Andrew Taggart

Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

, ,

Life is not like water (VI)

In philosophical counseling, ethics, education, politics on May 14, 2012 at 4:19 am

VI

We have been following nature’s course through modernity with a view to solving an enigma. How could it be so self-evident during earlier epochs that the virtuous person would, without question, live according to nature when it became just as self-evident in our time that the morally upright person would have to act contrary to nature? The answer is to be discovered, in key part, in the disappearance of what the young Hegel once called the “friendliness of life.”

The leitmotiv of human life as one that flowed like water was well-known in the ancient world. The Daodejing says that “The highest goodness is like water,” Xenophanes says that ”All things that come into being and grow are earth and water,” and in one of the extant fragments from Thales we read, simply, that “Life is water.” Among Daoists in particular, it would have been counterintuitive to speak of fighting against water or of striving to swim upstream, perhaps as absurd as Don Quixote fighting windmills or Sisyphus trying to push a boulder uphill. Yet this does not mean that water was always an easy friend.

The paradigmatic example of water’s ferocious power is, of course, the story of the flood. In the Early Theological Writings, Hegel writes that where once there existed unspoken amity, friendliness, and love, the flood sundered man from nature, evoking a “disbelief in nature” and, in turn, giving rise to man’s desire for mastery. Coming to consciousness of his world, man would build a tower impregnable to sea fury and though his wounds would never heal, at least he could console himself with the thought that he would never be harmed again.

Examined closely, the myth of the flood is a story of the emergence of higher order abstract reasoning on the heels of the destruction of a natural amity between friend and friend, human beings and the natural world. And where one might just as well imagine human beings weathering the storm and, once the flood had subsided, giving thanks to the earth and the sun, making love to each other and kissing their children and their gods all in the hope of restoring the general friendliness of life, one observes instead the construction of semi-permanent structures, forms of protection, bulwarks against harm and wounds and possible injuries.

One could do worse than to read this myth as an allegory for modernity. The breakdown of a previous social order led, out of fear and hope and, yes, also hubris, to the supervenience of principle upon lost love. If you do not love me anymore, then let us settle up, call in the law, summon forth the lawyers, draw up our contracts. Let us legislate and codify, regulate and systematize, making ourselves into good Confucians, middle managers, and dutiful bureaucrats. Above all, let everyone follow the rules (and, in the boudoir, eroticize transgressing them).

Given this disenchanted nature, morality must be a struggle against life, a set of duties trumping our inclinations, a list of obligations that at times terminate in tragic conflict. For us, morality must be deliberative and obligatory while nature remains mechanistic, undirected, following its own separate course. Now morality must be universalizable–stern and rigorous stuff–applicable mainly to the good will or good outcomes, or else it succumbs to mere cant, empty relativism, or the shameless will to power.

In Patterns of Moral Complexity, the contemporary moral philosopher Charles Larmore writes candidly about what he deems the “heterogeneity of morals.” He concludes, “We have to live with the fact that we have obligations we cannot honor.” All right, but what obligations are these and why can’t they always be honored? Larmore claims that the principles of partiality, deontology, and consequentialism are the three principles that constitute modern morality. We are partial, he believes, in that we have particular projects that we deem good and that we seek to realize. In the pursuit of final aims that are ours, we do not expect others to value or pursue the same. Additionally, we have incontrovertible duties, as Kant held, duties that admit of no exceptions and that enjoin us always to act, or to abstain from acting, in a certain way (telling the truth, keeping our promises, never using another as a means, and so forth). Finally, we have an obligation to bring into being the most good or least evil overall. To say, therefore, that modern life is “morally complex” is just to say that there will be scenarios in which one principle may come into conflict with another and this with tragic implications. Larmore once again: “I do not think there is any systematic principle [that is, any higher order principle transcending these three] that will decide these conflicts.” Larmore’s honesty is telling, and I think he is right about the inevitability of tragic conflict in modernity, provided we accept the assumption that morality consists solely of incommensurable obligations.

For Larmore takes for granted what we moderns also take for granted–that we act on principles and that these principles “lie,” in his words, “at a high level of generality.” But this is only true once we take on board the assumption that nature is ‘other’ and that our fellows are not our friends but strangers, mere acquaintances, and potential foes. Our distrust runs deep. Yet when life is going well, there is no principle that we apply with rigor and constancy but, more simply, the face to face, the touch, the besito; no abstractions but your words; no Confucianism but, says the Daodejing, “filial piety and fraternal affection” arising and holding us close to one another.

An order collapses, “The state is in chaos,” and “there arises the loyal minister.” These are Laozi’s words of caution. Indeed, once nature flees from us and we, in our turn, seek to bring it back to us by taming it, then we and nature go our separate ways. Truly, modern life may be like H20, but it is not like water. Recognizing as much, we poets of life long for ethical life to be restored.

Part VII (final) tomorrow: Ethical Life Restored…

,

On my becoming cozily parochial

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling, politics on April 19, 2012 at 4:12 am

I believe that the modern moral question concerning what one should do is off the mark, and I believe the ancient ethical question of how my life is to fare is apropos and wisely worded. I am getting settled with the thought that self-cultivation is what matters to me most such that I have become happily quietistic about a morality grounded on a simple principle (or on any principle for that matter). I stand aside from principle, turning my head, walking away, keeping my mouth for breathing.

Modern moral philosophers have taken quite a liking to thought experiments concerning our moral lives. Here is how the experiment is supposed to work. The hypothetical scenario is meant to motivate the underlying principle, revealing to us how our moral intuitions point us toward greater moral commitments and obligations. (Or, as in the trolley problem, it is supposed to show us the muddle in our moral considerations, as we puzzle through our vacillations between Kantianism and consequentialism.) The idea is that if this is the sort of thing we are obliged to do in this scenario, then it is also the sort of the thing we are obliged to do in any similar scenario. The experiment therefore hinges on the movement from particular case to universal principle, from “at least once” to “always so.”

Peter Singer, one of the most prominent utilitarian philosophers living today, has come up with a particular thought experiment to make more perspicuous our broader commitments to supporting international aid efforts. In one version of the story, Singer asks you to suppose that you have recently purchased a pair of expensive shoes. You are now walking along the road and come upon a shallow pond. You see that a young child has fallen into the water and that he appears to be drowning. If you jump in after him and rescue the child, you will ruin your expensive shoes. He asks, “Do you have any obligation to rescue the child?”

Surely, many of us would nod our heads in agreement. Of course, we would say, the cost of ruining the shoes would be small in comparison with the benefit of saving the child. Very good. But does it matter, Singer asks further, whether the child lives in this town or country, or could he also have lived halfway across the world or wherever? He answers,

Virtually all agree that distance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. I then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new CD, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert, can mean the difference between life and death to more than one person somewhere in the world. (my emphasis)

So it seems that we are all obliged to help any child who is also facing certain but preventable death, wherever that child may be.

I do not think so. I have become baldly literal-minded, altogether unclever and mildly daft, during the early years of the third decade of my life. I want to ask a simple question: “Who is this child? Do I know him?”

Or, rather, with the late Bernard Williams I want to say that this is all one thought and perhaps one question too many. I see this child of mine and I jump right in. I do not ask whether I would rescue him and I certainly do not think, within the scenario or afterward, whether I have an obligation to save him. I save him.

I needn’t remind myself that t am walking through my neighborhood. (I am living simply, so I did not purchase expensive shoes in the first place.) I see this child–her name is Marilynne–this child who is the child of my friend Sarah. I know her, know them both. I see that Marilynne is in trouble now; I jump in to save her.

Did I have an obligation to save her? How dare you ask me that. Do I have obligations toward strangers, that is, toward those whom I have never met and do not know? I do not think so. Or, rather, I remain silent when faced with the question. If this child from Botswana is drowning in the Jackie O. Reservoir not far from where I live and if I see her drowning and if I can do something about it, then I will jump in to save this child, this child here, this child of mine, as surely as I will greet my neighbor with a smile.

