An Out-of-Control Public Philosophy in an Out-of-Control Political
Party
The trade deficit, budget deficit and private debt has soared under the Republican
laissez-faire, radical free-market regime. And yet the Republican candidates
for president for the most part say the same thing - "cut taxes";
"cut the government"; in effect, give narrow economic interests
more power over the life of the nation. Since Clinton pushed for NAFTA and
gave MFN for China, the nation is less of a nation with common moral and spiritual
values and more of a collection of separate individuals with merely narrow
economic interests. Making economic freedom the highest moral value means
that other moral values must decline relatively, and in particular social
cohesion and real wages. The result: our society becomes a worse society by
both economic standards as well as moral and spiritual ones.
I was amazed to listen to the Republican candidates in New Hampshire seemingly
seriously propose economic policies that might have been reasonably argued
for in the early 1980's - lowering taxes and cutting back on regulations -
but are no longer reasonable or rational. To anyone who is aware of what has
been going on in the last 25 years in this country, it's as if the candidates
were transported into New Hampshire by a time-machine from 1980! They spoke
as if they had no grasp of the fact that policy choices occur in the context
of a time and place. I find that I'm making the same formal critique of the
Republicans that I made of the Democrats in the 1970s, after 25 years of dominance.
None among the Republicans seemed to reflect on the obvious, that there can
be too much or too little of any particular policy. Have they ever noticed
that moderation is the most important virtue to the founders of the United
States? Moral fervor seems to be their best friend, a quality considered quite
unbecoming to the true statesman by all those who contributed to the founding
of America. If asked the question: At what point would income or business
taxes be too low, one had the sense that they would not be able to formulate
a thoughtful response. Guiliani, Romney and Thompson in particular exude a
kind of "wag the dog" phenomenon, creating the appearance that they
are leaders, but using language that demonstrates that they are seeking to
manipulate the citizens by saying what they think they want to hear. The Republican
candidates with the exception of John McCain interject their public language
with the black-and-white moral language that is always a dysfunctional basis
for public policy. The fact that they can't see that such an approach will
not win a national election in the near future suggests that they are getting
poor political advice. At this point in the election cycle, the only Republican
candidate who has a chance of winning is John McCain. For the American public
understands intuitively the central role of moderation in American politics,
and they understand that this virtue is sorely missing in the rest of the
candidates. As the saying goes - you can fool some of the people some of the
time with a false and incorrect conception of principled leadership, even
if it's 49 or 51 percent - but you can't fool all of them all of the time!
The Silence of the American Government in the Face of Unfair Trade:
Representing the Few at the Expense of the Country as Whole
Regarding concrete economic facts: taxes on upper incomes are lower now than
since the 20's and corporations have more power today than perhaps since the
1800s. What is most noticeable in the Republican debates is that the participants
never say anything that would fundamentally reverse certain economic policies
currently in place which are by any reasonable standard harmful to the long-term
well being of the United States. What is disconcerting is that none of the
candidates are even suggesting that American trade policy needs to be seriously
revisited. When a nation goes too far in any one direction, it is normal to
hear arguments that we ought be moving in another direction. But what we hear
instead is the gall of arguments that we ought move further in the direction
of laissez-faire policies.
Radical Individualism: The Source of a Corrosive Public Philosophy
and the Achilles Heel of America
But let's not just be negative. Let's try to see what we can do for the longer-term
well being of the nation as a whole, and with it the American citizen. I pose
that radical individualism is the single most significant factor in the long-developing
political, economic and cultural crisis: Because of radical individualism
in American society, which is at once a source of strength and our Achilles
heel, we end up increasingly allowing the very concrete economic interests
who benefit tremendously from overseas trade to determine the policies that
we are all effected by. A key sign of the decline of a nation is when its
citizens can only use their money within the borders of their economy. The
falling dollar means that we may get to a point where we can't leave the country.
While a few benefit financially from current trade polices, the rest of us
are being harmed economically, then, in the form of a falling dollar, a rising
trade deficit which must cause prices on all goods to rise eventually, and
on the loss of American sovereignty. The simple elementary school fact that
American leaders have become radically relativist about is that we can't keep
borrowing money from the rest of the world without negative consequences to
our own economic well being, status in the world, and sovereignty. The increasing
manifestations of the always present radical individualism of American society
confronts us with a dilemma, which is easily seen from an outside perspective:
As suggested above, the Americans do not seem to have a sense for what their
interests as a nation are. An accurate description from outside would say
that they seem to act only as individuals who seem to have no allegiance to
the nation as it has been traditionally understood. We have, that is, no robust
sense of culture or ethically vibrant sense of what it means to be American.
More concretely, we don't know what moral values we need to defend, and how
they are grounded in a sense of nation which transcends the narrow interests
of individual traders, business, or lobbyists.
