There has been a lot of debate recently over the tactic of “no-platforming” where leftist groups attempt to pressure institutions to block certain instances of far-right speech—and, failing that, attempt to physically block those instances themselves. Sometimes this dispute takes the form of a debate over tactics: does it help or hurt the left/the far right when leftists take such actions? However, whenever people insist on speculating a priori about what are really empirical questions, that is usually an indication that there is some deeper moral disagreement present with the empirical question being a mere proxy battle that distracts from what is really motivating the dispute. This isn’t to suggest that a priori debates about the efficacy of tactics are useless or that there aren’t people who appeal to actual empirical research when speculating about these questions. However, it has been my experience that, when people agree about the moral permissibility of a given tactic, debates over the efficacy of that tactic tend to disappear. It is with this in mind that I want to briefly discuss some of the moral arguments regarding no-platforming and try to show that much of the debate around this issue is confused. By clearing up this confusion, I hope to move the debate one step closer to some sort of resolution.
To begin, consider the position of those who oppose “no platform” tactics. Their view is typically that there is some value to the open expression of ideas and, thus, that the use of violence to suppress such expression is objectionable. The problem with this view is that, if taken at face value, we find that speech is violently suppressed all the time—and, specifically, in ways that almost no one, including free speech proponents, seems to find objectionable.
Here is an example. I have a lot of strong views about politics which I would like to communicate to others. I sometimes write these up on this blog, but the audience is extremely limited (though appreciated!), and so my ideas do not reach as many people as I would like. In other words, my platform is fairly limited. Because I would like to rectify this situation, I have developed a strong preference to attend the Super Bowl and read some of my best essays over the PA system during the halftime show. Similarly, I have decided that I would like to go to the CNN television studio and read my essays on air so that more people can hear my ideas. But, of course, I won’t act upon these preferences. Why? Because if I tried to do either of these things, I would be violently removed by police and imprisoned for trespassing.
If one takes seriously the view that a right to free speech requires is a right against the violent suppression of one’s expression of ideas, then my free speech rights have been clearly violated by both the NFL and CNN. If I try to share my views in certain spaces, they will draw upon the violence of the state to prevent me from doing so. And yet, this great injustice has drawn surprisingly no condemnation whatsoever from the many purported defenders of free speech rights!
Of course, the reason that this suppression of speech hasn’t drawn outrage is fairly obvious: most debates over free speech presuppose a background of property rights where those rights take priority over the right to free expression. The owners of football stadiums are taken to have a right to control those spaces and what goes on within them, even if that includes the use of coercive threats and forcible removal to silence unwanted speech. Similarly, CNN is granted the right to unilaterally determine which speech to permit within its studios and which to ban. Hence the lack of outcry over the fact that my plan to give a talk at these venues has been thwarted by the threat of violence.
This observation reveals that, when some instance of no-platforming takes place, much of the ensuing debate over “free speech” is a red herring. Those who condemn no-platforming by appealing to the importance of free expression or the unacceptability of violence to preclude speech fail to take seriously the fact that, in a world of private property rights, speech is constantly suppressed via violence and coercive threats. Thus, unless critics of no-platforming are willing to grant that the NFL acted wrongly in violently suppressing my attempt to deliver my manifesto, they cannot object to no-platforming on the grounds that it is a violent suppression of speech.
Rather, critics of no-platforming must seemingly argue that the practice is wrong because those who do the violent suppressing of speech are not entitled to do so. When the NFL suppresses my speech, it has the right to deploy such violence because it has the prior right to control certain physical spaces—i.e., certain platforms. By contrast, rowdy college students and protesters don’t have any sort of property rights claim over various college buildings, meaning that their employment of violence and coercive threats to suppress speech is not legitimate.
However, if objections to no-platforming must tacitly appeal to property rights, then they lose much of their persuasive force. First, they give up the moral high ground of appealing to free speech, which is revealed to be entirely subsidiary to property rights claims. They can no longer appeal to the importance of a free exchange of ideas, the horror of Orwellian dystopias, slippery slope arguments, or anything of that nature in asserting the wrongness of no-platforming. Further, insofar as optics are concerned, it is rather a bad look to vocally trumpet the importance of free speech just prior to conceding that, actually, the right to control patches of the Earth entirely trumps such free expression.
