Remarks on the Financial Reform Bill

This bill has been a top priority for me since the
financial collapse.

One of the best things to have happened in American politics since 1980. That year was the beginning of an era in which Americans came to collectively believe that the economy and society more generally not only could, but should, function on the basis of economic
self-interest alone. It is irrational and nihilistic to believe that the pursuit of economic self-interest alone can and should be the sole force determining economic activity, let alone the life of a society. But this is the passionately held philosophy of today's Republican
Party. The radical version of individualism that became a national way of life since the era of Reagan is a dead-end, both for individuals and for society as a whole: this we must learn deeply if we hope for a real reform of our civilization.

The financial reform bill signed by Obama on Wednesday marks a small turn in the right direction. The Republican Party and their well-paid talk radio "lobbyists" have discovered that the interjection of moral zeal and righteous indignation gain votes - even when these two passions have no real target. The manner in which these passions take on a life of their own is just another reason they are considered dangerous to political and economic stability by mainstream political philosophers. No true conservative would support a party that
manipulates such passions, and a party guided by such passions can have no real direction. But we should not expect anything else from a party that actively embraces a philosophy that preaches that financial self-interest can and should be the sole value guiding individual and social life.

The most serious dilemma facing the United States today is to be found in the disconnect between the passions that motivate those on the American Right, on the one hand, and the well being of the nation as a whole. This disconnect is seen more concretely when the following conditions occur together:

Condition 1) an influential decision maker in business or politics makes a decision that is motivated by his personal financial interest at the expense of other values.
Conditoin 2) this decision has some visibly harmful effect on the firm as a whole or his constituents;
Condition 3) the decision making process that led to this trade-off of values is sanctioned because it is assumed by the larger society that "all individuals act in their self-interest."

The rejection by the Republican Party of the financial reform bill was made philosophically possible by the widespread occurrence of these three conditions since the 1980s, with the third one being the explicitly philosophical component. It is this third component; this
praise of narrow self-interest as a "public philosophy", which is so offensive to anyone who knows and who cares about the well being of society.

My Experience of God in Upstate New York
Terence Hoyt

For those who come from there, upstate New York has been described as a little piece of heaven. The transcendentalist spirit of Emerson and the Hudson River School made my home. As one who didn’t fit in with my peers, the nature of this place was laden with grace. I felt like God was always there. After leaving my family in Schenectady to go to Fordham University in the Bronx, it took me living one fall further south to experience that upstate was special. At the end of summer the air in the Bronx had a reddish hue about it and the sky seemed lower than it should, as if heavy with a season’s worth of smog. The air in the city oppressed, and God wasn’t as present. The leaves in fall were more or less brownish, lacking the yellows, reds and bright orange. By contrast, in the Mohawk Valley where I was growing up, the air was crisp and sharp. With the arrival of the new school year, fall meant another beginning as well as a new death, as one year after another flowed behind me. When January came the air was cold and dry, the sun stark. The horizon created a backdrop against which the sky felt long and far away, drawing me beyond its edge. With the boundaries sharp between the seasons, I sensed that nature was carrying me Somewhere. I resisted becoming a new man. Then and there I had not yet learned what this nature was pointing to. This I would only begin to learn to do later, as in now. For then, in this upstate place, I was training in the ways of nature’s God, beckoning me forward. I wanted to hold onto I knew not what.

I have a clear memory of one snowfall. The sun was setting. A plow had built up walls of snow which formed a narrow route that I imagined being funneled down by an unseen Force towards this immense light. Even now, I can feel the new snow absorbing all the sound, leaving me alone with the setting sun. This moment still feels so latent with meaning, and it pains for the absence in my life now underscored. The form of nature in time will not last, and neither will I as this embodiment. But some ineffable quality captured then and there has stayed with me until right now, pointing me to where I do not know. While I do not know what or who draws me, I have always believed in a Source of Nature. I have a memory of nature growing up in my head, teaching me now as then how to let go. This new place-time beyond, pointed to by what I longed for then as now, my life, my home, that Nature of Upstate New York, where I lived and had my being until I left for a time to go to the Bronx.

Posted April 6, 2010

In the last year I've argued that the banking crisis owes primarily to the undoing of regulations that were enacted after the Depression. And banking reregulation has still not happened as of this point in time! This deregulation of finance began earnestly in the 1990s. The most important of these regulations was the Glass Stegall Act . (Quote from wikepedia referring to the act that undid this regulation: The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, (Pub.L. 106-102, 113 Stat. 1338, enacted November 12, 1999) is an act of the 106th United States Congress (1999-2001) which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, opening up the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and/or an insurance company.) In the traditional view, which I adhere to, the Depression overcame the usual political power of banks, formerly called "trusts". The result was that the US had stability from around 1950 until around 1992 or so. (The high growth in the 1990s and 2000s was based on a ponzi-scheme essentially.)

I ask again: Why is such a significant part of our political culture either against or silent towards this thoughtful, traditional argument? Response: Many activists on the right in particular are under the influence of what the French call a "fixed idea". The core belief of their fixed idea is that freedom in the market place is the highest social, political and economic value. Those who hold this idea hold it not as an intellectual or pragmatic claim, but as a moral value. The second idea is that any government interference in private economic activity is morally illegitimate. The argument is not that government interference is impractical - but that it is immoral. This specifically moral quality at the heart of this activism is the primary source of economic and political instability today. It is difficult for a culture like ours to grasp that this can be so - that moral passion in politics is a bad thing. For complex reasons beyond the scope of this brief note, the fact of the matter is that in American civilization, moral intensity in politics is and will remain destabilizing.

See the article here

   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