The sense of a country being made up of people who have a common moral and
spiritual bond is something that neither the utopians on the right or the
left are comfortable with. We give them too much power, and the result of
our allowing nihilistic utopians on the right and left to determine our thinking
about public policy is what the result of bad government always is: The increasing
level of wealth and power in the hands of the few who live by the amoral code
"might makes right". We end up with the public moral philosophy
that tells us all that all we do and should care about as citizens is "being
able to live in a way that advances my own narrow economic interests".
But this is no basis for the long-term well being of a serious country. This
public philosophy makes the society less like one we want to bring children
up in.
Why are the many who are harmed by recent trade policies not motivated
to press for limits on trade?
Who benefits from these laissez-faire policies which seem to be repeats of
the policies of the late 1800s? The difference between then and now is that
now we are getting involved with cultures that do not share our ethical values.
This is not necessarily dangerous, but it could be. And that is to say that
a laissez-faire policy leaves our collective future to chance. Who knows how
long foreigners will be willing to allow the Americans to spend beyond their
means? No other nation allows itself to do this. It seems that when the Republicans
are in power for a long period of time, power tends to flow to those who have
very concrete interests in radically free market policies which always end
up in a fiasco. As a matter of direction and trends, the United States seems
to become more oligarchial and less democratic under long-term Republican
rule. While there are probably problematic trends on the left when the Democrats
are in power, the nature of the modern economy is such that there seems to
be more danger posed to the United States by a dominant Republican Party than
there is by a dominant Democratic Party.
Since these polices can be shown empirically to hurt many more than they
help, the question comes up: Why aren't the many individuals who are harmed
by these policies influential enough to change them? The reason is somewhat
simple. The interest groups who gain from laissez-faire trade policies are
much more focused and organized than the disparate individuals who are harmed
by the same. Moreover, the economic benefit from foreign trade is focused
in a way that trade within the nation is not. This focused benefit acruing
from free trade makes it easier to channel some of the largesse to policy
makers who enable this trade, in the form of campaign contributions. Such
a mutually beneficial relationship between businesses involved in a laissez-faire
regime and politicans furthers the very policies most needing to be reversed,
this relationship becoming all the more necessary for the maintenance of both
interest groups in response to the increasing resistance from such policies
once their effects begin to be felt by more and more citizens. While the interests
of the businesses who gain from trade rub the backs of the politicans who
pass laws to make the trade possible, the interests of the American citizen
are ignored and the country as a whole diminishes as a political entity.
Contrariwise are the many hundreds of thousands of disparate forces within
the borders that do or did the same work now "channeled" by many
fewer business interests from foreign shores. The business people that are
involved with trade with China, for example, including above all else Walmarts,
are much better organized to influence policy than the hundreds of thousands
of Americans who work in all sorts of areas in the economy that are harmed
by unlimited trade with other countries but who are unfocused and unorganized.
Simply put, the connection between radical free market policies and the gain
to those relatively few businesses who are involved with trade with other
countries, which not un-coincidentally have minimal ethical standards, is
much more focused and clear-cut than that between these policies and the harm
to workers and the country as a whole that results from failing to limit imports
from countries like China.
It is difficult for those who are harmed by the free trade with such cultures
to see that they have a common interest and to organize around this interest,
while is very easy for the few who can gain by "outsourcing" to
lobby Congress to keep trade polices as they are now or make them even more
open. If the logic of "cheap is better" is allowed to determine
trade policy, the cheaper stuff we get in general will not and does not make
up for the lower wages and lowered ethical standards most of us will have
to live by. One of the political dilemmas is that those who are hurt by our
current trade policy and attendant high deficit do not even know who they
are, while those who benefit are known by themselves and the political establishment.
It is a socially and politically corrosive American belief, perversely
treated like a virtue, that the only things worthy of the attention of policy
makers is lowering prices, "low taxes", and maximizing the freedom
of those with business acumen. These exclusively material goals do not
make for a good or unified nation. Moreover, the policies they entail are
actually harmful to the narrow economic interests we think we are supporting.
The cheaper stuff we can buy at Walmarts and elsewhere will not make up for
a dollar that will predictably lose its status as the world's main currency,
for example, if the levels of deficit trading are allowed to continue. At
a more profound level, there is a corrosive effect on the moral space that
constitutes the "heart" of our society we live in when we refuse
to apply ethical standards to economic and trade policies. Again, one way
to understand our problem is that our current public philosophy tells us that
we need to organize our politics and economics in such a way that allows the
interests of individuals involved in trade to have their way even when their
way is harmful to the country as a whole and many individual Americans. From
a moral and cultural perspective, our individualism and heavy stress on low
prices makes us deaf to appeals to another way of arranging politics and economics.
