Posted December 28, 2009 - Remarks on the "nanny state"

I keep thinking about one comment a friend made about not liking the government being a “nanny state”. Here are some distinctions I think are useful around this issue.

Americans have a difficult time imagining that they can act as a group, and not only as individuals. I would only call a “nanny state” a government that was involved in 1) repetitive transfers of wealth to individuals over time, and 2) such transfers going on across the board, and not merely in selective cases - e.g. social security as a limited program, and 3) the promulgation of regulations that are not based on any rationale, e.g. the kind noted below.

The need for making a decision as a group - e.g. you and I and many other individuals together - arises when the incentives that motivate those most able to get what they want, assumed to be wealth and status by political theoreticians, are at odds with the well being of the large majority of citizens. I have become increasingly convinced that the ongoing slow-motion breakdown in the American economy as well as political system can be understood around one simple concept: incentives. The American right understands incentives when it comes to the profit motive, but they seem just as simple-minded about incentives as the left used to be about profits when it comes to other kinds of incentives - those arising from the lack of good regulations or no regulations. The basis of modern political economy is the assumption that we can collectively influence the incentives of those most motivated to get what they want in a way that maximizes material well being and order for most, if not all, citizens. While 30 years ago it was possible to say that "what is good for GM is good for American", today it is not only not possible to say this, it is not even possible to assume that the actions of a CEO are good for his own firm! The market is not the same thing as a state of nature, and we can and do set up 'rules of the game'. By contrast, the kind of libertarian and free-market ideology that has developed in the last 20 years, inspired by Ayn Rand and the Austrian school, claims that freedom in the economy is a moral end in itself and that therefore, 'rules of the game' are not morally or juridically legitimate. When this set of related assumptions dominates the thinking of policy makers and activists it becomes nearly impossible to treat regulations as a normal part of a well ordered society. The notion that freedom in the economy is a moral absolute raises it to the level of the sacred. Twenty years later, I am still seeing references to the magic of the “invisible hand” in conservative journals, as if they just discovered this mechanism! There is a time and place to theoretically focus on this or that aspect of policy, and now is not the time to stress "freedom in the market place" or the claim that "big government is bad". Such claims suggest an over emphasis on certain Enlightenment principles grounded in the notion that only universally applicable policies are valid as well as blindness to history and current reality. Since conservatives are interested in spiritual and moral issues, they ought to be aware that the most significant problem with treating economic freedom as a moral absolute is itself a spiritual issue: it is idolatrous. Here’s a rule of thumb in a nutshell from mainstream spiritual thinkers: Whenever we make a man-made good into “the most important thing”, we will lose it. (Addictions can be understood in light of this claim. When one is addicted to something, they make a 'man made good' into the 'most important thing'. Many Americans make money into their 'most important thing'.) I believe that the Americans - to the extent that they are awash in radical free-market philosophy - are at risk of losing the material well being they have collectively earned over a long time period, because they have allowed freedom in the marketplace to become an idol, so to speak. (The government intervention since the Crash is a deviation from a much bigger influence in the culture coming from the philosophies just noted. We will revert to a laissez-faire spirit pretty quickly I am predicting. I have strong doubts that serious regulations of banking will come out of the bill pending in Congress. And the more serious problems in health care involving broken incentives are not touched by the current bill.)

Examples where we can and morally ought to intervene in the market-place as a society; as a group:

- Imports from China. They are out of control. Ex: Toxic wall board flooding Louisiana after Katrina from China. There are no more American sources of wall board! To top it off, individuals cannot sue the companies involved, because one of the rules of the trade agreement is that this cannot be done! This is a loss of true freedom. It is mere ideology to claim that the only freedom that counts is the freedom of traders. It is not a “nanny state” to regulate such imports and prohibit them when necessary. It is rational and moderate and normal. By contrast, it is cruel to effectively take away the only means of earning a living for millions of people are have no college education, which is what is happening as a result of Clinton opening the American market to China. But no one, including Obama, is suggesting a problem with this approach. Slowly opening the market would have been one thing, over 50- 100 years. Opeining it all at once is quite another, irrational and harmful to the well being of the nation. But a more reasonable approach would not have given immense profits to a few traders, as they would have been dead! Let us not, however, pretend that the policy is good for "all". It is not, clearly. The quality of life in the US has declined and the economic well being of millions of less educable individuls has been harmed as a result of radical freedom in international trade. (The fact that the US runs a trade deficit with so many countries is another sign that American policy is excessively influenced by an unholy alliance of free-market fundamentalists and the usual suspects, those who care only about profit and status.) It is a lie and mean-spirited to say that "all" should or can "make it on their own" in any literal sense! The moral force of this "all" claim is grounded in the Enlightenment, and is fundamentally miguided.

