changes going on in the world, which include the massive growth of evangelical religion in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Something is going on out there even if it is not evident in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books view of the world. The world is less secular on the whole than we think.

Inequality of Income

Moreover, many of Fogel's do not rely on his Awakening scheme for their force. He is skeptical of the Third-Awakening focus on income distribution, and he has good technical reasons for saying so. For one thing, that approach underestimates the massive improvement in nutrition, healthcare and life expectancy since the nineteenth century, as well as more leisure, both of which accrued more to the poor than the well-off.

The theory projected by the Social Gospelers, and embraced by modernism generally, held that cultural crises could be resolved by raising incomes. That theory has been given a long trial and has turned out to be incorrect. Despite the sharp rise in incomes, especially at the low end of the income distribution, the moral crisis of the cities remains unresolved. Although income transfers have gone far beyond the mild redistributions advocated by Bascom, Ely and Commons, such problem as drug addiction, alcoholism , births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, the battery of women and children, broken familitgies, violent teenage death , and crime are generally more severe than they were a century ago. p172

Income redistribution is at the core of the current political debate. But it is also increasingly irrelevant. We will conclude looking at the book tomorrow.

Virtue and the Founders

We're looking at Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, starting here.

Murray argues that mainstream America is seeing crucial social institutions erode. He gives a fascinating account of how the founders of the United States were convinced that the bedrock of the Republic was the virtue of the people. Naturally, I found this illuminating because of my continued interest in virtue ethics, like this post the other day. According to Murray,

Everyone involved in the creation of the United States knew that its success depended on virtue in its citizenry—not gentility, but virtue. “No theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure,” James Madison famously observed at the Virginia ratifying convention. “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

For Benjamin Franklin, this meant that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” On the other hand, virtue makes government easy to sustain: “The expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed.”

Washington emphasized the point too:

George Washington said much the same thing in the undelivered version of his first inaugural address, asserting that “no Wall of words, no mound of parchment can be formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.” Or as he put it most simply in his Farewell Address: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” In their various ways, the founders recognized that if a society is to remain free, self-government refers first of all to individual citizens governing their own behavior.

This shows, of course, how natural and widespread and unexceptional a belief in the virtues was before the utilitarian 19th century.

Now Murray believes virtue is eroding.

The success of America depended on virtue in the people when the country began and it still does in the twenty-first century. America will remain exceptional only to the extent that its people embody the same qualities that made it work for the first two centuries of its existence. The founding virtues are central to that kind of citizenry.

 

Four key institutions

He spends much of the rest of the book distingushing between the mores of an upper class suburb, which he calls Belmont, and a lower class one, Fishtown. The four core institutions of society - marriage, work, religion, and social trust - have all eroded markedly in Fishtown, he says. Marriage has declined:

For the first time in human history, we now have societies in which a group consisting of a lone woman and her offspring is not considered to be sociologically incomplete—not considered to be illegitimate—and so I will adapt and call them nonmarital births.

So too has the work ethic. One interesting thing is he emphasises work as a vocation, a calling, rather than just a means to pay the bills. He thinks that even low-paying work can give meaning if it helps support others.

Yes, you can overdo it. There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation. For some, an avocation or a cause can become an all-absorbing source of satisfaction, with the job a means of paying the bills and nothing more. But for many others, vocation takes the form of the work one does for a living.

The data shows lower-class neighnborhoods have changed much more than upper-class ones.

In 1960, 81 percent of Fishtown households had someone working at least forty hours a week, with Belmont at 90 percent. By 2008, Belmont had barely changed at all, at 87 percent, while Fishtown had dropped to 60 percent. And that was before the 2008 recession began. As of March 2010, Belmont was still at 87 percent. Fishtown was down to 53 percent.

Religious adherence - Catholicism in the case of Fishtown, which is based on an actual inner suburb in Philadelphia - has declined sharply.

The jury is still out on the metaquestion of whether secular democracies can long survive. But the last few decades have brought forth a large technical literature about the role of religion in maintaining civic life and the effects of religion on human functioning.

Social trust has also plunged.

The scariest message from the GSS [survey] does not consist of declines in specific activities that make up social capital, but this: The raw material that makes community even possible has diminished so much in Fishtown that the situation may be beyond retrieval. That raw material is social trust—not trust in a particular neighbor who happens to be your friend, but a generalized expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. As Francis Fukuyama documented in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, the existence of social trust is a core explanation of why some cultures create wealth and other cultures are mired in poverty.