We see this strange disconnect between structural incentives in the American
economy and long-term well being of the country as a whole repeatedly, most
recently in the real-estate crash. There are only so many pyramid schemes
that politicians can make use of to defer reality. Even though it was easy
to predict that many would get harmed from the kinds of lending practices
that were allowed in recent time, the structure of incentives and regulations
were such that many were motivated and allowed to do the wrong thing from
both an economic but also ethical perspective. When freedom is the only moral
value national leaders proclaim, this must be the outcome. This arrangement,
in which the freedom to do whatever I want economically, may be a belief system
we can expect among teenagers, but it is not one fitting to rational adults
who we expect to observe patterns and make practical and moral decisions based
on those patterns.
Qualitative vs. quantitative standards: The amorality of Republican
economic policies and why trade needs to be limited when it is with countries
who are very dissimilar from an economic and ethical viewpoint.
At this point, as I think I've said before, it can no longer be said that
what benefits GM benefits America. This axiom will only hold when American
firms are limiting trade to cultures with whom we share common moral and ethical
values. In particular, to maintain the moral and economic integrity of the
US, trade needs to be limited to being with countries that have similar ethical,
economic and environmental standards to the US. But this kind of limit - a
limit of a mostly moral kind - cannot and will not happen in the US at this
point in our history, and perhaps ever. Not without a re-education of the
American citizen away from radical individualism. For here is the rub: The
political philosophy underlying the United States and therefore modern economic
practice in general contributes to making both the public and policy makers
"blind" to those qualitatively unique kinds of moral goods which
are not in some obvious sense linked to the self-interest of the citizen defined
as exclusively economic. In short, the political philosophy which forms the
way the majority of Americans think and feel about politics and business tells
them that self-interest both does and should guide all activity that takes
place within the public structure of the political-economy. What has happened
in American civilization over 300 years is somewhat natural: While the founders
held that society must make room for the self-interest of business activity,
we now interpret this as a moral imperative. Strangely, American society today,
and in particular the Republican Party, are in an extremely dangerous place
from the only perspective that counts, very close to adopting Thrasymachus'
views on justice, while other Western nations are clear in their own collective
conscience that they reject this definition of justice. Thrasymachus is an
important historical source of the moral argument that the powerful have the
right to rule and set governments and policies up to benefit themselves at
the expense of others. Add Ayn Rand to the increasingly Hobbesian
public philosophy dominant in the United States, and we now have contempt
for the national government animating many of those who are working for the
national government or active in politics! Simply listen to the whacky anti-government
rhetoric of Guiliani, Romney, and Thompson to see signs of this anti-social
philosophy in action. All three of them talk as if they are clones out of
a play-book written in the 1980's, by Randian activists. See the list of urls
referring to the current influence of Randianism on the Republican Party and
its activists below:
Link
to Google listing of links to articles on the influence of Ayn Rand in the
Republican Party today
But these activists and the politicians who pander to them are spiritually
and practically misguided, and when those of us who know what to look for
search for them, we discover that they are "lost" in the wrong kind
of dessert. For the activists who have had the biggest influence in getting
us to this very bad state of public policy at the national level - a policy
which concretely harms the average American citizen - confuses the basic acknowledgment
that self-interest must be given room in any functional political-economy
with a moral ideal. They fail to see that the founders of the US made it unequivocally
clear, in the text of the Constitution, that the political-economy is not
supposed to be the end all and be all. There is no moral language in any of
the text of this document. Make no mistake about it: The writers of this text
omitted all moral language on purpose. Freedom of economic activity is to
be robust, but it is not the only moral good we are to guide public policy
by.
The absence of moral language in the Constitution - which forms the basis
of our political-economic life - does not mean that there is no place for
a morality or ethics animated by the citizen seeking to influence public policy
and economic life. This is what the leadership of the Republican Party wants
us to believe - that any regulation of economic activity is morally illegitimate
and excessively harmful to efficiency. It is Ayn Rand who taught activists
in the Republican Party to use moral language when talking about profit-driven
economic activity, and it is due to the success of their use of such language
that we are now living in a laissez-faire regime with its negative economic
and moral consequences. Any time an ideology takes hold of a nation, dire
consequences follow. I define 'ideology' as any set of beliefs which are not
checked by respect for objective reality. Make no mistake about it - an ideology
so defined has taken hold of the leadership of the Republican Party in a way
and to a degree that has never occurred in American history. I believe it
may be too late to change the direction of the ship of state, and that we
will soon have to pay the costs of having allowed the ideology of radical
free-markets to infect our national government. Nature seems to have a way
of correcting the worst excesses of both individuals and nations, and we can
pray and hope that our "correction" is not too harsh on the American
citizen. What this is ultimately a "correction" of is the hubristic
claim made by free-marketers and Randians in general that the only thing we
need to make a society good is selfishness.