*

I do not know whether you are following me. It may seem that this is all for the nonce, but there is rather a lot at stake. For I am becoming quiestic about all questions of a universal stamp: about the legitimacy of the state, human rights, civil rights, international treaties, climate change, species extinction, Occupy movements, universal health care, carbon footprints, oil reserves, you name it. I am not becoming quietistic out of callowness or cynicism (a side note: the ancient Cynics were the first cosmopolitans, i.e., citizens of the world) but rather out of a desire to live according to nature. I am becoming lovingly parochial, loving myself and my own, my friends and lovers, my neighbors and guests alone. About the rest I remain uninterested and agnostic.

I have stopped reading the paper, and I think this a good thing.

I do well by this friend here, to this tree out my window, to the large park over yonder. If John comes to my philosophy practice in the right spirit, then I mean to do well by him. If Karen, a guest, knocks on my door in the spirit of humility and in need, then I mean to be hospitable to her. When this woman on this street asks me for directions to that location, I walk her to her destination. Beyond this my mind no longer strays or ambles, no longer considers or puzzles.

I have no (or, more likely, only a few) principles, but I do exercise good judgment. I follow few rules, relying mainly on rules of thumb. Do I keep my promises? Yes, but that is an oddly formulated question. I suppose, as a rule of thumb, I keep these promises to my friends. But something could come up and the world, being so precarious during this unsettled time, could change its course. And then also I do not make promises to strangers or enemies.

Tell me then: is the general principle to “love your friends and ignore your strangers”? No, I love this friend in this way for this reason today. I hope to do the same tomorrow, come what may, should I be around another day. From this perspective, it could be said that I am all loving all day.

In my rising parochial un-worldview, my polis consists of friends, lovers, conversation partners, and neighbors. They have become my common good, my cares, my reason for being.

,

On 7 faulty but reasonable strategies for being at home in the world

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling, politics on April 11, 2012 at 5:08 am

Let’s suppose that a person P experienced sufficient physical harm during P’s formative years, such that P’s standing in the world is brought into question. What strategy or strategies would P likely employ (where these strategies are more ways of being in the world than conscious choices, more ongoing practices than ‘cognitive’ takes) in order to maintain a sense of basic integrity?

The key is to see each strategy as an attempt to make my standing in the world intelligible to me. To a degree, for the world to be intelligible to me is for it to be meaningful (enough) for me. The first strategy is to take an early exit.

1. Suicide. To P, the world is not and cannot be a home. P does not belong, and the future will closely resemble the past and present. This being so, P will remove himself from it. (But see my “On the Suicide’s Claims and the Philosopher’s Replies.”)

2. Contemptu mundi. The temporal world is not a home. In which case, P renounces the temporal world, thereby turning the eyes of the mind (or soul) toward the transcendent alone. Here we have asceticism.

3. Love of the Flesh. The world in general is not a home but the flesh is alive. The world rejects, but the flesh affirms. P can be a master in control of P’s desires, the other a slave. The love of the flesh is, it turns out, a safe space in which P can say yes to life, if only for a time.

4. Inner Citadel. The Stoics contrast the inner sanctuary of willing and thinking to the tragic cast of the world of others. (This is not entirely true, since the Stoics affirmed a cosmopolitan vision of human fellowship. But set this thought aside.) The Inner Citadel (Pierre Hadot’s leitmotiv for Marcus Aurelius’s philosophy) is the site of self-sufficiency, the rejection of all dependency on others. P’s Inner Citadel is a safe place where the chances of being wounded are lessened.

5. The World of the Imagination. If the world is not a home for P, then P can conjure an alternative. P’s imagination gains ‘depth’ rather like the birth of the soul for Nietzsche: as if a flat surface were being stretched and deepened. P’s imaginary world is thereby set over and against the real world to which P does not belong. (In my “On Putting Life in Order,” I write more about so-called “OCD,” a term I find objectionable.)

6. Bourgeois Respectability. The world’s so far not being a home does not entail that it cannot be a home for P. Perhaps P can ‘accommodate’ himself to it as it is. Bourgeois respectability aims at a life of stability and moderate comfort, a world (largely private) shorn of the greater passions and greater vulnerabilities.

P’s approach is one of prudence: not to live with the greatest intensity (e.g., German Romanticism) but to ensure that he has an insurance policy against whatever may likely befall him. P is not trying to live but is trying to defer the prospect of dying, as if dying could be held off, set aside, or deferred indefinitely.

7. Life Mission. When Eli Wiesel said, apropos the Holocaust, “Never again,” he was drawing on an intellectual tradition that began around the 17th C. and that has become the background picture for modernity. P, having been harmed, can make his life into a mission to stamp out X (where X is harassment, sexual abuse, female genital mutilation, homophobia, xenophobia, etc.). The late poet Adrienne Rich also supposes this when she writes that the goal of her life was to “create a world without exploitation.” We will see that this is a reasonable strategy, but it nevertheless contains an irremovable metaphysical flaw.

In modernity, Edward Craig argues, we have seen a broad shift away from The Mind of God thesis (man as contemplative being seeking to approach or achieve access to the mind of God) to the Agency Theory. On the latter, he states that man was

no longer a spectator, but a being that actively creates, or shapes, its own world. It did not, one cannot over emphasise, manifest itself only or even primarily in moral or practical philosophy; the striking thing about it was precisely the way in which what might be called the practical concepts invaded areas previously thought of as purely theoretical, those areas where ‘spectator’ [contemplator] theories had been paramount, and whose connections with the practical had been thought of as a welcome but wholly inessential extra (The Mind of God and the Works of Man, p. 229).

This idea is evident as early as Kant and doubtless comes to fruition in Marx’s famous final thesis on Feuerbach. For Kant, the normative (the ‘ought’) is distinct from the factual/scientific (the ‘is’). Kant’s novel claim–novel, that is to say, in the history of Western thought–about injustice would go as follows: The world is not as it ought to be.

Marx’s final thesis is a radicalization of Kant’s thesis, philosophers heretofore having only interpreted the world, the point now being, Marx says, to change it.

P would therefore take on board a life of restlessness:

a. The world is not as it should be.

b. My life must be directed at closing the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’

c. My life shall be infinite striving after the impossible.

For P, who is beholden to this metaphysical picture, the world can never be a home.

Conclusion

True philosophical self-reflection only begins once P has lived out any or all of strategies 1-7 and found it impossible to make the world into a home on these terms. Most people will never be ‘alive’ to this impossibility. (The Left has a bone caught in its throat with respect to 7. If this characterization is right, then it follows that I am not a Leftist.) A few brave souls will see that a different way of being–a way of self-cultivation–can put one in touch with the world. Yet the path of yes-saying is a long one–in Spinoza’s words, rare and precious and excellent.

,

On Pinterest folk

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling, politics on March 14, 2012 at 6:14 am

In the Start-up section of the March 11, 2012 issue of The New York Times, I glanced at an article devoted to Pinterest. The headline runs: “Pinterest Aims at the Collector Hidden Inside All of Us.” According to its website, Pinterest is a “virtual pinboard,” a place where you can grab and pin up photos, images, color swatches–hence, a publicly visible scrapbook or commonplace book of sorts. Strikingly, Pinterest was a company that I’d only heard existed the day before, but I was now coming to find that it was, as Jenna Wortham of the NYT was informing me, being touted as one of the hottest start-ups of 2012. Indeed, it was the darling of South by Southwest. If there is an It Girl and an It Drink, then there should also be an It Start-up. The pun alone makes it worth it.

Reader, I am already leading you astray because my focus actually lies elsewhere. My attention was caught not by the conceit of the start-up but by the founder’s remarks about folks. Quoting:

“We showed it to folks from all walks of life, lifestyle bloggers, crafters and hobbyists,” said Ben Silbermann, a founder and the chief executive of Pinterest. “The early people were from the area where I grew up, in Des Moines, and the site grew very organically from there.”

A few paragraphs later, more folksy Ben:

“It’s like, when you go to a friend’s house, you’re always excited to see what’s on their bookshelf,” he said. “Behind Pinterest was the idea that if you can put that online, it’d be really exciting for folks.”

Hey, they’re those folks again!, those folks getting excited about collecting things and being folksy and whatnot. But who are those folks anyway? By this, I don’t mean: what consumers make up Pinterest’s target market, and I don’t have in mind how the start-up will manage to become monetizable or achieve scale. My philosophical question, rather, is: what are folks anyway?