Diversity, for all its positive qualities, also erodes social trust.

Another problem regarding social trust, and one that may help explain the decline, has surfaced more recently: The key ingredient of social capital, social trust, is eroded by ethnic diversity. In the years after Bowling Alone appeared, Robert Putnam’s research led him to a disturbing finding: Ethnic diversity works against social trust within a community—not only against trusting people of the other ethnicity, but against trusting even neighbors of one’s own ethnic group. In addition, Putnam’s research found that in areas of greater ethnic diversity, there was lower confidence in local government, a lower sense of political efficacy, less likelihood of working on a community project, less likelihood of giving to charity, fewer close friends, and lower perceived quality of life.

The erosion of these institutions diminishes happiness. And there is a common notion of what happiness means, says Murray.

... the core nature of human happiness is widely agreed upon in the West. It goes all the way back to Aristotle’s views about happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics. Distilling his discussion of happiness into a short definition leaves out a lot, but this captures the sense of Aristotle’s argument well enough for our purposes: Happiness consists of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole. The definition in effect says that when you decide how happy you are, you are thinking of aspects of your life that tend to define your life (not just bits and pieces of it); that you base your assessment of your happiness on deep satisfactions with the way things have gone, not passing pleasures; and that you believe in your heart of hearts that those satisfactions have been worth achieving. It is not really a controversial definition—try to imagine a definition of happiness you could apply to your own life that is much different.

There seems to be a strong connection in survey evidence between the strength of Murray's four core institutions and happiness.

At baseline—unmarried, dissatisfied with one’s work, professing no religion, and with very low social trust—the probability that a white person aged 30–49 responded “very happy” to the question about his life in general was only 10 percent. Having either a very satisfying job or a very happy marriage raised that percentage by almost equal amounts, to about 19 percent, with the effect of a very satisfying job being fractionally greater. Then came the big interaction effect: having a very satisfying job and a very happy marriage jumped the probability to 55 percent. Having high social trust pushed the percentage to 69 percent, and adding strong religious involvement raised the probability to 76 percent.

I'll conclude looking at the book tomorrow.

 

Coming Apart

I read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 the other day. Murray, of course, is controversial. I had lunch back in late spring with a liberal friend from work who mentioned the book in passing - and spluttered in outrage. I wasn't sure why. My friend didn't give arguments, but radiated hostility to the book. So I decided I should read it at some point, although I looked at Murray before, here.

Murray repeats and extends his arguments in the book, with much more data. He argues that America is increasingly not divided by race, but by class. Hence he uses statistical evidence to demonstrate massive declines in social institutions among whites since the early 1960s (specifically, the date Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, marking the end of an era), without needing to consider any racial differences or stereotypes about an underclass.

THIS BOOK IS about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known. I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America. ..

It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.

He has a marked libertarian view, but with a conservartive slant. Government is the enemy because it saps vitality out of the other institutions of society, the "little platoons" as Edmund Burke would have called them.

But the American project was not about maximizing national wealth nor international dominance. The American project—a phrase you will see again in the chapters to come—consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems.

The most interesting thing by far is his discussion of the emergence of a new elite university-educated upper class which is heavily clustered into a few narrow districts, the "SuperZIPS". The value of brainpower started rising sharply in the postwar years, he says, as the economy developed from agriculture and manufacturing and towards more sophisticated services and technology. More people, and smarter people, went to college.

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960. The same thing happened throughout the college system.

And the graduates of selective colleges naturally associated with each other.

The human impulse behind the isolation of the new upper class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk. Cognitive segregation was bound to start developing as soon as unusually smart people began to have the opportunity to hang out with other unusually smart people.

The shift in the upper class was dramatic and swift, with consequences that we are still feeling today. The new upper class is very different to the past, he says. He uses alumni data from Harvard and Yale, among other sources, to show that a huge proportion of the graduating classes live in just a few upscale suburbs and cities across the continent. Unsuprisingly, there are clusters in New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and LA.

The new upper class is liberal, but not notably more so in most of the country. It is very much the four principal major cities which have very liberal upper classes.

They have increasingly little exposure to the mainstream of American life.They are isolated, mostly talking and interacting just with each other. (I of course live in one of those "superZIPS" in Manhattan).

That is not an argument for turning the clock back, he says.