In contrast to the dismal public anti-philosophy which "inspires"
our activists and becomes an enabler of anti-social corporate behavior, what
we can hopefully learn to do is cultivate a notion and source of public morality
that transcends our merely individual economic interests. For the nation to
maintain its moral, spiritual and economic integrity, citizens must continually
and repeatedly "inject" moral standards into public policy debates.
Contrary to Rand and her apostles dominating the activism in the Republican
Party today, a literally free market does not make a society good. It makes
it morally and economically schizophrenic. A national government that allows
business interests to do whatever they want must make a society morally schizophrenic
because a literally free market must force contradictory moral values to collide
with one another. When they do, choices have to be made. But if economic freedom
and radical individualism are the sole moral standards, choices cannot be
made rationally or morally. Chaos increases, and with it poverty and aimlessness.
Contrary to a laissez-faire policy, reasonable regulation of corporate power;
tarriffs on low-tech goods and services and on all food items that can be
produced in the US in fact does make this society a morally and economically
better society. High tariffs on car-part suppliers will preserve jobs for
those workers in the US who we are not morally allowed to assume will "get
re-educated" so they can get a "high tech job". The outright
denial of reality displayed by Republican public rhetoric about "retraining
all citizens to hold high tech jobs" is astonishing. Such talk implies
the loopy notion that 100% of any particular group of human beings can be
educated to the highest level attainable by humanity! Since when does a society
predicate serious public policy on such utopian assumptions? The lie of rhetoric
both in the Republican and Democratic party about "getting our workers
up to the highest standards in the world" is revealed when we consider
for a moment their implications: Such talk implies that our workers will somehow
always end up on the very top of the economic ladder which makes up the world
economy. Why would anyone make this assumption and offer it as the primary
response to the negative effects of radical free trade? Such a claim makes
me think of the little girl who is wondering why there are bad people in the
world. Those who talk about educating American workers up to the highest standards
know full well that this is utopian and not grounded in reality. They also
know that our public philosophy does not allow them to put forth policies
that will limit the ability of private economic interests to trade as they
want. The founders of our nation would turn over in their graves if they could
listen to the public rhetoric of those running for office on the Republican
side today in particular! To repeat: All that has happened as a result of
the radical free trade policies of the last 15 years is that those who benefit
from importing cheaper-made goods have been allowed to determine trade policy,
at the expense of many Americans. Free market activity alone cannot and
does not make a society a good society. It must make it a worse and even bad
society over the long run. Radical free market policies in a day and age when
transport is cheap is highly corrosive to the moral and spiritual values that
make a particular civilization good.
As a counter-force to the single incentive of economic self-interest, free
citizens choosing to inform the policies of the government can make the society
morally better when they act with a vision of the common good in mind as well
as common-sense understanding of their economic interests. Those who are acting
in their capacity as profit maximizes are not supposed to play the role of
making a society morally better. We should not expect the good society to
result from this sole motive. But free citizens are expected to influence
society for the better in a moral sense. Making our lives better in more than
a narrowly economic sense is the proper role of the citizen acting in his
capacity as a member of a nation with common moral and spiritual values. For
that matter, a business CEO can have two capacities: he can act to maximize
the profit of the firm, while in his private life he can act as a citizen
and put pressure on his elected officials to enact reasaonble laws that influence
society for the better. Moreover, while with Milton Freidman we are not to
expect the CEO to focus on making society better, we do have the right to
expect that the CEO will not take actions that are harmful to the common good
by standards reasonable people would agree on. So for example, he is not to
contribute to increasing pollution or excessively harming many American workers
in order to benefit a few stockholders. Stock valuation can not be the sole
standard guiding corporate behavior. If it is allowed to be so, we are saying
that the corporation can behave as if it a) gets its wealth independently
of the society it markets to, and b) could get its wealth if it existed in
isolation. Both assumptions are clearly false, and in fact the corporation's
stock value depends on the privilege of being granted the ability to market
to the citizens of a particular nation. The standards used to judge when some
action is excessively polluting and harmful to the American worker will require
a combination of both quantitative as well as qualitative judgment. One of
the biggest weaknesses in American culture is the large-scale refusal to talk
about non-quantitative moral values in the business and economics professions
and to take them seriously. We need to educate students on how to make qualitatively
based moral judgments. The primary moral value of the American citizen is
not and cannot be "cheap prices" and "getting what I want now".
We cannot accept that Thrasymachus'
view of justice should prevail in our society. If we allow purely quantative
standards to determine corporate behavior and public policy choices, we will
be sure to be on the road to spiritual death as well as economic decline.