*

To find out, I took a trip to Palo Alto, California, the rural outpost of Folksyville. When I got there, Ben was dressed in a flannel shirt and a beard. I sat down with him, and we spent the afternoon talking, over our lunch of hearty potatoes, about his growing up in Des Moines and my growing up in rural Wisconsin. We spoke about our fond memories of hay bailing and apple picking. Afterward, as I consulted my notes at the home where I was being hosted, I thought how uncanny it was how much Ben and I had in common.

I kid. I didn’t meet Ben or Mr. Silbermann in Palo Alto, and I don’t know how much flannel he is wearing these days. I write to you from my urban tree house in NYC.

It is true, however, that Pinterest is based in Palo Alto, and it is worth noting that the latter, alongside Austin, Boulder, Portland, Seattle, and Brooklyn, is a start-up hub. I ask: how could there be anything folksy about Palo Alto (or Brooklyn or Seattle)? And what would explain our desire to speak, for those who (I’ll argue) aren’t folks at all, in folksy terms?

*

When I think of “folk,” a few characteristics come to mind. (I am not sure whether these qualify as necessary or sufficient conditions. I am only thinking aloud.)

1. Folk live in the country, in a rural setting, in a small town.

2. Folk are commoners and laypersons.

3. Folk have kith and kin. A nice quote, from 1833, in the Oxford English Dictionary speaks to this sense of folk: “Your young folks are flourishing, I hope.”

What is especially revealing about the above list is that most of us don’t embody any of these characteristics. To wit,

1. Most people live in the city, in an urban setting, in a metropolis. (Think of Richard Florida’s many references to the “creative class.”) According to the latest statistics, only 1% of the US population today is involved in or associated with farming.

2. We are “elites.” I am reminded of Judith Shklar’s book Ordinary Vices. Her list of modern democratic vices includes cruelty, hypocrisy, betrayal, misanthropy, and snobbery. With regard to the last, her question is, “What is wrong with snobbery?” The wrap is that snobs reject the very idea of mass democracy, reinvoking or holding fast to outmoded aristocratic notions of social distinction, rank, and birth in order to shore up a sense of power. Granted. Yet another sense of “elites” would simply key into the fact that most of us are college-educated and engaged in some professional (not I, said the fox, but most) activities.

3. Most of us no longer have, in the blood sense invoked above, “kith and kin.” We have friends, acquaintances, co-workers. Most of these attachments we “acquired” over time. Few of us have hay bailing neighbors.

It follows that we’re simply not folks. So what gives?

*

My first inclination is to appeal to Marx’s early notion of ideology as false consciousness. We are calling ourselves “the folks” in order to hide from ourselves the extent to which we are not folks. My second inclination, however and more in keeping with the spirit of Hegel, is to ask what we yen for, what we desire ownmost when we call ourselves folks. What about being folks is appealing to us and what, by implication, is wanting in our social lives?

Not knowing much about the history of folks, I speculate rather freely, as is my wont. I imagine that–again, I’m thumbing through the OED, fairly rapidly at that–words like folk, folksy, folklore, folk-music, folk-song, folk-dance, folk-blues, and folkfest (in the 60s and 70s) were evocative of a time (or of times) of great social unease and of great social cohesion. Some prima facie evidence: Google Ngram Viewer indicates that, from 1900-2008, the word folk was used most frequently in the 1930s. If this is right, then it implies that American citizens living through the Depression would have had reason enough to conceive of themselves as folk: they were indeed countrified, they were quite poor, they were mostly commoners, and they had, and stood by, their kith and kin.

As a pin-up note: we could imagine the hippie movements in the 60s and 70s as drawing on this tradition, though now in an “alchemized” and “spiritualized” form.

*

Why folk now, why now during the beginning of the second decade of the 21st C.? I think our folk fantasy bespeaks our sense of social alienation and our nostalgic yearnings (from the Greek: a desire for home) for meaningful social bonds. The trouble is that we can’t return to “folk talk,” as if saying made us so, as if social reality were so malleable as to bend to our language and our will. In addition, by invoking “folk,” by engaging in conceptual deformation, we shortcircuit the heady philosophical inquiry into what would be necessary for us to re-imagine forms of togetherness that would be “post-traditional” but just as closely knit. We need “metaphysical compensation” for the social unraveling; we yearn, and rightly so, for this.

Let us try to be candid, honest, and courageous. Let us look social reality in the face. There is no such thing as city folk, and there is no such animal as Pinterest folk. Let’s get over this, get over all this nonsensical folksy talk, so that we can start working toward bringing into reality a more fitting understanding of our shared social experience.

,

Gift economy explained, justified, and defended

In philosophical counseling, ethics, education, politics on February 28, 2012 at 6:04 am

Gift Economy Explained

1. Suppose A gives B a gift wholeheartedly. (By “wholeheartedly,” I mean without reserve or hesitation, without holding back or misgivings. Positively, I mean: “giving forth freely or receiving plentifully.”)

2. Then B receives the gift wholeheartedly.

3. It follows that B is goodly indebted to A. The debt is lighter, not onerous, because of being indebted for having received well and fitting.

4. It is now B’s turn. In order to discharge the debt, B can explore 1 of 2 options (or both separately or at once).

(a) In due course, B can give a gift wholeheartedly to person C or entity D (an organization, e.g.).

(b) In due course, B can give a gift wholeheartedly to A.

Remarks

1. B must avoid the common misconception of taking the discharge of debt to be thoroughgoing and final. To the question, “What am I giving a gift for?” B must keep the answer hopelessly vague, “For the purpose of discharging (some of) my debt.” It is not, however, a final discharge because once B gives a gift to A, A is then more deeply entangled with A than ever before. The paradox is that the more A and B give to each other, the more they’re entwined with each other. The more B gives to a third, the more the third is entwined with A and B both. (This is but one articulation of the expansive feature of a gift economy. Giving can also be inviting.) The more entwined, the more they come to rely upon each other. Oh, goodly messy social life!

2. B mustn’t regard his gift as being equivalent in value to the gift originally received. The rule, “Always find an equivalence such that X=Y,” is not the worst definition of justice, to be sure, and yet it cannot hold court in a gift economy. It cannot have a place outside of market exchange (money for good, money for service, etc.). “How much should I give?” is a question that is so poorly formulated that it cannot find purchase in a gift economy proper, only in donor models such as NPR. So the directive that B might follow could be: “Give in the right spirit with the greatest lightness! Give to meet A’s or C’s life needs!”

3. B has to learn not to be in a rush to offload his debt. This is not easy; we are often impatient and believe that we mustn’t be “under another’s thumb.” (NB: a gift economy gets rid of thumbs, having no use for them.) On the other hand, B cannot “hold out” without also removing himself from the gift economy proper. The gift economy gives B the opportunity to exercise phronesis (what gift to whom in which way at what time).

4. A, a mutually dependent creature, must learn patience, since it is not exactly clear where the next gift will come from. I like to say that A must learn to receive blindly, the gift being “just around the corner.” Of course, B could, in his turn, turn and give a gift to A, but then B may also give a gift to C instead. (Is the “instead” warranted here?) Clearly, a gift economy builds in uncertainty (who to whom when?), yet it also works to establish a network of ground level trust. A may not know from whom the gift will come, but A, through experience, has found subsequent gifts to be “just around the bend.”

Reasons

1. A gift economy models good givings and receivings: good givings and receivings of words, gestures, actions, objects, and money. Accordingly, it is an ongoing exercise in friendship and love. (For more on this line of thought, see my short post on material inferences. It’s a good, short piece. If you live according to good material inferences, your life will be changed for good.)

2. A gift economy acknowledges, more openly than other financial models, the extent to which human animals are dependent upon each other. P’s claim to Robinson Crusoe-esque self-sufficiency is contradicted any time P swipes a credit card or uses the subway. A gift economy points us in the direction of analyzing how mutual dependency can be made good, as opposed to exploitative, miserly, sweet dealing, winner takes all, and so on.

3. A gift economy can let us accept money as one kind of gift among others, and it does not rule out the idea that A and B may give each other the same sort of gifts (a gift amount on a regular basis, say) time and again. The hope is that, through active participation in a gift economy, we will learn how to defetishize commodities.