Second, objections grounded in private property rights are then threatened by the numerous critiques of private property posited by anarchists and socialists. While I will not rehearse these arguments here, I will note that the claim that private individuals had the right to coercively seize unowned patches of the Earth—and, thus, that the inheritors of those patches are similarly entitled to violently control them—is a controversial premise upon which to rest one’s critique of no-platforming. Indeed, many of the most outspoken proponents of no-platforming are, in fact, anarchists and socialists who reject exactly these premises. And, once one rejects the view that some university administrator has the right to unilaterally determine who gets to use certain physical spaces to express their views (and who gets violently removed), then community control of those spaces as expressed via no-platforming begins to seem quite reasonable.
This, of course, is not a full defense of the moral permissibility of no-platforming. Rather, I have merely tried to point out that framing the issue in terms of “free speech” is misguided and that, instead, how one feels about the practice will hang on one’s views about property rights. While this still leaves plenty of space for left-right disagreement on the issue, it suggests that the socialist/anarchist left—and, indeed, anyone who has doubts that property rights are absolute or inviolable—should be at least open to the tactic.
I’ve been re-reading Marx’s Capital (and commentary), and have become increasingly worried about the labor theory of value (LTV). I’m not an expert on the subject, but wanted to write out some of the doubts I have about its adequacy while they are still fresh in my mind. Specifically, it seems to me that there are many counterexamples to LTV; I assume that many others have noted this, but I’ve actually had a fair amount of difficulty finding a comprehensive comment on this subject. So, for both my own reference and the potential interest of others, I thought I would write out what I’ve come up with.
Before laying out my counterexamples, though, it will be helpful to clarify what, exactly, LTV amounts to—and here I am indebted to G. A. Cohen for some extremely helpful conceptual work from which I am heavily borrowing.
First, LTV asserts that there is a relation between the price at which a commodity sells, the value of that commodity, and the labor time needed to produce that commodity. Specifically, it maintains that price is determined by value which, in turn, is determined by labor time—with the result being that price, according to LTV, is directly proportional to labor time.
Two points of clarification. First, note that, of these concepts, both price and labor time are empirically measurable notions, with value then being a novel metaphysical notion introduced by Marx to play an intermediary role between price and labor time. But what is this thing Marx calls “value?” He obviously has to provide us with some definition if we are to understand this new term of art he has introduced. And, as Cohen notes, there are two possibilities here. On the one hand, one might take Marx to be defining “value” as proportional to labor time, in which case an assertion that value is determined by labor time would be analytic. Then, the interesting empirical hypothesis of LTV would be that value (as stated in terms of labor time) is proportional to price. Alternatively, if Marx defines “value” as proportional to price, then the claim that value determines price would be true by definition with the testable empirical claim being that labor time is proportional to value. Either way, however, LTV must be understood as an empirical claim that labor time is proportional to price—a hypothesis that the counterexamples presented below seek to call into question.
Second, in popular discourse, “labor time” is often treated equivocally, whereby it is sometimes characterized in terms of how much labor actually went into producing a given commodity. However, this concept of labor time is not what Marx employs when he defines LTV—and, for good reason, as it would open up LTV to even more serious counterexamples than those presented here. Instead, Marx is concerned with the amount of socially-necessary labor time for re-producing the commodity in question in the current technological environment.
Note that, if LTV asserted that price was proportional to the amount of labor that went into producing a commodity, then it would follow that two identical commodities would sell at different prices if they were produced at different times when the technological/productive capacity of society were different. So, for example, if IKEA introduced a new machine that partially automated the production of the MALM bed, all MALM beds made prior to partial automation would sell at higher prices than identical MALM beds manufactured post-automation. Obviously, this is not how furniture pricing works. So Marx’s theory benefits from the fact that the formal statement of LTV characterizes labor time in terms of the re-production of commodities.
So how much better does the formal statement of LTV fare? Not well, I argue, given a number of apparent counterexamples that cut against its core claim. Most obviously, there is the problem of monopolies. The only difference between a monopoly and a competitive market is the distribution of the means of production; the number of necessary labor hours for producing a commodity remains constant. However, the price of the commodity will be much higher under conditions of monopoly—contrary to what the LTV asserts.