..I have described the America of 1960 in ways that have sometimes sounded nostalgic. But if a time machine could transport me back to 1960, I would have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. In many aspects of day-to-day life, America today is incomparably superior to the America of 1960.

The increased presence of brainpower in the upper reaches of society starting in the 1960s made a major difference in daily life:

That brings us to the timing of changes in the American standard of living. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, not much changed in the technology of daily life. ... Then things took off. Beginning around the mid-1970s—the appearance of the Apple II in 1977 is a good symbolic opening—the cascade of changes has been unending. They range from the trivial (it was still difficult to get a really good cup of coffee or loaf of bread in most parts of America in the late 1970s) to the momentous (the Information Revolution is rightly classified alongside the Industrial Revolution as an epochal event). The design, functionality, and durability of almost any consumer product today are far better than they were in 1960.

The social changes are not simply a product of wealth, however. Taxing the upper classes to achieve greater income equality would make little difference in behavior or culture.

The new-upper-class culture is not the product of great wealth. It is enabled by affluence—people with common tastes and preferences need enough money to be able to congregate—but it is not driven by affluence. It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities. You can whack the top income centile back to where it was in the 1980s, and it will have no effect whatsoever on the new-upper-class culture that had already emerged by that time. Places like Marin County are not fodder for cultural caricature because they are so wealthy.

This is very interesting.

Education and cultural change

He essentially says the cultural change is a natural outcome of sorting and acculturation by higher education. As I see it, perhaps it is a shift in society in a more priestly direction - the triumph of the brahmins, as opposed to the warrior, merchant or lower classes in the traditional fourfold Indian classification , for example.

In the past, a military aristocracy has often dominated society. Now the ruling class is the one which is more skilled at symbolic manipulation and arguments and moral deliberation - traditionally the role of the priests. We have a secular religion with its own upper class factions.

We have discussed before whether the massive social changes of the 1960s came about because humanity for the first time was not impelled by immediate survival needs. The possibility of abundance caused an outbreak of aquarian utopianism, followed by backlash.

Part of it was also technological, like the new possibilities opened up by the contraceptive pill.

And part of it was the rise of a more intellectual, educated upper class.

I'm not sure that higher education is inherently liberal or egalitarian in orientation. Rather, it was in a particularly liberal and secular phase in the 1960s and since. Harvard started off as a training center for the hardline Calvinist ministry, after all. The Jesuits have been famously highly educated, and not particularly liberal. The same applies to Chinese scholar-officials educated in the classics, or many Jewish Rabbis or graduates of the old Islamic Universities like Al-Azhar.

But having an upper class that did pass disproportionately through a few key institutions means it is likely to be stamped with the ethos of those institutions at a point in time. Most of the people would never have attended those institutions had they not become meritocratic. Hence there was natural self-interest in reinforcing those values.

We'll look at more of the book tomorrow.

Aristotle: Virtue and Happiness

I'm going to conclude a series of posts about Aristotle's The Politics , which start here.


He warns again against simply doling out surplus, as in a welfare state - which apparently happened at the time, and notoriously so later in antiquity in the form of Roman bread and circuses.

On the other hand if revenues are available, one should not do what popular leaders today do - make a free distribution of the surplus. (When people get it, they want the same again: this sort of assistance to the poor is like the proverbial jug with a hole in it.) .. Every effort therefore must be made to perpetuate prosperity. And since that is to the advantage of the rich as well as the poor, all that accrues from the revenues should be collected into a single fund and distributed in block grants to those in need, if possible in lump sums large enough for the acquisition of a small piece of land, but if not, enough to start a business, or work in agriculture. p375

Independence is preferable to simply handing out revenues, he thinks. It is a timeless thought. Often we think we are the first generation to confront a problem, or we are wonderfully modern and sophisticated. But it is just as often because we don't know how often it has been confronted in the past. We forget lessons which were already manifest in 350 B.C.

 

A constitution needs a view of the most desirable life

However, he comes back to his main point. We have to know what the good life is to design political institutions to achieve it.

If we wish to investigate the best constitution appropriately, we must first decide what is the most desirable life; for if we do not know that, then the best constitution is also bound to elude us. p391

He believes that virtue is the precursor to prosperity and happiness.