One of Marx’s greatest insights remains his claim that commodities have become “fetishes” in the sense that an economic exchange foregrounds the objective relation between items (my money for your mangoes) at the same time that it obscures the subjective relation between persons. When I go in search of the “sweet deal,” I reduce my considerations to the simple calculation of getting the most while giving the least. In so doing, I have lost sight of the history of making, of the creative agent who made the product or who made the product possible. (The factory model points us to Marx’s other great thesis about social alienation: the estrangement of the agent from her work.)

The fetishization of commodities, Marx held, has become near universal (below, however, I consider “nook” and “cranny” exceptions) with the consequence that we no longer look, when we consider the objects that make up our everyday world, to the human powers behind and within them. An iPhone is “ghostly,” therefore, because it seems to have no past, no history, seems to arrive in our hands and work as if by magic.

A gift economy tries to “wind back the clock,” showing what hands and minds were necessary for me to receive this check from you. To this extent, the gifts I receive are “aestheticized” through and through. The stamp and the wave across the stamp; the envelope; the writing on the check; the card marked up with flowing pen; the labor you had to undertake to put this check in my hand: all of these are parts of the gift, all parts that I must acknowledge as fully as possible.

4. A gift economy invokes phronesis as a virtue of justice, not justice according to which each receives exactly the same. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of a muscular man needing more food than a scrawny man. He says that the “mean,” which amounts to a rule of thumb, should guide our apportioning of food. It is a gross mistake in justice to believe that each can be given the “exact same” in all things; humans start off in diversity and become more diverse with age and experience. Instead, phronesis tells us to use good judgment in giving to each person in the right way for the right reason toward the right end. A gift economy is great practice in this: lots of oopses, a few errant passes, and just enough adjustments and amends-makings.

5. As already implied, a gift economy establishes a moral-economic order based on trust and trustworthiness. As she becomes an adept in a gift economy, the agent signals that she is trustworthy. Conversely, a moral-economic order breaks down when a sense of social trust is shaken to the core. “When trustworthiness is lacking, then there is lack of trust” (Daodejing 17).

Objections and Replies

1. It has been said that a gift economy is Pollyannaism. To begin with, one can’t possibly live like this, unless one is being financially supported by some other means. In addition, it assumes that people are angels rather than devils: self-interest, not other regard, trumps all other considerations.

I reply: The implication seems to be that I am going “high-minded” because I couldn’t cut it “low-minded.” This implication is not warranted: in the past, I’ve charged as much as $250/hr. Without blinking, except to consider whether it wouldn’t be more prudent to charge more. This the first riposte. Now a second: insofar as I am able to make a decent living within a gift economy and without resorting to some other means, I embody the counterexample. Third, I assume that people are neither angels nor devils. I assume only that, qua mutually dependent beings, human animals are capable of giving and receiving. The solution to Pollyannaism is actually fairly simple: surround yourself with virtuous and friendly kindred spirits. By my lights, a gift economy in the modern world is “esoteric,” not “exoteric.” The gates to entry are high, yet the life within is good. Within are friends whom one can–and must–learn to trust.

2. It has been argued that the one bestowing gifts (say, the philosopher as gift-giver) is merely giving something for nothing. And everyone knows that anything that is free isn’t worth valuing. Simply look at content on the Internet. Why pay when writers are giving it away for free?

I reply: A gift is given freely (=wholeheartedly) but is not free in terms of content or obligation. A gift, as already noted, entails a debt. The recipient owes a gift, which is to be given to the same or to another. Far from being “something for nothing,” the recipient-cum-giver is in the strange position of having to give, as it were, infinitely: infinitely because wholeheartedly.

3. I grant that gift economies do manifest themselves but then only under extraordinary circumstances. When every house on the block is on fire, then everyone grabs a pail of water and chips in without hesitation or a moment’s notice. That is, a crisis that affects all requires heroic efforts from all. This spirit of we’re-all-in-this-together, however, is the exception that in no way proves the rule.

I reply: We have grown quite cold, haven’t we?, if we don’t see the “extraordinary circumstances” mentioned as longing to be ordinary. It takes no heroic exertion of the will to act beside one’s neighbors habitually, no great strain on the imagination to perceive that without the subway or highway or railway one cannot get to work. Without potable water, one would die of thirst. Without shopkeepers and farmers (now but 1% of the workforce!), we would starve. We are living in a unique period in history when the thought that we are not in this together has led to an economic order that is looking shabbier by the day. Some have too much, most not enough. The Daodejing speaks of having enough as being the basis for being generous. I have found this to be true in my life. As I have come to have just enough, my generosity has grown  infinitely. Having too much or too little uproots generosity.

 4. It has been said that it would be overly optimistic to believe that, in the current economic order, everyone could live in a gift economy. Men have children to feed, and mothers have bills to pay. What of them? Surely, you don’t claim that they too would do well to embrace a gift economy.

I reply: I concede the point, though I don’t recall advocating or recommending a gift economy as a one size fits all model for healing our economic woes. In fact, I would advise a freelancer to sharpen her elbows when she goes to negotiate contracts with corporate entities. I would counsel the project manager to heed the call of prudence. Now, the purpose of this post is to be an apologia for a way of life. It implies that there are nooks and crannies within the economy we have inherited. These nooks and crannies are small in scale, “invisible” in relation to a wider gaze, and open to friends. A gift economy is a small scale experiment, a worthy adventure. I doubt that it is scalable.

When I was reading Chris Bertram’s excellent review of David Graeber’s book on debt, I was struck by the fact that he had reached a similar conclusion: “We cannot take the beast on in a direct assault, and nor should we, but we can work together to develop a more human society within the nooks and crannies of the commercial one.”

Further Reading

Andrew Taggart, “Philosophical Life as Gift Economy; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gift (a Year in Funding Review)”

, ,

On nomads and settlers (but mostly on nomads)

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling, politics on February 13, 2012 at 6:09 am

Honest to God, I’m not cherry picking my examples, at least I don’t think so. I’m looking at the profiles of my conversation partners, past and present, of the individuals I’ve spoken with during the past year over Skype, of the exchanges I’ve had over email, and some common characteristics almost immediately jump out at you. (This post will be full of cliches. Please excuse.)

  • Age: late-20s to early-40s.
  • Education: college-educated, bachelor’s degree to Ph.D.
  • Orientation: creative type.
  • Location: US, Canada, northern Europe.
  • Patterns of movement: very peripatetic.
  • Intellectual acumen: very, very, very high, like the dong sound that the bell makes when the man with the large hammer hits the thing that causes the other thing to go up and say dong.

Regarding the penultimate, I’ve had so many conversations about packing things up, moving on, leaving it all behind; about flight and wilderness and wildness; about traveling to other countries; so many, in fact, that I can barely keep up.

It’s probably no coincidence that humanities departments have specialists now in “exilic literature” (whatever that means), that sociology arose near the beginning of industrial Revolution, or that our great cultural figures, like Rushdie and Dyer, are card-carrying nomads. Probably no coincidence, either, that a friend recently tweeted that he was a grown-up now that he’d purchased some new luggage (wheels for ease, I’m sure). Probably nothing new that people feel “aimless” and “restless” and “unsettled” now more than ever. Perhaps unmistakable that that really muddled psychologistic pseudoconcept, “anxiety,” would be diagnosed so frequently nowadays. (Not long ago, NPR ran a program called the Age of Anxiety. Maybe I had it once, didn’t know it, only to lose it before I knew it. Meno? Hello?)

Things suck, I get it. And when your life sucks, you think often and intently about moving to Boulder or to Paris or to Istanbul or to a solar-paneled hut on a sliver of land where you can grow your own dandelions and eat your fair share of sea beetles. Because life has to be better out there, over there, you suppose. Better than this sucky one right here. And because that’s freedom, freedom from harm, from your past, from everyone and everything. You go there, and it all gets better. (Except that now you’re there, you’d better go somewhere else and so on, because once desire is construed as that which you don’t have, you’ve got an indefinite regress problem on your… tongues.)

As someone who’s moved something like 14 times over the course of 10-plus years, as someone who’s lived for a time in the desert (literally and figuratively) and now on a tiny island next to a chunky park, I get it. But, my friends, it’s not going to work. Because the error lies with the very idea that freedom = flight. And that’s a very old idea and not a very good one.