Another problem is land price. It is hard to even make sense, really, of what quantity of labor hours are necessary for "reproducing" a given plot of land, say a vacant lot in Manhattan. So, at the very least, LTV has a hard time accounting for such prices, even if they do not run directly contrary to its predictions.
Third, there's the problem of appreciating and depreciating commodities. To produce a bottle of wine today requires roughly the same amount of labor time as producing one 50 or even 10 years ago. Yet the price of a particular bottle of wine might go up dramatically over that time period. Further, the price of wine bottled in 1954, say might be extremely different from one bottled in 1955. Is this really because reproducing 1955-era wine would require many more labor hours than reproducing 1954-era wine? LTV would have to say "yes" when the answer seems clearly to be "no."
Alternatively, consider the price of things like old cars (not vintage) e.g., a Chevy Malibu from the early 90s. Given that production lines are no longer designed to manufacture this particular type of car, it would likely take many more labor hours to make such a vehicle today than in the year it originally was made. Yet the price today (of even an unused car) would be much lower than in the early 90s—the opposite of what LTV would predict.
Or you might consider the problem of art. There are many pieces of art that could be reproduced fairly easily but that sell for outrageously high prices. Again, it is hard for LTV to make sense of this.
There are also small problems like: why do snacks and alcohol cost almost twice as much when sold on airplanes than when sold on the ground? Nothing changed in their production process, so it is unclear why they should cost so much more per LTV.
Another: say that you somehow managed to automate the entire production of diamonds. According to LTV, their price should fall to zero. But it seems obvious that this is not what would happen. Or, to put this point more generally, increasing automation of a process should always reduce the price, while labor-intensive industries should produce the most expensive goods. But this is empirically not the case (these shoes, for example, will cost much more than a shoe made in a sweatshop).
An additional problem is the price of labor, which, for Marx, is a commodity like any other. According to Marx, the cost of re-producing labor is the amount of money necessary for keeping a worker alive and functioning; thus, wages—i.e., the price of the labor commodity—should be proportional to this cost. More specifically, I take Marx to think that wages are equal to this cost. However, if this is the case, then there would seemingly be no advantage to the capitalist to own slaves rather than pay for wage labor; indeed, the cost of both should be equivalent. However, given the historical resistance by landowners, e.g., to moving from slavery to wage labor, one suspects that it is, in fact, cheaper to own slaves than pay wages. But this would be contrary to LTV.
Beyond the puzzle of slave vs. wage labor there is another problem of why different workers are paid different wages. Seemingly the LTV should hold that wages should be uniform, as they should be equal to the amount of money necessary to sustain the average laborer. Thus, it does not seem to adequately explain the actual wage distribution.
These are just a few apparent counterexamples to LTV. There are likely objections to some, but it is hard to see how one might be able to adequately respond to all in a way that doesn’t tie the theory up in knots. Further, I think there are deeper reasons for doubting LTV that have to do with how its various details are derived (e.g., why does only socially-necessary labor time count toward price? Why is “socially necessary” defined as the amount of labor time needed given an average degree of productivity/intensity as opposed to the minimum? Etc.) However, I here set these aside and point out only that LTV—however it was derived—seems to often give the incorrect result when predicting the prices of various commodities.
Finally, let me close by noting that this is not an attack on socialism; in fact, it is just the opposite. I take socialism to be primarily a normative theory resting on various claims about egalitarianism, freedom, and justice. I, thus, think the more it can be disentangled from various questionable empirical claims, the more compelling it becomes as a political philosophy.
(Content warning: descriptions of abuse, racist violence, rape, and domestic violence/child abuse)
Libertarianism and anarchism make for interesting contrasting ideologies in that the two begin with very similar assumptions but end up in very different places, with anarchism falling on the far left of the political spectrum and libertarianism landing somewhere on the right.
One possible explanation for this divergence is that the proponents of one ideology simply fall victim to mistaken reasoning somewhere along the way—their error taking them off course such that they arrive at conclusions that do not follow from their premises.