- Legal Drugs: The US is the only country that does not regulate drug prices. So this means that American citizens end up subsidizing all other countries drugs insofar as the drug companies rely on the money of American citizens to be motivated to make the drugs. This is obviously unjust. “Conservatives” can’t be seriously arguing from a position of moral right and claim that this situation is okay.

- Both Democrats and Republicans have refused to allow the federal government through medicare to negotiate drug prices with drug companies. This implies that they work for these companies rather than the nation as a whole and millions of American consumers. The argument: This would amount to price controls. The real radical position is the position that says “keep the status quo”. It is owing to their rigidy concerning regulations that they claim that the present situation should remain.

- Banking: The media has not clarified and done its job in explaining some simple causes in the Crash. The Fed lowered the reserve requirement of banks from $1 for every $12, to $1 to every $32. This is the single biggest factor in allowing excessive money to flood the market, creating a temporary bulge in demand for housing that could not be sustained.

The regulation as they currently stand allow banks to collect late fees when mortgage holders are behind on their payments. This has been the biggest factor in making the attempt at renegotiating the terms of mortgages fail. Since the banks are to blame for the present situation, they have moral and practical obligation to renegotiate terms of mortgages. But they won’t, unless there is a clear regulation. And they have not so far. The percentage of mortgages in default that have been renegotiated along the lines the Obama Administration wants is less than 10%. This is no nanny state, it is a state tipping towards upholding the interest of those good at getting jobs in banks and milking an unjust system.

The general rule of thumb: Regulation must to the extent feasible and within reason prevent business practices that are at cross purposes to the interest of society. This might mean, in this case, that they cannot charge late fees for longer than a certain number of months.

All of these examples involve individuals seeing that they can get together as a group to create laws that make society a better place to live. This is neither utopian or “absolutist”. The current situation is utopian and absolutist - the situation where the “few strong” have been able to get their way for too long now. We have seen the cost in people like Bernie Maddof. That situation should never have been allowed to happen. It is crazy that this situation was allowed to go on for as long as it did. It would be a nanny state if the government was watching every move of a firm. It is not a nanny state for regulator to be looking for patterns that are clear signs of something wrong, whether ethical or practical. It is common sense and prudence, as well as moral and principled in the true meaning of these terms.

Posted December 23, 2009:

Important article in New York Times Magazine on culture, sex and marriage. I've been arguing since the 1970s that the relativism of the left could never be a strong foundation for healthy culture and that it would still lead to a destabilizing reaction on the right. This reaction would be harmful in ways that would make the left wish they had not opened the genie bottle of moral relativism.

The writer discussed in this article is apparently looked at as a serious thinker in Catholic conservative intellectual circles. I tend to agree with the critique below regarding Anglo-Saxon morality: it is laregly based on feeling or sentiment. Contrariwise, George's argument is attempting to resurrect a natural-law foundation for morality. But I have a hunch he is overly ideological and is not adequately taking into account various movements in modernity that are both good and true. When I read about him in this article, I later was brought to think of 1 Corinthians 13, and in particular: "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. " Whenver I read the conservatives more generally, I keep feeling like they are afraid of something deep inside themselves. I continually sense they would be afraid of Jesus coming up to them and accepting them just as they are. Here is some text from the article discussing George's thinking as it relates to the American Catholic conservative movement. In this excerpt, George is critiquing Hume:

Excerpt from "The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker," in the New York Times Magazine, Sunday, December 20th, 2009.

Aristotelians, like St. Thomas Aquinas, hold that there is an objective moral order. Human reason can see it. And we have the free will to follow or not. “In a well-ordered soul, reason’s got the whip hand over emotion,” George told the seminar, in a favorite formulation borrowed from Plato. Humeans — and in George’s view, modern liberals are usually Humeans — disagree. Against Aristotle, Hume argued that the universe includes facts but not values. You cannot derive moral conclusions from studying the world, an “ought” from an “is.” There is no built-in, objective reason for me to choose one goal over another — the goals of Mother Teresa over the goals of Adolf Hitler, in George’s hypothetical. Reason, then, is merely a tool of whatever desire strikes my fancy. “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and may pretend to no office other than to serve and obey them,” George said, paraphrasing Hume, just as he does in seemingly every essay or lecture he writes.