Radical Capitalism: Efficiency and monetary gain are increasingly
the only shared moral values in America.
The danger for the American is that the public philosophy he lives by tells
him that economic values are the sole moral values he holds in common with
others. Freedom by itself is not a moral value, but makes moral values possible.
And politicians on the right mask this difference in their over-use of the
term "freedom" in their public speeches. This tendency to see being
able to buy what we want when we want as the only moral value we share with
other Americans is the dark side of Locke's
implied equating of self-interested reason with moral goodness. In its
attempt to avoid religious conflict, the political spirit of the 1600-1700s
over-stressed the role of government in providing a religiously neutral platform
for all to pursue their lives as they see fit. This foundation was meant to
be morally neutral, and never conceived as in itself leading to a good society;
a society we would want to bring children into. Single individuals acting
in their capacity as human beings who grasp moral ideals seek the good and
make a society one fit for children. When the American founders made the foundation
of the United States capitalist, they did not mean there to be no role for
morality in the formation of public policy. They were not "libertarians"
or "free-marketers" or "neo-conservatives". Nor would
they fit into the spirit of the 1960's form of utopianism. They were moderate
above all else. Perhaps their most significant blind-spot was a failure to
see that their silence on public virtue would later become a basis for excessive
individualism, which in turn would enable excessive influence to accrue to
private economic interests whose primary form is the large corporation today.
The biggest concrete danger to the long-term well being of American civilization
is not "big government", which is controlled by a citizenry, but
by large corporations which have no allegiance to any nation or ethical culture.
The advances in the technology which make transport and communication over
long distances much cheaper are the conditions which heighten this danger
in our time. Although they were largely silent on the question "Where
will public morality come from"? "What will the standards be which
limit and guide political and economic activity over and above self-interest?",
and while our economic system was formed to run smoothly and efficiently without
much reliance on the moral integrity of the participants - checks-and-balances
being the primary mechanism to maintain order - the founders of the U.S. never
meant by their creation of this system to imply that the system all by itself
is sacrosanct or that it would be sufficient to a good society.
Moral and Intellectual Confusion on the Right Concerning American
Foundations: The Distinction Between What Is the Case and What Ought To Be
"Conservative" Americans have been committing one of the most serious
sins on the book since the 1960's. (I put "conservative" in quotes
because based on the standards of western civilization, they are largely amoral
in their views concerning political-economy. As such, they are not conservative
in any robust sense. They are Lockean.)
They have made the American constitution into an idol. The Constitution is
never to be looked at as the end all and be all of the good society, but rather
simply as the foundation for the good society. The United States is based
on the idea that self-interest does rule political and economic activity.
It was Plato and Christianity in particular who have always offered a contrasting
vision to this claim: The Jewish, Christian and Platonic standard held that
ethical standards and some vision of the Good ought to influence our lives,
both privately and publically. What has happened in the last few decades is
that the American right has confused a descriptive claim about self-interest
with a moral claim. In other words, they have confused the observed fact that
economic self-interest does in fact influence most of us most of the time
with a claim that this is good. We can see one source of this belief in the
following claim of John Locke: "The state of nature has a law of nature
to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches
all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent,
no one ought be harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions..."
(Chapter II, Sec. 6, "Second Treatise on Government, John Locke.) In
this statement, made in one of the most influential documents in American
political thought, Locke tightly links moral virtue with natural reason. But
this view that reason alone is the source of moral goodness is not tenable.
Contrary to the popularly held opinion in America, heavily formed by Locke,
that reason all by itself shows us the good and leads us to it, the more likely
truth is that reason alone does not grasp what is true, nor what ought to
be in a moral sense, and self-interested reason as Locke conceived it will
not suffice to make citizens morally good in a social and political context.
More is needed than this Lockean notion of reason, a reason which is capable
of grasping its own material and political interest, but nothing more. A serious
reflection on Plato's arguments concerning the source of moral goodness as
well as on true Christianity, I argue, offer the best beginnings for us to
again move towards building and maintaining a society which educates children
to care about goodness. I take teenagers in particular to be the test of the
moral integrity of a society: What they in fact care about reveals the soul
of the culture. As an aside: there is no good argument to allow private economic
interests to market violent video games to children. What I want to claim
is that American civilization may very well contain a serious error in its
adoption of the Lockean notion that reason alone either gets us to or constitutes
moral goodness. Locke himself makes it clear, if we look at what he said,
that reason shows us our economic and political interest, simply. This misunderstanding,
leading to an excess of sentimentality, results in the bad public policy of
allowing corporations to sell harmful goods to children.