More plausible, however, is that the divergence between libertarianism and anarchism runs deep, extending all the way down to the foundational assumptions upon which the respective ideologies rest. As evidence for this claim, consider Robert Nozick’s answer to the question of what underlying principle grounds the libertarian prohibition on aggression and violence directed toward others:
I conjecture that the answer is connected with that elusive and difficult notion: the meaning of life. A person’s shaping his life in accordance with some overall plan is his way of giving meaning to his life; only a being with the capacity to so shape his life can have or strive for meaningful life.
It is for this reason that Nozick considers paternalistic aggression—as well as seemingly all other forms of aggression—impermissible: such aggression intolerably interferes with the victims’ ability to develop and implement their respective life plans.
Lest one think that this grounding principle is particular to Nozick, note that many libertarians object to redistribution on the grounds that transfers interfere with the ability of individuals to develop/implement life plans. It is, thus, common to hear libertarians insisting that only the stability and predictability of strong property rights are sufficient for the crafting of such plans—thereby grounding their opposition to coercion and theft (i.e., aggression) via an appeal to the sacrosanctity of such life plans.
To the extent that Nozick’s principle is generally shared by libertarians, its weaknesses help to reveal the underlying tendencies that motivate the libertarian ethos. Specifically, note just how inadequate Nozick’s proposal appears to be with respect to grounding a principle of non-aggression. According to Nozick, what is wrong with violence/coercion/constraint is that such aggression disrupts someone else’s carefully laid plans regarding how they want their life to go—i.e., it is the existential version of kicking over someone’s sand castle. In other words, if the victim of aggression wishes to raise a reasonable complaint, her objection must be that she has been thwarted by the aggression, that it has frustrated her efforts. Indeed, her complaint must echo that of the artist whose work has been damaged by another’s willful actions.
However, when one considers the most egregious forms of aggression—the slave who is whipped to the edge of consciousness only to then have turpentine rubbed into her wounds as punishment for verbally disrespecting a white person; the bully who holds the crying victim down while another urinates on his face; the college student who is drugged by her friend and then gang raped by the friend’s fraternity brothers as part of an initiation ritual; the alcoholic father who beats his wife and children for any perceived slight—any explanation of their wrongness in terms of the victims’ having been “thwarted” or “frustrated” does not seem remotely adequate.
Indeed, objecting to these extreme acts of oppression by noting that “this isn’t how they intended their lives to go,” would seemingly fail to take seriously the gravity of the acts being perpetrated. It is not that the victims have been diverted from their life’s purpose or prevented from living a life they find meaningful; rather, the violence done to them seems intolerable in its own right—far more intolerable, in fact, than any loss of meaning.
If this is right, then an apparent puzzle arises: why does this libertarian grounding for the wrongness of aggression seem to adequately explain only minor forms of aggression as opposed to more serious forms of aggression?
The answer proposed here is that libertarianism (generally speaking) is simply not motivated by an opposition to these severe forms of aggression and domination. Rather, libertarianism exists to condemn the disruption of lives, particularly those lives that are built around the accumulation and control of objects. It is this concern that is reflected in Nozick’s grounding principle as well as the persistent libertarian defense of market-based distributive arrangements against the threat of proposed redistribution. Similarly, this opposition to petty disruption is what seems to most animate the libertarian rank and file, their online forums and publications consumed with critiques of taxes and traffic stops, regulations and restrictions of speech. By contrast, displays of concern regarding more severe forms of aggression like those discussed above are conspicuously absent or rare.
The suggestion, then, is that Nozick’s explanation of the wrongness of aggression fails to adequately ground serious forms of aggression because it was not crafted with those forms of aggression in mind. Rather, he and his ideological compatriots’ primary concern is the aggression of tax collecting bureaucrats, with the violence of rapists and slave owners considered only as an afterthought.
Anarchism, by contrast, takes these serious forms of aggression and domination as its starting point. One notes, for example, that, while public libertarian discussions rarely even pay lip service to severe aggression (with libertarian opposition to waging war being the only apparent exception), anarchist forums and discussion spaces are preoccupied with its various instantiations. Thus, for the anarchist, it is these paradigmatic examples of aggression against which any proposed principle grounding the wrongness of aggression is to be judged. Alternatively, these acts are taken as the intuitive data points supporting the contention that domination—i.e., the use of violence to impose unjust outcomes—is inherently objectionable, where that principle is taken as a brute normative fact requiring no further grounding principle.