Thus people suppose that it is sufficient to have a certain amount of virtue; but they set no limit to the pursuit of wealth, power , prosperty, reputation and the like. {But} it is not by means of external goods that men acquire and keep the virtues, but the other way around; and to live happily, whether men suppose it to consist in enjoyment or in virtue or in both, does in fact accrue more to those who are outstandingly well-equipped in character and intellect, and only moderately so in the possesion of externally-acquired goods. p392

Of course, one of the more difficult issues in life is that sometimes character and virtue are not rewarded, of course. Time and chance happen to everyone. But it is still probable that as a rule people who are prudent and temperate and courageous and honest will do better. Parents generally teach their children to be honest rather than lie, after all. And living happily has only a tenuous connection with wealth and material goods beyond a certain threshold, as we know from the Easterlin paradox.

So Aristotle may overstate the point when he says

Let this then be agreed upon at the start: to each man there comes just so much happiness as he has of virtue and of practical wisdom, and performs actions dependent thereon. p392

But we would like it to be true. And in the long run, on average, it probably is true - and, like Pascal's bet, it is probably better to act as if we believe it is true.

 

Defining the Good Life

So what's the good life, or the best life? Not asceticism or denial or honor/shame or material success.

For the present, let this be our fundamental basis: the life which is best for men, both separately, as individuals, and in the mass, as states, is the life which has virtue sufficiently supported by material resources to facilitate participation in the actions that virtue calls for. p393

Although this is open to all, some avenues attract the most ambitious.

Both in earlier and in modern times men most ambitious for virtue seem generally to have preferred these two kinds of life, the statesman's or the philosopher's. p395

We have to have some purpose, or target.

The well-being of all men depends on two things; one is the right choice of target, of the end to which actions should tend, the other lies in finding the actions that lead to that end. p427

Aristotle is very teleological, of course. I often complain about liberal neutrality. But there is a liberal teleological tradition as well, and a leftist one stemming from Marx and Hegel. The problem is the good life they aim at is a vague abstract equality without much substance.

I would add another element. We need a choice of target, if nothing else because the economy and society naturally evolve regardless of whether we choose to perceive it. We can and ought to at least choose the fitness and selection criteria for the kind of change we experience.

So was it worth looking in such detail at a classic work, from a world in which a trireme or a horsecart was high technology? Yes. While looking up the Easterlin reference above, I came across this previous quote from Deirdre McCloskey in this blog post:

The great economist Simon Kuznets, notes his student Richard Easterlin, believed that "the `givens' of economics- technology, tastes, and institutions- are the key actors in historical change, and hence most economic theory has, at best, only limited relevance to understanding long-term change.

The technology has changed since Aristotle's day, of course. But tastes and institutions are still the key actors which we need to understand in a much less superficial way than our own parochial view allows.

And that is why stepping far outside our own parochial view , right back to first principles at the origin of many of our conceptions about ethics and politics, can give us a fresh perspective on our current challenges.

Aristotle: Justice and Law

I've been taking an extended look at Aristotle's The Politics , starting here. It helps to see political issues and dilemmas in very long view.

We have been looking recently at how impartiality and fairness are not the whole of our moral sense. It a running theme on this blog. Empty neutrality is not necessarily the end point of humanity.

 

Justice

There is a frequent tendency to identify justice with fairness or equality. But, says Aristotle, justice is not the same as equality.

So it thought that justice is equality, and so it is; but not for all persons, only those who are equal. Inequality also is thought to be just, and so it is, but not for all, only for the unequal. We make bad mistakes of we forget this "for whom" when we are deciding what is just. P195

Nor does he believe the state can just be a neutral referee between different views of the good life, as contemporary liberal theory mostly believes.

..a state's purpose is not merely to provide a living but to make a life that is good. .. all those who are anxious to ensure government under good laws make it their business to have an eye to the virtue and vice of the citizens. It is thus evident that that which is genuinely and not just nominally called a state must concern itself with virtue. p197

The purpose of the state is not to be a referee, but to enable its members to live well.

it is clear therefore that the state is not an association of people dwelling in the same place, established to prevent its members from committing injustice against each other, and to promote transactions. Certainly all these features must be present if there is to be a state; but even the presence of every one of them does not make a state ipso facto. The state is an association intended to enable its members, in their households and the kinships, to live well. ; its purpose is a perfect and self-sufficient life. p198

This, again, thoroughly goes against the grain of contemporary liberal thinking in its Rawlsian mainstream, which is interested in minimal coexistence rather than living well.