   The purpose of this site is to attempt to shed light on the ideas - both modern and ancient - which have a significant impact on the way we live. While many view philosophy to be abstract and unrelated to our lives, I believe that the ideas we hold are the single most important factor in how well or poorly we live. I am particularly interested in the moral judgments we make about various viewpoints, both those we adopt as well as reject. One hope I have is to shed light on the sources of these judgments; these stances. More than even the content of ideas, it is the judgments we make about them which influence us most strongly.

         I have three aims on this site. The first is to gain insight into my own ideas by responses I receive. Second, to present and explicate the various ideas Americans are collectively and individually influenced by, and particularly ideas about which we make strong moral judgments. Third, the site as a whole is intended to convey a kind of comprehensive summary of the political, social and moral problems we face today and offer ideas to respond to them.  My assumption is that if we better understand not only the ideas influential in our society and the judgments we make about them, but the moral impulses behind why we do so, we might learn again to apply creative, pragmatic solutions to the unique problems we face today. One of the reasons we find ourselves in a political and cultural quagmire, I believe, is that the sources guiding the moral judgments underlying our practical decision making are a confused jumble. Basing our collective and often private decision making on this mismash has harmful effects on us both morally and spiritually as well as politically and economically.

        One of the issues we face as modern Americans is that, as individuals, we often live our lives on the basis of ideas and moral judgments which not only do not help us but hinder us from deepening our relation to what Socrates refers to as "the most important things". A question I consider is why we collectively but also individually feel so ambivalent towards what we claim to be our moral and spiritual ideals. (The links to the three texts left and below are to sources of our modern notions of morality and happiness as English speaking Americans. The ideas espoused here are very different from those found in pre-modern Christian and Greek sources.) The first indication of this ambivalence is discomfort with the notion that we might, after all, take our lives and all the potential good in them less for granted. In terms of the central idea of this site, the contrast between the good man and the good citizen, I believe that we Americans put a great deal of moral emphasis on being good citizens without questioning whether there is any significant difference between the way American civilization defines good citizenship, on the one hand, and what it is to live a truly good life, on the other. As I conceive modern individuals, to be modern will include, among other things, too easily assuming that there is no distinction between these two capacities we all have. All thinkers and prophets of merit argue that the distinction is to be taken seriously, and I will follow the tradition in doing so as well.

     Each person lives out of two capacities, then: a human being as such, but also as a member of society, or a citizen. The beliefs we adhere to in our capacity as members of the larger society do not get to the heart of truth. The beliefs grounding societies are not intended to. The nature of social and political life is such that opinions held in common must and always in fact do remain on the surface of things. This is as it has to be, for society could not function if each of us as members of society; as citizens, were continually questioning our commonly held beliefs. The movement of the 1960's failed to grasp this. Although it would not be practical to habitually question our beliefs as citizens, that is, in our capacity as members of a particular society with particular opinions about the good and bad, as noted above, we are not only members of a political society.  We are also persons, with the ability to reason and seek to discern the good and true. The question for us, then, is: does each of us as a person and not in our capacity as a member of a group always also have to remain on the surface of things in order to live well? While this "remaining on the surface" has its place in society as well as in politics, if we as single individuals care about the deep good; about our souls, if you will, then we will desire to respond to the call to go deeper. We must, that is, patiently and courageously habituate ourselves to a standard of truth much more rigorous than that which modern society prescribes, a standard never intended with the deepest good of the person in mind, but for the maintenance of political order and the attainment of the basic necessities of life.  This ethical and spiritual ideal - of going deeper and habitually questioning our opinions - is of course Socratic, but it is also quintessentially American as well. I would add that it is also Christian. For it is in the very nature of the truths of human existence, of philosophy and true religion, to remain elusive until the day we die. It is in sincerely seeking that we come into a relation to these truths, and only as such. This means that we are never to act or speak as if we have attained the deepest truths of human existence. Stated another way, this means we are to avoid conflating theology and political philosophy.