The poet Wendell Berry taught me that settling in doesn’t have to mean settling for or settling down. And he’s 77 and chipper, that fellow. Part of that last statement is no doubt true.

Where to begin? You can read anything I’ve written as just another rumination on the question of what it means to lead a good life in the modern world. Is this possible? If so, how is it possible? And what is modernity?

And so, my usual point of departure is with the birth of modernity. By modernity (and I’m pulling this from an email I wrote one conversation partner of late), I mean minimally, following Max Weber, the disenchantment of the human-natural-divine cosmos. Here, for the first time in history, we’ll find the ontological separation of humans from nature (Cartesianism), humans from each other (atomism), and humans from God (secularism). In this disenchanted picture, we begin to see lots of stories unfold at once. Among others: a metaphysical story according to which humans just are individuals existing apart from or standing over and against a set of social roles (Thatcher’s fatuous but telling line: “society does not exist”); another according to which nature becomes instrumentalized mainly into free-standing objects and resources (some of the worst consequences of industrial capitalism); another in which nature is construed mechanistically according to the laws of nature (materialism, reductivism, naturalism, eliminative materialism, physicalism…); and another according to which God is no longer a part of the fabric of being (deist, unnecessary as a scientific hypothesis, agnostic, Dead for Good, etc.).

What you begin to see, as you track this story a good ways forward, is this incredible uprooting of people from the communities into which they were born. Not always a bad thing, to be sure (see my parable about being a small town boy), but a new thing at any rate (see Karl Polanki’s The Great Transformation–I’ve included an Appendix below). This uprooting speeds up over time as industrial capitalism moves ‘individuals’ from the country to the city; as the concept of ‘professionalism’ (particularly during the 19th C. and then throughout the 20th C.) arises, replaces ‘amateurism,’ and begins to hold sway throughout the developed world; as the concepts of ‘social ambition’ and ‘upward social mobility’ become the final end (the telos) of a life (it’s here that the concept of the career becomes intelligible as a key organizing principle of a life well-lived); and so on.

I’ll tack a bit here onto the email I wrote her: there’s a passage in Polanki’s book about how hard it was to get rural folk in England off the land and into the factories. By the 19th C., of course, we’ve got lots of novels and treatises going on about how awful factory work is. To get a taste of how awful it was, you can read Gaskell’s North and South, Gissing’s The Odd Women, or just about any of Dickens’ novels. We’re now seeing this, of course, in China, where Foxconn factory is the driving force behind the production of iPhones and such. It’s not pretty, but this is how the manufacturing phase of industrial capitalism unfolds. We’ll have to look at India to see how manufacturing, service, and IT come together.

Obviously, along with social uprooting comes a profound social problem: rootlessness, drift, waywardness, in short, lack of any social ties. The uprooting from family and home brings about social alienation. As the developed world moved away from manufacturing and then into service and now into information technology, social life has become only more “frictionless.” The Internet has made it possible for super-smart IT people to live just about anywhere–and that arbitrariness is actually quite scary. The flip side of globalization, even for the super-smart, highly employable winners, is the horror of waywardness. Where is ‘here,’ and what is ‘conviction’?

In any case, however we tell the story, many feel as if they don’t ‘see themselves’ in the modern world, can’t ‘identify’ with social institutions, don’t see how they ‘fit into’ the order of things, feel that ‘something’s missing,’ and so on. There’s a deeper problem I’ve glossed over: namely, that metaphysical estrangement from the natural world. I’m going to jump over that problem here and press on a bit further with the social alienation story.

Social alienation leads, in turn, to nihilism. If P just is a father, then P knows what it means to live a good life: to care for his children well, etc. P is not sitting around, mired in metaphysical doubt. The thought would not occur to him. Qua father, P is totally in his life. Well, we don’t know today (or don’t have many exempla or models) of what good fathering looks or feels like, and there aren’t many P’s out there who are entirely in their fathering lives. Many look and feel clumsy and out of sorts. Not unrelatedly, few think that being a father is necessary and sufficient for leading a good and fulfilling life.

There’s a further problem, and that is that we don’t trust any good authority, so we’ve no idea how to “get back on track.” We’ve no idea what good guidance would look like, and we don’t even believe that good guidance exists. So, we think that freedom as flight is the greatest good because we’re away from all that ails us and because no one can coerce us or make us move this way or that. (In a figurative sense, we’re all firm believers in the 2nd Amendment.) This is the freedom of being fucking left alone.

That said, this overly excited talk about freedom = flight is kind of paradoxical, if my story is roughly correct, kind of strange because flight got us into this mess in the first place and flight, we seem to think, is what’s going to get us out of it. So flight is both problem and solution, both cause and comfort. I don’t think this is going to work. Freedom as flight may move us about, may make us relieved that we’re not stuck, but in actuality we’re not getting anywhere and we’re really really stuck. Flight is a way of going in circles.

This post is already running long, so I’ll only say a few things about getting out of nomadism. Over the past year, what’s been so illuminating for me has been the lived experience of having gotten settled with life. And the more settled I’ve become, the more I’ve been able to go on quests, undertake pilgrimages, follow inquiries, and embrace life. This struck home (the 100th cliche of the post! huzzah!) when I was reading St. Benedict’s Rule this past summer. He was just so completely spot on. If you belong to a settled way of life, he says, then, among friends and guides, you can learn more about yourself. But, first of all, you have to be committed to the right people and stay with them. (Good judgment: knowing that they’re the right people.) And you have to be humble because being humble makes possible the idea of making progress and of working with a guide. And, lastly, you have to put your hands into those of wise guides.

Benedict is right. The more I’ve surrounded myself with kindred spirits and gotten my feet on the ground and looked up to others, the more I’ve been able to be giddy and adventurous and fun-loving and, well, whole. Because, in the end, it’s about wholeness, isn’t it?, wholeness within, without, and throughout. You’ll know it when you feel it throughout yourself, in your life, and in all things.

Our focus amid unsettled times should be on getting into a settled, flourishing, radiant way of life. Trust me. There’s no other way. I’m putting out my hand.

Appendix

I opened Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation almost at random and began to read. This paragraph falls on p. 43.

We submit that an avalanche of social dislocation, surpassing by far that of the enclosure period [the key acts were passed between 1750 and 1860], came down upon England; that this catastrophe was the accompaniment of a vast movement of economic improvement; that an entirely new institutional mechanism was starting to act on Western society; that its dangers, which cut to the quick when they first appeared, were never really overcome; and that the history of the nineteenth-century civilization consisted largely in attempts to protect society [read: common life of a people] against the ravages of such a mechanism. The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.

, ,

On education as ‘going along with the flow’; on choice as the offspring of distrust

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling, politics on January 31, 2012 at 5:18 am

1

One of my fondest college memories is of proving Euclidean theorems all the way up to the precipice: the Parallel Postulate. Until one arrives at the Parallel Postulate, one can derive Euclidean geometry from 5 scintillatingly simple axioms. Each theorem can be clearly formulated, each proof can be neatly arranged according to the steps in the argument, and each conclusion can come with the utmost logical necessity: the Q.E.D., or quod erat demonstratum, a period at the end of a finished thought. All along the path, you see the system emerging slowly by following the clearly laid out stepping stones of theorems, corollaries, and lemmas.

I was 19 then, and I loved this course especially because the professor was bald, pale, and a loving hardass. Jerry Wagenblast had yellow orange skin, liver spots, a long clicking slappy tongue, and eyes that turned askew, more often when he drew inferences and accented points. He was right much of the time but self-righteous almost never. And the beautiful thing about mathematics is that there is no smarmy coddling.

Actually, I loved mathematics because it was full of loving hard asses: with men, mostly, who were socially inept, intensely curious, and impressively loving in their own way. They were loving, most of all, in their desire to work with you on mathematics provided you showed the curiosity, the aptitude, and the patience. (One professor from Holland taught me about set theory; he wore wooden clogs. I met with him every Wednesday.)

I had not elected to take this course on geometry. I was a freshman at the time and rather farther along in my studies in mathematics than other freshmen. I had spoken with the Head of the Department, Patrick Sullivan, about my love of math and about what course would be suitable for me. He recommended this course in Absolute Geometry which after the Parallel Postulate diverges into Hyperbolic Geometry, and I followed his recommendation. I took it also because it was a required course, one I would have to take anyway if I were to graduate with a degree in mathematics. The course was deemed a junior- and senior-level course, a keystone of the curriculum. (I’ll come back to these fitting italicized words later on. Clearly, I’m sweating profusely to make a point.)