Virtue does not imply absolute equality,says Aristotle.

Those who contribute most to this kind of association are for that very reason entitled to a larger share in the state than those who, though they may be equal or even superior in free birth and in family, are inferior in the virtue that belongs to the citizen. p198

The strong may need to be restrained, however.

It is always the weaker who go in search of justice and equalty; the strong reck nothing of them., p367

Law and appetite

The advantage of law is it takes emotion and self-interest out of the equation.

Therefore he who asks law to rule is asking God and intelligence and no others to rule; while he who asks for the rule of a human being is importing a wild beast too; for desire is like a wild beast, and anger perverts rulers and the very best of men. Hence law is intelligence without appetition. p226

"Intelligence without appetition" is marvelous, and similar to ideas about "public reasoning." But, law is also a search for the mean, not simply impartial enforcement of universal rules;

Again, doctors when ill call in other doctors to treat them, and trainers other trainers when they themselves go into training - on the principle that it is impossible to give true judgment when their own interests and thir own feelings are involved. So it is clear that the search for what is just is a search for the mean; for the law is the mean. p227

And one must be wary of interests that cloak themselves under the cover of law.

 

Cities and the public good

Republicans do particularly badly in cities, says Atlantic Cities, and it may not be a matter of race and demographics alone. Where people are squashed together, the need for public services is more obvious than on a tract of land in the exurbs.

In a good piece on the GOP’s problem with geography earlier this week, The New Republic’s Lydia DePillis interviewed Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse, who made this point succinctly: "There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good," he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially."

The real urban challenge for conservatives going forward will be to pull back from an ideology that leaves little room for the concept of "public good," and that treats all public spending as if it were equally wasteful. Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises

There may be something to this. It is indeed partly a matter of the public good, in the economic sense. But I would like to see more money spent on parks and libraries and infrastructure and other actual public services open to everybody - not transfers, entitlements and padded union pensions that go to particular individuals for their private use. I pay a staggering amount in New York City taxes, only a tiny fraction of which goes to actual public goods rather than entitlements or subsidies.

As often happens, the principle is correct, but the practice can be corrupted in machine politics and clientelism. In a similar way, I'd double spending on NASA and the National Parks at Federal level, things that everyone benefits from, so long as we eliminate soybean or corn subsidies, say, or limit the proportion of the federal budget spent on services and entitlements for the over 65s.

But it is not simpy about public goods, either. It is also a matter of being able to articulate a notion of the common good. Aristotle, as we saw, defined any constitution that does not aim at the common good as "deviant". Both parties have trouble with the common good, the Democrats because they are a coalition of sectional and selfish pressure groups, the Republicans because their libertarian and oligarchic country club wings both deny any notion of the common good at all.

 

Aristotle: The Middle Way

I've talking about Aristotle's The Politics , starting here. We were just talking about his warning about over-reliance on expert judgment, and the need to emphasize the "middle" kind of life.

This leads to a very important point. One major criticism of virtue ethics is that it is only for an aristocratic elite. I looked at an Oxford roundup of articles, here.

One of the contributors, Schneewind, says

The Aristotelian theory may have been suited to a society in which there was a recognized class of superior citizens , whose judgement on moral issues would be accepted without question (p200)

But in fact Aristotle is not arguing for exclusive reliance on a higher class of superior individuals. He says:

If we were right when we stated in our Ethics stated that virtue is a mean, and that a happy life is a life without hindrance in its accordance with virtue, then the best life must be the middle life, consisting in a mean which is open to men of every kind to attain. p266

This is very important, because it refutes one of the principal objections to virtue ethics that we have come across: the argument that the good life is only one philosophers can aspire to.

The state aims to consist as far as possible of those who are like and equal, a condition found chiefly among the middle people. And so the best-run constitution is certain to be found in this state, whose composition is , we maintain, the natural one for a state to have. p267

it is the middle citizens in a state who are the most secure: they neither covet, like the poor, the possessions of others, nor do others covet theirs as the poor covet those of the rich. So they live without risk, not scheming nor being schemed against. p267

 

Faction

Aristotle is not arguing for a guardian class, like Plato. Even further,

The superiority of the middle constitution is clear also from the fact that it alone is free from factions. Where the middle element is large, there least of all arise factions and divisions among the citizens. And big states are freer from faction, for the same reason, that their middle element is large. p268

Faction seems endemic to just about any human group or organization, unfortunately. He specifically warns against the "greedy grubbiness of the rich."