This proposed divergence at the foundations of the two ideologies would do much to explain their sharply differing conclusions when it comes to issues like capitalism. Libertarians, drawing upon their aversion to disruption, insist that non-aggression entails upholding property rights. Anarchists, on the other hand, note the domination that goes along with the enforcement of property rights—via both the coercion/violence that maintain inegalitarian distributive arrangements as well as the domination that characterizes status quo labor relations—and reject capitalism as intolerably oppressive. Thus, a supposed commitment to non-aggression leads libertarians and anarchists to endorse opposite conclusions, as the two groups have rival interpretations of “aggression” emerging from very different grounding principles.
I leave it to the reader to judge which account of non-aggression is the more consistent and adequate of the two.
The third day I'm in the school I acted a little smark-alecky. [The teacher] said to me: 'I don't think you're ready for class yet. I think you want to play. So why don't you go out in the yard today?' She said this calmly, without any hostility. I thought, what kind of school is this where they punish you by letting you play? I played in the yard all day. And the next day too. The day after that I told [the teacher] that I didn't want to go into the yard again. She said, 'Do you feel ready to sit down and work with the rest of the class?' I said yes. 'All right, come in.' Can you imagine the difference between this type of discipline and that in the public schools of that day, a military type of discipline, a barracks discipline?
Maurice Hollod, as quoted in The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States by Paul Avrich, p.111
The recent biker gang shootout with police, which left nine people dead and over 170 bikers in prison, has been an object lesson in the grip that white supremacist narratives still have on how the media and the public think about crime. While gang violence in urban areas is routinely racialized such that blackness is cast as inherent to the activity—e.g., the associated bemoaning of “black-on-black” violence or the supposed breakdown of the black family; the use of “thugs” as a dogwhistle to emphasize a criminal’s blackness; etc.—this serious act of violence by white gang members has, unsurprisingly, not been framed in racial terms. Indeed, the selective employment of synecdoche when it comes to lawless behavior on the part of black people is one of the hallmarks of ingrained (and, with respect to the media, institutionalized) white supremacy.
To push back against this tendency, antiracists have been quick to draw attention to the differential treatment of black vs. white lawlessness, contrasting the blasé reaction to the biker shootout with the pearl clutching horror elicited by the recent looting in Baltimore. This rhetorical move has proven to be quite powerful, and, at least anecdotally, appears to have gained a fair amount of mainstream traction. As a result, the far right has felt compelled to address the argument—with fascinating results.
Of particular note is a rebuttal published in the white supremacist journal Radix, by someone writing under the name “Paul Treitschke.” After laying out relevant background details, Treitschke first attempts to defuse the attempted analogy between white and black criminality as follows:
The most interesting part is that it appears that all of the individuals involved were White, which, of course, prompted leftists to sneer at just how violent White people are and how they are just a bunch of thugs… That is an easily dismissed line of reasoning because very few White communities support outlaw MCs, unlike Black communities with rioters and Muslim communities (excepting most American ones) with jihadis.
Now, obviously, this attempt at finding a disanalogy fails, as it rests on the patently false claim that there is support for rioting in the black community. Further, one notes that sympathy for black rioters would, in fact, be far more understandable than tolerance for biker gangs given that the riots were an expression of anger at racist policing while gang violence lacks any such justification.
If his objection weren’t already weak enough, however, Treitschke goes on to directly undermine it only paragraphs later by suggesting that white communities do, in fact, have sympathy for outlaw biker gangs:
But there is something interesting in the whole idea of White people as thugs... White people sometimes want to relate with [sic] the bad guy, the outlaw of society, in a way he can’t with Black gangbangers and Hispanic drug lords. Bikers show White people as individuals you fear, not as potential victims of non-white crime. They’re modern-day barbarians—living outside the confines of the System and the law it imposes.