Sullivan, who had a habit of staring madly off into the distance as if seeing some visionary gleam had caught his eye or as if grasping some Platonic truth and who, as a result, rarely looked at you, was an excellent guide. I trusted him. I didn’t know any better, and my ignorance was never tested. In addition, the course he recommended appealed to me, and–to be frank–that was that. That, to me, is how an argument reaches a conclusion without any doubt or moment’s hesitation.

Mathematical reasoning, as Plato well knew, is an elegant and rigorous form of reasoning. Through practice, you learn how to follow steps in an argument, steps not of your devising or choosing or selecting. (What would it mean to “choose” the answer to 2+2? Only 4, for the properly trained, would come to mind and that immediately, clearly, and distinctly.) Professor Wagenblast, who started us off by teaching us some formal logic, gave us assignments–here, Andrew, do theorem 15–that followed from those that came before and that pointed to those that would come after. We were clearly enmeshed in an inquiry, none of which was chosen, and all of which led to only one (or a few) logical directions. There may be a couple ways to prove a theorem, but the way that was best was the most parsimonious, elegant, and straightforward. The criteria for success were clear: formal beauty and Ockham’s Razor.

We loved it–or I loved it. (I don’t know whether they loved because I was socially inept.) The course was hard, I struggled initially, I was engrossed entirely, and I loved it all from beginning to end.

I don’t recall the long, painful hours I spent in the library shot through with thinking about doing otherwise, imagining other pursuits, dreaming up other options, concocting other alternatives, drumming up counterfactuals, or involving myself in opportunity costs. The thought never occurred to me because I was committed to a worthwhile inquiry and because I was in love with the beauty of a well-crafted proof. I did it very well and I muddled.

I muddled and I did it well. The two are deeply intertwined.

2

At the risk of being overly hasty, I want to draw a conclusion based on this perspicuous experience: here we have a picture of good learning, and there is no room in it whatsoever or in any ‘family resemblance’ picture of good learning for choice, choosing, or its cognates. No room period. No room. End of story.

Recall your best educational experiences. I’ll wait here for a minute…. Go ahead…. I’ll still be here when you get back…

What terms did you use when the experience came to mind? You might have said: you were passionate, involved, focused, in love, all in it, enraptured, in the flow, in the zone. You could have thought: you lost track of time. You forgot yourself. You gave yourself up to it. You couldn’t imagine doing anything else with your time. You were drawn to it. You were pulled by it. You felt compelled to do it, but it was a compulsion that was peculiarly liberating. You were called. You were attuned. You attended. You were drawn. You were inspired (a term derived from a religious background). You just did it. ‘You’ weren’t ‘you.’

If you’re feeling the itch to carrot in “I chose to…” before any or all of these, then I think you’re making a category mistake. Or, with Bernard Williams, I would say that you’ve had  ”one thought too many.” (You don’t choose to save your lover; you save your lover.) Choosing, being free to choose, and letting so-and-so be free to choose: none of these have anything to do with the activity of learning proper.

3

Ah, point well taken, you say. But but. But here’s the but. Sometimes it’s said that we choose an activity and then, from the inside, we feel passionate about that activity which does not involve choosing. (Ah, my friend, but I never chose to love math.) Suppose, you say, you ask your child, “What book should we read for bedtime tonight?” The child points to the book, picks it out from the others, and then is passionate–in other words, “really into”–this book. Arguably, the child is especially passionate because she chose the book.

The general line of thought seems to be that there is a salient distinction to be drawn between the external (the frame) and the internal (the activity), a distinction between which game the child would like to play and the game playing proper.

My reply (you see, reader, we’re playing without choosing: your choice would be stop reading: to turn away from this blog and to stop reading) would be that this scenario starts “too far along.” What really happens is that a child is introduced to a game or activity with love and due care. Through exercise and discipline, the child moves from pain and disquietude to respect and love. This would go by the simple name of education. In another blog I wrote also about fond memories:

One of my fondest childhood memories is of my father playing catch with me. In my mind’s eye, I can see him showing me how to rotate my glove through a sundial of positions. A basket catch won’t always do. You don’t stab at the ball with pinchers; you let it in. A good outfielder gets under the ball and uses two hands. A great fielder moves to where the ball will be, not where it is. The drop-step, the first five steps, a keen eye, a clean read, quickness rather than breakaway speed: all of these the outfielder’s weapons.

During the summer, we played catch after he got home from work while it was still light out. Sometimes he could be a prick and I could be mopey, but usually this was our time to figure out what being a father and a son was all about. During winter, I stood sideways and caught footballs. Or I did out-and-in’s, out-and-down’s, down-out-and-down’s. I learned how to catch the ball over my shoulder in stride. I dove and leapt for balls when I had to. Many an imaginary cornerback lost his jockstrap.

This is a story about good education, about letting ourselves ‘go with the flow.’ Contrast this image with school choice in New York. Erg. A few years ago, one former friend of mine, then in her early 40s, was talking about her seventh grade son. Where should her son go to high school? She told me that she and her former husband would speak with her son, but in the end, of course, the decision was up to him. I think he was 12 or 13 at the time.

4

What happens when you distrust a school?

You argue for school choice. (Consensus on Left and Right)

What happens when you distrust teachers?

Generally, you reject the possibility that good authority can ever exist.

Specifically, you turn teachers into ‘facililators’ (On the Left, this was John Dewey’s solution. Me: weeping.)

You speak of teacher accountability in terms of value added metrics. (On the Right. Me: frowning.)

You move to another school district or enroll your child in another school. (So much for settlement.)

What happens when you distrust food?

You turn a school cafeteria into food a la carte. (A charming corporate vision here.)

What happens when you distrust curriculum?

You speak of ‘child-centered’ learning. (Erg: that darn John Dewey again)

You move from ‘requirements’ to ‘electives.’

End of the story, a contradiction in terms: you offer an ‘open curriculum.’ (Here’s Hamilton College.)

What happens when you have doubts about any subject matter?

You let the student pick. (Or, um, you let the kids run the school.)

What is the end of the story?

The trenchant skepticism regarding a common vision (telos).

A nation of Choosers without commitments. We can always opt out. (Me: sighing heavily.)

5

The common thread running through the litany above is an abiding sense of distrust. Our first premise is that we live in a hostile world. Our second premise is that our child will likely be harmed. One of the ways of harming her is by “coercing” her to do what she doesn’t want to do. From premises 1 and 2, we draw the inference that choice will serve as a form of protection against harm. (Cf. talk of rights as a bulwark against the power and scope of the modern state.) Arguably, all the talk of choice and school choice is a recoil from the prospect of harm.

(NB: What could have happened so far in our inquiry about education? Well, I could have lost you. Maybe you’ve not been able to follow me because I’m going too fast, too slow, or skipping steps. It’s possible that I’m being unclear. If you still trust me, then you could, in due course, ask questions that put us back on track, that bring us back together. And I’ll reply as best I can. If this works, we’ll continue with the inquiry.)

But this picture admits of no tertium datur between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ between ‘can’ and ‘must,’ between freedom and coercion. Strange because most of a good life, I submit, is spent inhabiting this vast savanna in which we are called to follow someone else’s lead (be it Kant’s, Sullivan’s, or a good parent’s), yearn to meet someone’s need, conduct inquiries that lead to reasonable conclusions, live according to everyday logics (the idea of choosing to be a philosopher never occurred to me: what an odd thought that would have been!), make dinner for hungry children, finish homework assignments out of habit and love… The list could go on.

6

Let’s try to imagine education once more, this time by telling a different story. Let’s suppose we’re highly skilled golfers. When things are going well, we look at the green, assess where we are, draw conclusions, grab clubs, and hit the darn ball. Then we walk to the ball, whack it nicely again, and repeat. Things are going well! It’s fun! We’ve learned to reason well, to see clearly, and to go on, as if we were doing things naturally.