The kind of moral and intellectual confusion I am arguing is core to American
society is in fact part of the life of all nations. In particular, there are
in all societies "slides" between what is in fact morally neutral
and what is seen as morally good by the larger society. The most obvious example
involves the way of life of a culture. The dominant way of life of any society
will be viewed by philosophical anthropologists as morally neutral. There
must be a way of life in a defacto sense. But from the perspective of the
culture which lives out a particular way of life, that way will be viewed
as normative. Plato and Christianity are the most robust sources of challenge
to the view that we ought equate our own defacto way of life with the morally
good. Part and parcel of the Western and American moral ideal is to be self-reflective
and not assume that my own opinions about what is good and true are in fact
good and true.
There is a unique problem with the fallacy in the common understanding
of American political-economy.
The claim here however is that the particular moral and intellectual confusion
in American civilization entails more than the usual equation of a way of
life with the moral good. It just happens to be the case that the unique political
philosophy which constitutes the heart of American civilization makes our
own fallacious identification of our founding ideals with the moral good pernicious
in that it is more difficult to detect. This particular fallacy, involved
as it is in a conflation between the normative and nominal; between what is
good and what simply is the case; between what we observe in political and
economic behavior, and what qualities and behaviors we want to see in others,
is perhaps also one of the most spiritually dangerous civilizational fallacies.
This fallacy, to which I only allude here, most endemic on the right in America
but also present on the left, although it does not exist on the right in Europe,
reveals a grave misunderstanding of both the foundation of American civilization
as well as Western moral and religious thought in general.
The spirit of Descartes and the recent (re)turn towards radical free
market policies in America: Selfishness as a moral good.
In addition to the more esoteric influence of John Locke on the American
understanding of the relationship between reason and public virtue or moral
goodness generally, there is another important factor influencing the increasingly
radical free-market policies argued for on the right. What has happened in
the Republican Party in the last 10 years is due in large part to the popularity
of Ayn Rand. (See her "Capitalism:
The Unknown Ideal" and "Atlas
Shrugged" and "The
Virtue of Selfishness" in particular.) She has been tremendously
influential among activists on the right. It is well known that Alan Greenspan
was one of her disciples. In brief, Rand argued that selfishness is a moral
virtue. Partly as a result of arguments offered by her, the acknowledgment
that self-interest does rule much human behavior by the founders of the US
has become normative on the right. It has become a moral ideal. Plato had
neutrally observed that many are narrowly self-interested, e.g. concerned
about their comfort and relative place in society rather than their spiritual
well being, and both he and Christianity would lead off from this observation
to argue that to live well, we need to seek ends which are qualitatively different
than the ends pursued by a narrow self-interest. After the scientific revolution
and the installation of the Cartesian spirit in the Western imagination, the
observation that individuals in power act to maximize their narrow well being
came to be observed first as a neutral observation, as it had been for Plato.
But, to repeat, what has happened on the American right is that this observation
has become normative. Selfishness has come to be viewed as a good thing. Descartes
had the effect on the Western mind of bringing the intellectual to heavily
focus on the form of truth rather than any particular contentful notion of
the true. If we can discern something clearly and distinctly, this is what
is esteemed. A side effect of the heavy stress on clarity of what is observed
is a dimunition in respect for moral goodness as a quality which does not
adhere in a quantitative vector. The reason for this is simple: The grounds
and nature of moral goodness are "opaque" and "ambiguous".
After Descartes, gaining clarity about some reality takes on tremendous importance.
Whether or not the reality discerned has any relation to moral goodness is
not relevant to this kind of questioning and thinking. It is not an exaggeration
to say that in the mind of most intellectuals in America and the West generally,
justifying that a claim is factually truthful has replaced seeking virtue
as the "the most important thing". After this attempt to gain clarity
about beliefs becomes paramount, simply by virtue of the fact that we can
"see" a phenomenon clearly and distinctly raises the status of that
phenomeon in absolute and relative importance. What is morally better, worse,
good or bad disappears as a category of consideration.The whole structure
of the relation between seeking truth and the truth itself is here radically
different compared to the Platonic, Aristotelian and Christian understanding
of the same. If we are talking about some aspect of human reality that can
be characterized in the form of Descartes' "clear and distinct
ideas", we are "on". If we are talking about a moral or spiritual
end or goal, our thinking class for the most part shuts down both intellectually
as well as emotionally. The civilizationally dysfunctional sight of seeing
activists get passionate about the claim that selfishness is morally good
is the result of the Lockean and Cartesian project. The scizophrenia of the
Republican candidates running for office, saying they are Christian yet adhering
to a purely Lockean conception of social and political philosophy, is another
symptom of the philosphical dilemma discussed above.