There’s a natural appeal there for the average law-abiding White guy. It goes against the cultural stereotype that Whites are just a bunch of goofy losers and it is a completely different lifestyle from that of the bourgeois norm. That’s why it’s not entirely a bad thing that the media is going wild with a story about White thugs—it’s a welcome respite from the normal reporting on domicile Whites.
One can plainly see how this passage undermines Treitschke’s earlier argument: any effort to sharply demarcate the bikers’ lawlessness from the ideals of the white community fails if it turns out said community both relates to the bikers and finds a “natural appeal” in their lifestyle. However, the damage done by this argument runs much deeper. For, in only a few paragraphs, it manages to reveal some of the deep contradictions inherent to right wing thought—contradictions that threaten to destabilize one of its major theoretical projects.
As I have suggested elsewhere, one of the defining features of reactionary thought is its embrace and elaboration of ontological hierarchy. Specifically, it seeks to carve the mass of humanity up into distinctive kinds such that those kinds also stand in relations of superiority/inferiority to one another. It thus divides people into the “best” and the “multitude; the aesthetes and the philistines; the creators of value and the parasites; the Übermenschen and the slaves; or the civilized and the barbarians.
It should be fairly obvious how white supremacist ideology embodies this reactionary thinking. By positing race, the reactionary mind can neatly cordon people off into distinct tribes and then affix differential value to their supposedly distinctive modes of existence. The only remaining theoretical work is to develop the criteria by which one group will be judged superior to another.
Among contemporary white supremacists, the civilized/barbaric axis is the preferred metric by which to establish racial superiority. Hence why both white supremacist organs and rank and file are so fixated on the idea of black crime: if it could be established that black people are more likely to break laws and violate social norms, that would pit them against civilization and all the associated cultural achievements. Further, it would leave white people standing at ramparts, defending the edifice to which represents the culmination of all of human history.
But how quickly this narrative becomes inverted! For, as the passage reveals, as soon as white people begin to act lawlessly, then the civilized/barbaric axis is thrown out in favor of a more Nietzchean set of criteria pitting Übermenschen against slave morality. Per this way of thinking, acting within the confines of the law is cast as pathetic and meek, the behavior of conformist sheep and weaklings who call themselves good because they have no claws. Indeed, what was previously thought of as civilized man now becomes the “goofy loser” who is deemed ontologically inferior to the noble barbarian living wild and free beyond the shackles of civilized domestication.
At this point one can interject to note that the white supremacists are trying to have their cake and eat it too. One can’t simultaneously maintain that whites are superior because they uphold civilization and that they are superior because they cast off the shackles of civilization. Yet this move is exactly what Treitschke is attempting!
The obvious hypocrisy and inconsistency of this position is contemptible but also clarifying. By casually discarding argumentative consistency in his efforts to establish a predetermined conclusion, Treitschke reveals the true nature of the white supremacist project: a mean-spirited—and very dangerous—effort at self-aggrandizing rationalization.
More significant, though, is the way in which Treitschke’s sudden embrace of the outlaw exposes the groundlessness of the entire reactionary ontological project. First, by casually swapping out one basis of valuation for another, Treitschke helpfully makes a theoretical move that can be generalized so as to invert any given ontological hierarchy. When confronted with a claim of ontological superiority, all one needs to do is identify the evaluative standard being used, reject it, and then substitute in some alternative standard that inverts the posited hierarchy.
Consider the following example from an essay I wrote for The New Inquiry (on the subject of Ryan Gosling):
[In the film Crazy, Stupid, Love,] Gosling plays Jacob, a smooth-talking, sharply dressed tomcat who tries to help cuckolded Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) by teaching him the art of the pickup, training him to dress fashionably, drink like an alpha male, and make woman-pleasing small talk. “Be better than the Gap!” Jacob commands, urging Cal to ditch the suburban wear and New Balances that, from the opening scene, have emblemized Cal’s distance from respectable masculinity.
Jacob’s status as an alpha is never in question. He has his pick of the women in any given room, and Cal physically submits to his dominance on multiple occasions: Jacob repeatedly slaps him for transgressing various rules of fashion, eliciting little more than a whimper from Cal — and continued compliance. Yet the foundation of Jacob’s high status is not his ability to physically subdue others but his ability to satisfy their desires. While Irene gives her body to the Driver so he’ll protect her, Cal submits to Jacob because Jacob can pander successfully to women and manipulate them for sex. Jacob is socially useful only insofar as he dresses in ways that women find pleasing, speaks in a way that entices them, and has a body that looks like it’s been Photoshopped for maximum sex appeal.