But at all times a legislator ought to include the middle peope in the constitution. .. The better mixed a constitution is, the longer it will last. It is a mistake made by many, even by those seeking to make an aristocratic constitution, not only to give to great a preponderance to the rich, but to cheat the people. In the long run mistaken good inevitably gives way to unmistakable evil for the greedy grabbing of the rich does more harm to the constitution than that of the people. p272

So there is a sympathetic element to the Occupy 99% there. On the other hand,

In democracies the rich ought to be treated with restraint: there should be no redistribution of property, nor of income, such as goes on unnoticed in some constitutions. p327

Confusions arise from overextending the ideas of equality, or inequality.

Democracy arose from the idea that those who are equal in any respect are equal absolutely. All alike are free, therefore they claim that they are all equal absolutely. Oligarchy arose from the assumption that those who are unequal in some one respect are completely unequal: being unequal in wealth they assume themselves to be unequal absolutely. p296

I think this is a common problem. Gay marriage, for example, is a claim to be 'equal absolutely' even if other citizens have to be coerced or sued into accepting it. Any difference in any respect in equality or any disparate impact is seen as unacceptable.

But, says Aristotle, there are two kinds of equality - numerical, and what amounts more or less to proportionate equality:

Inequality is everywhere at the bottom of faction, for in general faction arises from men's striving for what is equal. .. Now, there are two kinds of equality, the one being numerical, the other of value. I use 'numerically equal' to cover that which is equal and the same in respect of either size or quantity, and 'equal in value' for that which is equal by ratio. ... To lay it down that the equality shall be exclusively of one kind or the other is a bad thing, as is shown by what happens in practice: no constitution that is constructed on such a basis lasts long. p298

Too much emphasis on simplistic equality, taken to an extreme in either direction , can lead to political collapse.

He is also wary of faction arising from different regions or ethnic backgrounds.

Then there is difference of stock, which remains a stimulus to faction until such time as the two groups learn to live together; for just as a state cannot be made out of any and every collection of people, so neither can it be made in any space of time at will. Hence faction has been exceedingly common when the population has included an extraneous element, whether these have joined in the founding or have been taken on later. p304.

The "learning to live together" takes time, and multiculturalism, so to speak, can just as much lead to bitter faction instead of universal harmony. This is a common theme with Aristotle: you most often cannot simply enact things by will. People have to be habituated to them.

Of course, much of this runs counter to current liberal orthodoxy. But it may be there are some timeless issues with human nature that we have to remember to make genuine progress possible. This does not mean we should not look to have people from different backgrounds living together, of course, in the interests of diversity. But it does suggest we need to be on the lookout for faction if so.

He also has a precursor to the "broken windows" theory of law enforcement that became popular in the 1990s, which said minor crimes like turnstile jumping could lead to more widespread major crimes like assault or murder:

Now in constitutions that are well-blended it is essential to take many precautions, and certainly against anything being done contrary to the laws; and it is essential in particular to guard against the insignificant breach. Illegality creeps in unobserved; it is like small items of expenditure which when oft-repeated make away with a man's possesions. The spending goes unnoticed because the money is not spent all at once, and this is just what leads the mind astray. p323.

We will look at Justice and law next.

 

 

Aristotle: Citizenship and Constitutions

We're talking about Aristotle's The Politics , starting here, because it's useful to go back to first principles and get a long view of our political and economic problems.

Citizenship

One matter which has attracted attention in social democratic circles in the last few years is the notion of citizenship. (I have a recollection of a long discussion in David Held's Models of Democracy, but haven't read it in a while.)

In general, however, our conception of citizenship is now very confused and unclear. It mostly tends towards simply residence, or miminal civic inclusion, rather than any common ethnicity or values or beliefs. Multiculturalism has become the ideal on the left, as well as sectional rather than national identity. We have had an immense shift in the last fifty years from ideas of national self-determination and decolonization to purely civic membership, with no obligations except to obey the law and pay taxes.

Aristotle ( who spent much of his life as a foreign resident in Athens) is adamant that citizenship is not just residence. Instead,

What effectively distinguhes the citizen proper from all others is his participation in giving judgment and in holding office. p169

A citizen must be capable of meaningfully participating in deliberation. So is the good man and the good citizen the same thing? Not quite. For one thing, it will depend on the kind of consitution a citizen lives under.