     I believe we Americans live with two paradoxes: On the one hand, we want to live truthfully as well as ethically. On the other hand, we have a strong need, indeed a willful desire to see our public, or political philosophy, as the peak of human thought as well as deeply moral. But political philosophy is not intended to attain a deep level of morality.  When we confuse the ends of true religion and spirituality with the ends of good political philosophy, we become susceptible to the temptation to define my good in terms of those structures in society whose purpose is the maintenance of social and political order and material well being. While these can properly be viewed as necessary to deeper spirituality and morality, they are not themselves to be defined as deeply spiritual and moral. Stated more simply, the fact that I live in a well-functioning political-economy is to be radically distinguished from the conditions which make my living deeply spiritual and moral. There is another temptation which comes with confusing the deepest ends of human existence with the conditions of order and material well being: Alongside viewing our political-economy in almost sacred terms, we Americans have a strong need to see ourselves as morally right and good. This subjective need too often wins out over a humility that is necessary if we are to continually seek to live truthfully and ethically. When we define our public, or political philospohy, as the peak of human development, we become less able and willing to acknowledge all sorts of limits . Not only does this stance cause a practical problem of facing up to and dealing with the limits of our own system. The belief that our political-economy and society has already attained the highest level of human development also keeps us collectively spiritually and morally immature. If we collectively feel we (already) have possession of the truth and that our political-economic system embodies it, we will experience ourselves as needing nothing else. (See my paper on the experience of need. ) We will feel ourselves to be self-sufficient. But if we are truly self-sufficient, then we have no need of being in relation to anything or anyone outside of us. This belief paradoxically distances us from what is most important: our true self, other people and God. A second and parallel paradox is the fact that we for the most part live richly in a material sense, but poorly in a spiritual and moral sense. This poverty, moreover, is not the kind praised in the tradition when we hear spoken of "spiritual poverty". Spiritual poverty is experienced when I am conscious that I need; that I am not, after all, self-sufficient. The blameworthy form of poverty occurs, paradoxically, when my feeling that I need nothing results in my ceasing to seek to relate to myself, others and God in any rigorous manner. A good indicator of our spiritual condition, in my view, is the quality of our relations to others. A question which can be utilized as a kind of practical test is: How honest are we with and towards others we claim to be close to in our lives, and relatedly, how truly accepting are we of, firstly, ourselves, and secondly, others, in the context of these relationships? I take it for granted that most of us live on the surface even in the context of that area of our live where we take it for granted we are being most true and real: In our relationship to those whom we tell ourselves we are close to. This includes our true self.

     Aristotle was perhaps being partially ironic when he wrote that the happy man is the one who needs nothing. For while this indeed is a sign of the materially wealthy man, it is simultaneously the sign of the spiritually impoverished man defined as he who feels he needs nothing and no one. Being able to hold this belief about myself is a stance that our culture praises, the most influential on our stance-making being Emerson's essay "Self Reliance". The stance that I ought not need anyone is one of the more significant examples of a commonly held belief which keeps us at the surface of things and, if felt to be a virtue, blocks us from living spiritually richer lives. If I a) hold the belief that it is good to become independent in the sense just spoken of, and then I b) pursue and subjectively attain a significant degree of this independence, I may come to experience myself as in need of nothing and no one. I am then less rather than more likely to seek to be in honest relation to myself and others. If on the other hand I courageously and humbly remain open to the reality of my own limits; my own deep need, I will be more likely to seek to develop relationships to what Socrates has called "the most important things" in life.   One of the basic themes of this site is that our ambiguous relation to the true highest good owes to the assumption that modernity is unambiguously good for us. Where pre-modern culture acknowledged limits and human need, modern culture in general and American in particular cultivates the stance; the judgment that limits and need are bad and thus to be avoided.

     I hold the working assumption that most of us Americans are, in our heart of hearts, modern through and through. What I am interested in is not any intellectual ideas we hold about modernity. Rather, I am interested in the fact that we often believe at a pre-conscious level that modernity will lead us to what is deeply good for us, in spite of the fact that modern political philosophy consciously rejects this aim. In other words, I am interested in the judgment we make about everything that comes as a product of modernity, for it is this judgment more than any intellectual notions we have about it that impacts the decisions and choices we make. Because the underlying premises of our society are not intended to cultivate the deep good for us as persons, when we make decisions in our lives assuming that they are, we at most remain "on the surface" of things, or worse, harmfully affect our very own selves; our souls.