But if these underpinnings of Jacob’s preeminence were explicit, they would cast doubt upon its legitimacy. Social dominance generally depends on the perception that the alpha is an ontologically superior being capable of shaping the social world at whim. Yet Jacob is not an Übermensch but its antithesis, no more than a servile flatterer willing to conform to others’ whims for a buck or, in this case, a fuck. Jacob is an impostor masquerading as a king.
Who is Jacob, really? His wardrobe, haircut, muscled body, charm, and conversational style are nothing but calculated attempts to accommodate others. Jacob has given up everything about himself to get female affection. Conditional love has left him little more than a shell, his personality and aesthetic totally flattened by the societally imposed need to please. He is someone who simply cannot afford to be himself, for the cost of rejection — going without love or companionship — is far too great.
Here, the original hierarchy posited by the film was something akin to that embraced by pickup-artists/red pill types who inhabit the anti-feminist far right. It casts Gosling as the “alpha male,” a dominant ontological type defined in part in terms of its ontological superiority to “beta males” like Steve Carell who lack the aesthetic sense and sexual/seductive prowess associated with the alphas. While this hierarchy seems unassailable in the film, the passage attempts to show how easily it can be inverted. Indeed, all one needs to do is substitute out the given evaluative criteria for ones that contrast independence with conformity, individuality with desperate pandering and, voila: a once-noble character is transformed into a pathetic schlub.
This theoretical move is a useful tool for subverting any particular hierarchy. But from it one can draw a more general lesson that seems to undermine the notion of ontological hierarchy altogether. For, after only making a few such evaluative substitutions, what rapidly becomes clear is that there is no “correct,” stable basis for comparing different groups or individuals. Indeed, how could one possibly resolve whether those who embody “civilization” or those who embody the Übermensch—and thereby stand opposed to civilization—are the true elites? Two people might debate this question, but it seems that which argument proves triumphant will merely be a function of how creative the respective parties to the disagreement happen to be feeling on the given day.
Further, there seems to be no obvious limit the variety of different evaluative criteria that might be posited. If one has sufficient poetic dexterity, one can romanticize any mode of being while simultaneously denigrating any purported rival. With the help of just a few carefully chosen words, biker gangs warp from degenerate criminals into Nietzschean rebels and back again, their ontological status flickering as one evaluative standard is pulled out from under them and replaced with a new one.
But if this is true, then the entire reactionary ontological project is reduced to a mere exercise in creative writing. Given the ease with which any given hierarchy can be deconstructed and inverted, the inevitable conclusion that must be drawn is that there is simply no fact of the matter when it comes to ontological hierarchy. Rather than serving as a tool for establishing some kind of truth, reactionary ontological political philosophy amounts to nothing more than fanciful theoretical castles built on sand. Although it makes strong and clear claims about the nature of persons, these can be deftly inverted via the method described above, thereby miring the project in a series of irresolvable antinomies.
If all this is right, there would seem to be little left of the reactionary ontological project beyond the malicious desire for domination and hierarchy that motivates it—and, of course, the needless suffering and oppression it leaves in its wake.
In response to left/liberal attacks on Indiana’s RFRA, many on the religious right have defended the measure by appealing to the liberal value of religious freedom. According to these defenders, the conservative Christian position on homosexuality is increasingly a minority viewpoint whose adherents are now facing persecution on the basis of their deeply held religious beliefs. By penalizing those who refuse to participate in gay marriages, RFRA proponents argue that non-discrimination statues effectively coerce members of a religious minority into acting contrary to their religious convictions.
Given all this, defenders of the RFRA conclude that non-discrimination statutes are intolerably oppressive and illiberal. They, thus, argue that the RFRA is necessary to preserve the religious freedom of beleaguered Christians who merely want to not be forced to actively participate in the defilement of their most sacred institution.