Although the spirit of science and Descartes stresses the truth of things,
now conceived morally neutrally, Plato and Christianity's stress on the higher
moral and spiritual ends of the human person remain ever-present within our
hearts and minds even as they have been sidelined to bit players in the life
of society. In brief, insofar as Greek, Jewish and Christian philosphy is
still true for us, what is true; what is morally good in a robust sense is
never supposed to be reduced to what merely is the case. Locke is perhaps
the key culprit in committing this reduction of the moral to the true. Plato,
as we noted above, observes that many in power to attempt to maximize their
narrow self interest, but he responds by arguing that the individual or society
who lives on the basis of this ethic will not live a good life. Later, Christianity
concretizes this challenge to humanity with the claim that individuals ought
to care about a kind of moral good that is qualitatively different from the
good as defined by all large groups in all times and places. This challenge
takes the imperative that we are to "love one another". The influence
of Descartes and Locke, with the side-kick in the person of Ayn Rand, largely
eviscerates this moral imperative from the public spirit of Western civilization
in general but American in particular, for what now gets attention is what
is true, simply. Locke's gloss that reason is the source of morality merely
conceals this traditional understanding of both the source and nature of public
morality from view, but that understanding remains there to be rediscovered.
What morally ought to be is not something we can observe with any certitude,
and we can never have knowledge of moral goodness in the sense that moral
goodness was understood by both Plato and Christ. And of course, as I noted
above, it is not quantitative. It does not fit into any language of efficiency.
In short, for the spirit of modern philosophy there can be no legitimate distinction
between the true and the good, and as a consequence the "good" effectively
gets reduced to "what is the case".
Combine Randian utopian notions about free-markets with the sources of intellectual
moral confusion noted above, and it begins to make sense how we can get to
a place in our society where some seriously argue that selfishness is a moral
good, and witness serious candidates for president argue what are deeply civilizationally
corrupt policies. This claim is held secretly by many of the free-market radicals
who dominate the Republican Party today. They will not make their belief explicit,
because they know that it is contradictory to the single source of public
morality in America that counters Locke's investation of reason with morality.
That counter-claim is what I have refered to as Christian care for others.
The self-interest that was observed as a "fact" of human nature
by Plato and which he challenged, agreed with by the founders of modern politics
in general and the "rules" of American political-economy in particular,
are now embraced by the radicals in power on the right as morally good. Selfishness
is thus not simply neutrally observed to exist in many in private and public
life, but is now made normative. This is, among other things, a great coup
for the views of Thrasymachus, the opponent of Socrates who argued that "might
makes right".
Behind the nihilism of the free-market right
How did this odd "slip" occur - How did an aspect of human nature,
that Greek and Christian culture argued should be struggled against and that
the founders of the U.S. meant to merely tolerate come to be seen by a small
clique in North America as morally good? I believe the best explanation for
this is the overwhelming force of public opinion in American society. The
radical transvaluation of morality on the right in the US was enabled by the
psychological pressure put on the intellectual class to pay heed to popular
opinion. What is the opinion in American society that most influenced the
intellectual on the right to adopt selfishness as a moral virtue?! I want
to pose the following explanation: The primary trait of American society is
the need to see itself as morally better than other societies. Interpreting
the self-interest that is the primary functional moral value in the Constitution
as all by itself making society good is flattery to the body politic. But
it is a lie that self-interest is the only functional motive in society. There
are qualitatively different motives other than self-interest, in spite of
the fact that they are not "clear and distinct" in the way economic
and political self-interest is. In a kind of weird way, the assumption that
narrow self-interest can be the single incentive of man might be viewed as
the installation of an anti-Platonic ideal - a kind of Unnoble lie in American
society. For in fact no Constitution and no political-economy by itself can
make a society a good society. Free-markets; capitalism, is not enough. Efficiency
is not the only moral good! And since moral values are central to the self-understanding
of American civilization - a civilization whose foundation is the Constitution
but whose fulfillment is in a moral and spiritual ideal - to the extent that
this society allows unalloyed free trade and unregulated corporate power to
become the norm, to that extent does this culture perform on itself the equivalent
of a moral-spiritual decapitation.
In contrast to the rather bizarre claim by Rand - that refugee from Communist
Russia - that selfishness is a moral good, all of the reputable philosophers
and prophets from whom we do in fact get our moral and spiritual values argue
that no society and no single individual can live well on the basis of the
narrowly understood civilization defined solely around the ability to efficiently
trade economic goods and services. They all argue that those societies that
are based on allowing the interest of the able or strong to act without any
moral restraints placed on this activity by the collective whole will end
up destroying the country they live in. The civilization will not get destroyed
because those who live by economic incentives alone are bad or selfish - as
noted above, this has been observed by philosophers and prophets since before
Socrates - but because the society in this case is telling itself collectively
that man does, after all, live by bread alone. But in adopting this latter
position, the activists who control the public rhetoric of the Republican
Party today contravenes one of the most important spiritual claims in American
civilization - that men do not live by bread alone.