That was a good day. Here is a bad one. We hit the ball, and it goes every which way. Perhaps, at first we’re still “self-forgetful,” still “naive” and “unconscious” for a few more strokes, but after a while we’re in a terrible muddle. We have no idea what club to use, how hard to hit the ball, we’ve lost our sense of reasoning, lost our bearings, and we’ve no idea how to calculate. In this fog of doubt, we glob onto the discourse of choosing: weighing up, deliberating, hemming and hawing, and deciding. We think that choosing will do away with the fog of doubt, leading us to the land of quiet certainty, but thinking in terms of choosing only makes matters worse. Like Chuck Knoblauch, we’ve come down with a nasty case of “the yips.” On these terms, we can’t possibly win. It’s as if we’d never felt love.

7

We think choosing is the starting point to most of our conversations about education and life, but in truth it is a much later step in an argument that, more often than not, has already gone awry. Most disconcerting is that we have, in our national conversations about education and education reform, forgotten that this is the case and then begun the conversation at the point of crisis. In light of this, we need to first remind ourselves of what good education looks and feels like (e.g., constructing arguments, writing poems, falling in love, playing golf flowingly), second to begin by building educational institutions based on intimations of blessed visions of education, and third to inquire about the source of our disquietude when it arises. In most cases, we don’t solve choices; we “back off” of them, as though we were stepping out of a trap. (We back off of dilemmas; we don’t try to force our way through them.)

The last, for now, shall be first. When you begin thinking in terms of choosing, you might examine the doubts that led you to speak and think in terms of choosing in the first place. Thus:

  • I don’t truly know this person. In my eyes, Jane is opaque.
  • I don’t truly know what Jane wants or needs or likes.
  • I don’t want to hurt Jane, and I don’t want Jane to be hurt.
  • I don’t trust Jane, and, for all I know, Jane doesn’t trust me.
  • I’m not sure where to go next in this argument. I’m confused and possibly scared.

So we’d start to see a choice question would come after any of these statements. If I don’t know what Jane wants, I ask her choice questions. I’m uncomfortable, a little wobbly. If I knew what Jane wanted, I’d simply give it to her. (Cf. giving a gift with giving a gift certificate.)

It’s scary how we’ve built our educational institutions on the prospect of not being harmed. To me, this doesn’t exactly meet my demand for a radiant social world.

8

A quick summary of a very long and windy argument.

1.) When life’s going well for us, then we’re ‘in the swing’ of things. We rarely choose. Rather, we’re ‘going along with the flow.’ To me, this is a beautiful story about education’s going well.

2.) When life’s not going so well for us and when life has become hostile or doubtful or uncertain, then our talk turns to choosing. (I remain agnostic for now about the metaphysical question of whether free will exists. Throughout this post, I’ve been focusing only on the ‘practical implications’ of choosing.)

3.) Choosing normally appeals to us when a way of life has gone under and when something’s amiss. Now, we look for the exit. We say (and it can be assuring) that we have alternatives.

, ,

A picture of a philosophical way of life followed by a medium-length rant

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling, politics on January 26, 2012 at 6:19 am

An anecdote: Yesterday, while strolling through the grocery store, I heard a young mother say the following to her young son: “Honey, you just have to be happy with the music they play for you. Bon Jovi’s OK.”

—

Human Anthropology

1. Human beings are thoroughgoing social animals. I.e., social life is ‘metaphysically prior’ to the life of any individual. (Pace the picture of liberal society where individual is ‘metaphysically prior’ to social life. Recall Margaret Thatcher: “Society does not exist.”)

2. No human being can meet all its basic needs and wants. (NB: If social life “fails” us, then we are on the way to social tragedy.)

3. Human beings are  mutually dependent on each other in order to persist and flourish.

Sociality and Human Development

4. Simplifying to the extreme, social life is comprised–to be sure, of many groups, organizations, etc.–above all of institutions.

5. Good social institutions supply individuals with livable, inhabitable, suitable social roles. E.g., a good father, whatever his particular shape or form, etc., sees to the care, nurturance, and overall philosophical education of the young. E.g., a good host sees to her guests. Etc. (Cf. Ibsen’s middle tragedies like Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, Enemy of the People, and Doll’s House: all social tragedies in which individuals have come “unstuck” from their social roles. There, society is to blame.)

6. Institutions are the “trellises” upon and through which individuals, like vines, can grow, develop, and flourish. I.e., institutions help nurture and guide growth in particular, flourishing-promising directions.

7. Trellises are such, let’s say, as to only permit of certain kinds of growth (hence, not every logical possibility will be actualizable). Human growth, guided by trellises, will fall into a vague “range” of good or good enough answers to what it means to lead a good life.

Final Ends

8. Good institutions also and at the same time supply good final ends. E.g., the final end of the market is to contribute to general welfare, i.e., meeting the basic material needs and basic desires of all.

9. Human beings, qua social animals, engage in practices that are embedded in social institutions.

10. Good practices–which is to say, ongoing activities–are undertaken for the sake of the final ends supplied by good institutions. (An image: that of a dancer, perpetually in graceful motion.)

11. Final ends must, in the final analysis, be “answerable to” some objective dimension beyond the institutions themselves. The old answer, which was also very short, was: God. But this no longer. The new answers I propose: a sense of mystery or blessedness as well as a sense of wholeness (integritas), both of which are discernible in or can be “read off from” radiant lives.

12. Practices consist of virtues (arete) such as courage, judgment, and patience, all of which are actualized through particular spiritual exercises (ascesis). E.g., writing this blog–much to your surprise!–is, for me, a morning exercise in good, whole person thinking-living. E.g., good humor is ascesis, the lightening of human frailty. E.g., manners are “codified” ascesis.

13. Good institutions, conjointly, are aimed at the common good. E.g., family, market, and state all aim at the common good, the life we hold in common.

Yearnings for Reconciliation

14. Each individual must ‘see’ how he/she fits into this picture. (Cf. educare: the lifelong education of the soul)

15. This picture must be made to ‘fit’ each individual. I.e., the unfolding of the philosophical story in a commodious, welcoming way. (Philosophy, as it were, as invitation)

—

A Medium-Length Rant

In his NYT Stone blog “Philosophy–What’s the Use?” (January 25, 2012), Gary Gutting writes about the “uses” to which professional philosophy can be put.

As ever, what’s unpalatable to me is that someone as intelligent as Gutting can go on to defend philosophy by saying a few choice words about what professional philosophers do and about why that ought to matter to non-philosophers. He’ll then go on to show that logic is important (because we want our basic beliefs to be coherent) and conceptual analysis is important (because we want to use concepts properly).

Points well taken: it would be good if more Americans held coherent beliefs and grasped the contours of the most fundamental concepts (e.g., happiness) they use.  However, both points are also woefully inadequate.

The trouble, first off, is that few laypersons will care much about the inapt and too facile distinction between professional philosophers and non-philosophers. It smacks of pedantry. Indeed, Gutting seems to be missing a very broad range of middle categories: everything from the “philosophically minded” to “philosophical practitioners.” That’s terra cognita, the vast savanna of lived experience, for sure.

Second, he fails to show how there is any genuine ‘vitalist concern’ connected with one’s facility with logic and conceptual analysis. To be sure, there’s a world of difference between giving one’s rational assent to the conclusion of a knockdown argument (ho-hum) and giving one’s (for lack of a better word) whole person assent to the letting go of beliefs that one had hitherto lived by. The first is nothing much, nothing apart from an academic exercise, truly; the second is exceptionally, stunningly, palpably, enormously painful and moving and wondrous. Grrr.

The whole enterprise–the defense of a few feet of professional philosophical astroturf juxtaposed with the stony silence over a very broad, but unremarked upon swath of human experience to which philosophy ought to be answerable–is maddening. Straight up, out and out maddening. Grrr once more.

,

Against the fantasy of something for nothing

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling, politics on January 21, 2012 at 6:27 am

(Beyond my bedroom window: the snow comes down, the pigeons sit askant, at odd angles, one here, another there as if playing with me.)

—

(The birds, unseen, are singing amid the gently falling snow. Pure sprightly delight.)

—

We have inherited a misguided public philosophy concerning the desirability of “free things.” The fantasy that, all things being equal, it is better to get something for nothing has sunk deep into our collective way of life.