Not that good ruling and good obedience are the same virtue - only that the good citizen must have the knowledge and ability both to rule and to be ruled. That is what we mean by the virtue of a citizen - understanding the governing of free men from both points of view. p182

You cannot, on this perspective , really be a citizen by simply asserting rights or claims against the whole, rather than also seeing the perspective of those who must meet those rights and claims and comsequences.

And the virtue of the ruler and the citizen are not the same. The virtue of the ruler is mostly practical wisdom, or phronesis, which is neither theoretical nor technocratic, but skilled ability to judge particular situations. The virtues of the private citizen are wider.

Strikingly from our perspective, as a rule he also believed anyone who works as skilled craftsman or works for wages for others cannot be a citizen...

for it is quite impossible, while living the life of a mechanic or hireling, to occupy oneself as virtue demands. p184

That perhaps vanished as a sensible view with the increased scale of organizations with the industrial revolution. But the notion that one must have time and energy to reflect still stands, perhaps.

The common good

He then separates good from bad constitutions. The notion of a good constitution is very clear:

It is clear that those constitutions which aim at the common good are right, as being in accord with absolute justice; while those which aim only at the good of the rulers are wrong. p189

Looking to simpy private advantage, "be it of the one or the few or the mass" is a deviation, when the interests of one section of the community take precedence over the others.

This has contemporary relevance as well. Seeing politics as simply a matter of demographics, of sectional interest and redistribution and faction, obscures and denies the common good. I think this is where the Democrats, as a coalition of minority and special interest groups, usually go wrong, and where the GOP is joining them with its increasingly libertarian tone. Assembling enough sectional coalition elements to get to 50.1% is not the same as advocating for a view of the common good.

It also prefigures much contemporary analysis, such as the notion of "inclusion" in Why Nations Fail. Small groups often focus on dividing a small collective pie to their own advantage, instead of making the pie bigger.


Of course, there can be different views of the common good. But you need some conception of the good. And you need to go beyond the shallow Pareto optimality of welfare economics to have any real insight into the common good. We will come back to this later.

So Aristotle distinguishes six kinds of rule: monarchy, and its deviant twin tyranny; aristocracy (in the old sense of rule by the aristoi, or the best and most virtuous men, not traditional European landed upper classes) and its deviation, oligarchy, typically the rule of the few or the wealthy; and polity, which is "political control exercised by the mass of the populace in the common interest" versus its somewhat deviant twin, democracy, which is rule only "for the benefit of the men without means." , ie the poor. p190

 

Expert Judgement

Although he is against giving power to those with little or no time to reflect or use their reason, he is nonethless very supportive of wider participation. Almost 2300 years before the rise of the middle classes in Europe, Aristotle emphasizes wide deliberation and the importance of the middle sort. For one thing, a wider group often makes better decisions.

For it is possible that the many, no one of whom taken singly is a sound man, may yet, taken all together, be better than the few, not individually but collectively, in the same way that a feast to which all contribute is better than one supplied at one man's expense. p202

Interestingly, this is a little different from 'many chefs spoil the broth' or the cult of leadership. This too prefigures what we find today, such as the greater accuracy of aggregate economic forecasts that we were looking at the other day.

He has a dietary analogy: it is actually preferable to include "rougher" classes in discussion with the powerful:

By thus mixing with the better sort, they render good service in their states, in something like the way that a combination of coarse foods with refined renders the whole diet more nutrtious than a small amount of the latter. p204

So, says Aristotle, democracy is "the most moderate of the deviations" p239. And polity, the ideal, " is a mixture of oligarchy and democracy." p259

Similar comsiderations apply to experts, according to this author who spent twenty years in the original Academy. There are some things in which they should be judged by their peers. But in others, users are much better judges than expert producers.

.. that provided the mass of the people is not too slave-like, each indiviudal will indeed be a worse judge than the experts, but collectively they will be better, or at any rate no worse. Secondly, there are tasks of which the actual doer will be neither the best nor the only judge, cases in which even those who do not posses the skill form an opinion on the fnished product. .. So too the user of a rudder , the helmsman, is a better judge of it than the carpenters who made itl and it is the diner not the cook that pronounces upon the merits of a dinner. p205

This reminds me of William F. Buckley's assertion that "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University ."

Expert judgement has its limits, according to one of the first experts.