The Fundamental Civilizational Sin: Contradicting a Civilization's
Primary Moral Beliefs
Perhaps the most important philosophical dictum in the realm of anthropology
and civilization is as follows: Thou shall not contadict your own collective
spiritual and ethical values. A civilization will decline to the extent that
it allows itself to contradict its own fundamental moral and spiritual values.
I want to suggest that this is the most serious kind of "sin" that
a collective can commit. The recent turn toward radical capitalism constitutes
a contradiction of our own highest spiritual values and is fundamentally incoherent.
Equality, openness and the priority of efficiency over qualitative goods becomes
the mediate cause of the destruction of civilization when these values make
it possible for those with no moral or ethical standards to have their way
in the life of a nation.
Summary Conclusion
The lesson for this year: Stay away from the Republicans, especially Guiliani,
Thompson, and Romney. Huckabees notion of a "fair tax", getting
rid of the IRS, and getting government revenue solely from sales tax is the
stuff of free-market Utopianism. It's unreal in a double sense. It is not
consistent with the spirit of American foundations, nor with Christian values.
While McCain is the most sane and intelligent among Republican candidates,
his idea of preserving the Bush tax cut is pure pandering. The Bush tax cut
in general and getting rid of the estate tax in particular constitute an egregious
harm to the public good, and McCain knows this. Unlike the other three mentioned
above, McCain is too intelligent not to know this, and has a kind of integrity
that they lack. His embrace of radical free-market rhetoric is "simply",
and sadly, due to the influence of the philosophy of radical capitalism in
the party at this point in time. He is simply being politically expedient,
which counters his own best quality: his ethical integrity and common sense.
The first three in particular, however, truly pander to the worst elements
in the larger culture, refusing to hear counter arguments to their corrosive
public philosophy that all that we need to live well is the self-interest
of those who are motivated to make money. They are serious threats, potentially
constituting a continuation of national governmental policy of turning the
United States into an economic playground for the few; an oligarchy. The whole
set of policies advocated by the right are akin to giving an addict his drug
of choice: Even those who push such policies end up being harmed by them,
for to the extent that they are allowed to have their way, they make the society
a morally worse society. And no one rationally wants to live in a morally
worse society.
The United States is again in a situation where policy makers are enacting
laws and policies which are economically beneficial for a very small group
of individuals, not as Americans, but as individuals simply, who as such have
no allegiance to any other moral value than free trade and profit. This is
no way to run a nation that pledges allegiance to moral and spiritual values
that transcend narrow self-interest. It is simply a way to run a private club
set up to advance the interests of a few. Plato, Jesus, and the founders observed
that this amoral value in fact influences most public policy in most times
and places and the founders made sure that the US was set up in a way that
did not fight these forces but made room for it and sought to moderate its
bad side-effects with checks-and-balances. This foundation, however, which
made room for the profit motive, was never viewed as in itself making society
a good society. The free market is not all that we need as a society. Over
and above the political-economy, in which self-interested participants would
be allowed to have their say, we need the good citizen who through his elected
officials enforced minimal moral and ethical standards whose function is to
"limit" the negative side effects that would occur if selfishness
were allowed to be the sole effective force in policy making. In short, the
US was going to live by a higher moral and spiritual set of values even as
it accomodated self-interest. To live up to this nuanced and highly sophisticated
foundation, we citizens are called to put pressure on our policy makers to
enact public policy which furthers not merely the narrow interests of the
few, but the common good of the many.
Concrete Proposition: Tariffs on imported goods and services should
be restored to a high level on all low-technology products, on all food items
that can be grown at a reasonable cost in the US, and on any products found
to be physically harmful in any way.
The practical rational: The economic argument for free trade with other countries
holds that such trade should occur if one country performs a task more efficiently
than another. But this argument cannot hold between countries with statistically
significant different wage levels in equivalent or similar industries. Nor
can it be applied between cultures with different ethical standards, as applied
to worker safety, the environment and human rights in general. Finally, this
justification for free trade cannot be applied when it involves products or
services that are not involved in a significant technological innovation.
If one of the justifications of trade with other countries is that the one
importing gains from the technological know-how of the exporting country,
this justification cannot be used if there is no such gain.
The moral rationale: To be able to economically benefit from the American
market, you must work within the American market. You cannot have it both
ways: access to the American citizen as consumer and avoid working with him
to run your business. Running a business is not a right, but a privilege.
There is no moral right to access to a market, and we as American citizens
have the moral right and indeed obligation to our descendants to preserve
the integrity of American civilization by selectively limiting who we trade
with and what we import.
T. Hoyt
Posted 1/12/08