Look around you, virtually anywhere, and you’ll find this misconception running wild. There is the good deal, the sweat deal, the bargain, credit default swaps, the tragedy of the commons, the unpaid internship, the free sample, the free school, free education, free content on the web… A few days ago, I traced this fantasy back to a more primitive desire to escape mutual dependency by trying to maximize receivings and minimize givings. The background assumption of the “something for nothing” is that a world of scarcity has created a sense of Hobbesian hostility.

Concerning the scene of transaction, it would be no exaggeration to say that the con is the reductio ad absurdum of our insatiable desire for “free things.” Concerning the metaphysical picture of selfhood, the image is that of the “inner citadel,” a being invulnerable to harm, a creature as self-sufficient as god.

One place where you can see this picture of freedom being brought out into the open is in Jaron Lanier’s New York Times Op-ed, “SOPA Boycotts and the False Ideals of the Web” (January 18, 2012). The claim that content wants to be free is not only false; it is not only a fetish that hides the real human relations; it is also, and most certainly, an ideal we end up paying for on the back end.

Enjoy, make snow angels, and have a lovely weekend!

, ,

To be a modern woman: A social tragedy

In ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling, politics on January 20, 2012 at 5:32 am

Were the fate of the modern woman to be written today, doubtless it would be cast in the genre of a social tragedy. Where once she was held in bondage, now she is free to choose: free to choose her own poison. The endings of many nineteenth and twentieth century novels bespeak a sense that the heroine must die, must commit suicide, must go into exile, or will sink into quiet despair. Choose your own ending, the woman is told, knowing that none will do you any good. The tab is left, as it ought, at society’s doorstep, a fee which it has yet to acknowledge or pay.

That modern women are caught in a social tragedy, one that begins with a sense of fatedness to suffocation yet ends with their ability to choose from a menu of unsatisfactory ways of life, stands in stark contrast with the novels of Jane Austen. In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Emma, Austen, despite her arch criticisms of the social order and in spite of her sharp satire and ironic asides, thinks nothing of ending her novels, without blushes or smirks, with marriage. Has there been a time since when marriage, the union of one with another, of lover and beloved, of friend with friend, could be so earnestly believed in? I doubt it. More often than not, marriage is construed either as straitjacketing and oppressive (think of Madame Bovary and Hedda Gabler) or as melodramatic and overly sentimental (call to mind any Hollywood romance). What goes for marriage also goes for child rearing, cooking, work, friendship, leisure, and political involvement. It is worthy of criticism, it is presumed, or it is good only for a wry, ironic laugh, the stuff that undergraduates are keen to mock, but neither is to be believed. If not to these, then to what form of life can women commit themselves wholeheartedly?

It would be nice to conclude, after the successes of feminism, that we–men and women both–know better what lives would be suitable for modern women, but the truth is we don’t. Regardless of its achievements, feminism left the job halfway done. For women have been ripped free of social roles that were embedded in and native to previous ways of life, have been freed, financially and socially, to lead other ways of life, but without due accommodation for imagining better, more sensible, more radiant ways of living with grace and beauty, with strength and courage, with harmony and femininity in the here and now. This is to say that there has been no social or metaphysical “compensation” for social disembedding, no sensible models for leading flourishing lives after the great unraveling.

Instead, women, so disembedded, have been doubly and triply burdened, burdened all the more with conceptions of success and ambition; with sentimental love and its feckless affections; with the value but not the substance of genuine friendships; with becoming the most caring parents conceivable quite apart from how this is to be done or in what ways it is to be rewarded. If women are reticent with speech, if they speak of “being privileged” in one breath and cannot speak of crying maddeningly to themselves in the next, how can we blame them? And why do they insist, also to themselves, also keep insisting on blaming themselves? But if they do not blame themselves, then must they court bitterness for the world to the end?

Insofar as living this ampersand existence, this life of the A&B&C…, is at once overly demanding and utterly impossible, at the same time desired and loathed, both unthinkable and unendurable, one would imagine death, suicide, flight, despair, self-sacrifice, and ennui as being the only exits available from tragic feminine life. When I do not find all this appalling, I find it chilling. I can see why women, whose longings and imaginations can flourish amid disquietude, make for excellent poets, for pens bleed well.

*

One insightful woman who follows this blog suggested I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. I finished the novel yesterday afternoon and thought I would speak about Wharton’s book as being one important chapter in the much longer story I wish to tell about the plight of modern women. (The novels of Gissing and Flaubert, the middle tragedies of Ibsen, the recent works of Margaret Atwood also come to mind.)

The House of Mirth is set in fin de siecle New York where money from finance has allowed the nouveau riche to take over Society. (Twas always thus in New York, no doubt. Apart from Joan, whose first father-in-law purchased the brownstone in 1920, my block is filled with the nouveau riche and the young Turks, all of whom are flush with Midtown cash.) Lilly Bart, the beautiful heroine of the novel, is raised to desire the luxury afforded by wealth but is not fortunate enough to be born into wealth. Her harried father makes the mistake of investing poorly, of losing his shirt, then rectifies the problem by dying swiftly. He leaves Lilly and her mother to become transients with outsize desires and mostly empty pockets.

As she is well aware, Lilly has been groomed to wed a wealthy man. This is her way out as well as her way in. The trouble is that she cannot put her whole heart into the conquest, and so when the prey is in the trap, as often happens, she flees the scene and the prey runs free. She is not without her scruples, for she understands that Society’s luxurious decadence is hollow, soul-sucking, and boorish at its core, yet she is also not courageous or free spirited or clear thinking enough to have cultivated an imagination that would allow her to see things differently.

Around her is decadence and toward this fate she is disposed half-heartedly. According to John Armstrong in his book In Search of Civilization, for barbarians, understood in the Matthew Arnoldian sense, “[G]reat material prosperity… do[es] not serve any higher purpose than their own maintenance.” Barbarians, he sums up, “have a very high degree of material prosperity but no corresponding spiritual prosperity” (136). So it is with the nouveau riche set. Theirs is the decadent life of card playing, snubbing, and chitchat; of operas, summer homes, and dinner parties; of snubbing some more, conniving, and insincerity. It affords lavish pleasures but, to Lilly, those pleasures always fall short of fulfillment.

Juxtaposed with the decadent life is that of the working class. For Lilly, who grew up betwixt and between but whose mother carefully kept up appearances, the dinginess of drudgery is so unattractive as to be unendurable. I cannot blame her. On the bus I took en route to La Guardia Airport just before Christmas, I was saddened by the sheer shabbiness–these were the words I wrote down later in my notebook–of it all, the sheer shabbiness of Queens. Squatted homes amid the squalor. Treeless, browned, and yellowed. How, I thought, could one live amid the shabbiness without feeling one’s soul crying out for relief? One can go on but why bother? When at the end of the novel Lilly is brought low by poverty and is forced to live in a boarding house, she nearly goes mad. I do not blame her.

The alternative Wharton presents to decadence and dinginess is a Platonism seen through a glass half-darkly. On a few occasions that Lilly spends with Selden, she experiences luminous beauty, the opening of sincerity, and an intimation of a higher form of love. Yet the Platonic vision of a radiant life is not only dim and transitory; not just hazy and dubious; for all intents and purposes, it is only a fancy, a play of the imagination, a thing ineffable that seems to have no native home in the present social world. For once the stroll in the field is over, once the touch of the hand has gone cold, in what avenues and in what homes will such a life take root? How will imagination sink down and stay put in the unwelcoming New York soil?

I think you know how this will end. The novel, another example of a lived indirect proof, shows that neither decadence nor dinginess nor a dimly lit Platonism can be truly lived out under the material and social conditions provided by fin de siecle New York society. The conclusion, to quote the novelist Nella Larsen out of context, is “death by misadventure.”

*

And today?

Because I’m free to do what I want any old time. Today, the tableaux (or should I say “triptych”?) of women that come to mind:

  • The decadent hedonist of Sex and the City: alone, ironic, cynical.
  • The frenzied single working mother ground down by “the great speedup.”
  • The mid-20s female whose unmade bed, in Tracey Emin’s provocative “My Bed” (1998), is cluttered with used condoms, cigarette butts, empty alcohol bottles, worn panties, stained sheets, and a stuffed animal off to one side.
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 196 other followers