     Paradoxically, in defining ourselves as modern, we tend to assume that we have a kind and degree of insight into the truth of human existence nowhere else attained by man. Part of the self-definition for us as modern people is to ignore or heavily discount opinions which are "not modern", read by us as "anything non-American".  What I am suggesting is that there is a very fine line for the American mind at the level of felt judgment between a) modernity and b) American. The assumption that we have a degree of insight into the truth that sets itself apart from all other insights can tend to have the practical effect of blocking us from seeing any truth in insights gained by others. This allows us to feel self-sufficient in the intellectual realm, and it has an effect similar to the desire for independence in the realm of relationships. It cuts us off from seeking truth in any ethically serious way. The logic of the belief that we already have the truth is that we have no real need to seek it, when it is the activity of continual seeking where we find a lived moral and intellectual integrity.

     The problem with assuming that modernity has brought us to the highest level of insight and acheivement possible to man is that the modern mind on the whole seeks to objectively understand and describe reality. Knowledge of the physical world and of man treated as part of that world is the goal, not the cultivation of living well, at least not in any spiritual or moral sense of the term "well".  A practical question we face today as concrete individuals is:  Where are we to find the source of living well if we do decide we want to live life on qualitatively better terms that those offered us by modernity? To critique modernity is not to say that it is bad, but simply that as persons we need something qualitatively distinct from what it has to offer us. In short, the thinkers who founded modern society often glossed over the distinction between the necessary conditions of life - e.g. economic well being and political stability - and higher ends of human life which are spiritual and moral in nature. To affirm the former never automatically brings about the latter, although we ought keep in mind that negating the former will almost always make the attainment of the latter harder, a point self-described radicals tend not to grasp. While the American model has the strength of making it easier for us to attain the necessities of bodily life, its weakness is that it glosses over the fact that the human person has a moral and spiritual dimension that is not well served when the goals of efficiency and order are the only ones we allow ourselves to talk about in the public space.  I believe we are beginning to see more clearly the unaccounted for costs we have been accruing by living for so long now as if our ultimate human purpose was to maximize our economic efficiency and fit into the needed mechanisms of society. We humans are not supposed to relate to the cosmos in the same way physical objects are related to the physical realm, this realm the original inspiration for the foundation of our political-economy as a system.  When we view ourselves as as if we are morally and spiritually void, objects in the physical world, we disable ourselves from 'accessing' or relating to what matters most. We treat ourselves as objects to be 'pushed around', rather than subjects who can think and discern the good from the bad; the better from the worse and live and act accordingly.

     Today we are often, individually as well as collectively, like a computer which grinds its hard disk because its drive is broken. We "grind" and remain in a practical and spiritual morass because, in relying almost exclusively for our private and public decision making on modern philosophical assumptions, we as individuals who are also members of a society no longer do what Plato told us was essential to a good life: actively seek the good. This "good" in a Platonic sense is qualitatively distinct from any object we merely gain objective knowledge of. This good is something that, when we relate to it in a certain qualitatively distinct way, affects the way we live, first individually and then social-politically. The good is not something we ultimately understand, in the way we understand phenomena in the physical world. This is one of the key insights Kant has developed in greater depth than any other thinker. To say that we do not access or relate to objects (German: Objekts) of ultimate importance with the use of empirical knowledge is not to conclude, as we often do, that we can gain no insight into these objects or how to properly and adequately relate to them. For that, the great spiritual traditions can teach us much. Rather, it is to emphasize that we get ourselves off track spiritually, morally and intellectually, as it were, if we live our lives on the basis of the assumptions that a) ultimate reality is knowable in the way gravity or electricity is knowable; b) that human beings are and should be treated like objects controlled by gravity or more generally, physical laws; c) that our primary task is to prove ultimate reality conceived along the lines of the physical sciences and demonstrate epistemic certitude of this reality. Our task today is not to come up with arguments we must theoretically prove to be right before we act on them, but to discern practically better decisions from practically worse decisions and act accordingly.

        A second area I focus on is more explicitly political in nature: As a site that I update from time to time, I will be attempting to persuade readers to consider a particular aspect of the American mind which has the the two-fold effect of a) bringing us to believe that we are isolated individuals and essentially must make it on our own in the world, resulting in b) an inability or at least great difficulty imagining how together, we concrete individuals who make this society up today can have a practically beneficial effect on our economic and political situation. This second theme is less spiritual in nature and more mundane, if you will. From the perspective of political philosophy, which aims to grasp the whole, this mundane realm is no less important than the spiritual and moral realm, for it comes prior to it in time if not importance.

Terence Hoyt
New Orleans, July 4, 2006

Email: thoyt@practicalphilosophy.net