This argument is compelling in that it seemingly turns the liberal defense of gay rights on its head. Liberals tend to decry the RFRA on the grounds that it will codify the oppression of a persecuted minority group, namely the gay community. But, RFRA proponents argue that it is, in fact, conservative Christians who are the truly persecuted minority group—and, thus, that it is this group that liberals really ought to be concerned with protecting.
I think there are a number of problems with this argument, most notably that it downplays the extent to which the RFRA opens the door to oppressive treatment of gays while dramatically overstating the persecution faced by conservative Christians—arguably one of the more powerful political blocs in the country. However, in this post I will set such concerns to the side to focus on three more general objections to this conservative appeal to liberal principles. These objections are, admittedly, only sketches of arguments, with each merely gesturing toward more detailed and precise formulations that might be made. However, I think they at least paint a general picture of what an adequate liberal response to the conservative defense of the RFRA might look like.
First, one might think that the liberal value of religious freedom is not a foundational or brute value of liberalism but, rather, is derived from an underlying set of more basic liberal premises. For example, one might think that liberalism is most fundamentally concerned with the granting of equal moral status to all persons (with any more detailed normative prescriptions falling out of this premise). Given this foundational value, it is unclear why liberalism must condone any actions that fail to treat people as moral equals. Thus, to the extent that Christians oppose gay marriage because they do not think that the right to marry is one to which all people are entitled—or, framed somewhat differently, that all persons are equally entitled to marry a given person (or, alternatively, the person of their choice)—any actions grounded in that belief run contrary to the fundamental liberal value of recognizing individuals as equal moral persons. It is thereby unclear why a liberal must condone or protect those actions.
Per this argument, religious freedom becomes a derivative or instrumental value that liberals ought to embrace only insofar as doing so promotes the treatment of people as equal moral persons. If religious convictions prove to be illiberal and fail to align with this fundamental liberal value, the consistent liberal ought not defend those convictions.
Second, liberals might think that there is something illiberal about protecting religious moral convictions in that it unfairly privileges a certain kind of moral conviction. Conservative Christians subscribe to a set of ethical principles that are derived from a particular set of metaphysical views (God exists; God has provided humans with a set of moral prescriptions) and associated normative views (if a moral prescription is provided by God, one ought to adhere to it). However, many people are equally committed to ethical views not derived from such metaphysical premises. The liberal might ask, why should the law protect the former set of ethical convictions but not the latter? Such unequal treatment would seem to be a case of the state legislating morality, which is anathema to liberals. Yet this is exactly what special protections for religious conviction amount to, as they grant legal legitimacy to a certain set of moral convictions while denying such legal protection to others.
Third, one might note that conservative Christians have a long history of illiberalism, particularly with respect to the gay community. Not only did conservative Christians seek to deny gay people the right to marry, they also tried to exclude gays from the military, prevent them from teaching in public schools, and suppress speech that might be construed as promoting homosexuality. (Not to mention their success in imposing ever-expanding restrictions on abortion, historical suppression of the teaching evolution in public schools, their imposition of abstinence-only education, etc.)
Given this history, one might wonder why liberal protections ought to be granted to a group of people who have actively rejected liberalism and its protections in the past. It is a plausible liberal view that if one attempts to undermine some right possessed by another, one forfeits a certain set of related rights (hence why self-defense is justified—the aggressor forfeits her right to not be harmed as soon as she attempts to violate someone else’s right to not be harmed). Given this premise, one might reasonably think that, given their historical attacks on the liberal political rights of gay people, conservative Christians may well have forfeited their right to refuse to provide goods and services to members of the latter on the basis of religious conviction. Indeed, perhaps one might think of it as a form of reparations or compensation; if one person violates another’s property rights, liberal doctrine maintains that the former might be compelled to undo this diminishment of the latter’s freedom. Why not think that gay people are entitled to some similar form of compensation from those who have actively worked to limit the rights of gay people in the past?
Of course, one cannot treat conservative Christians as a monolith. There are certainly members of this group who have consistently opposed illiberal treatment of gay people and, thus, have not necessarily forfeited any associated liberal rights. However, given the impossibility of discriminating between liberal and illiberal conservative Christians when it comes to crafting policy, one must weigh whether one ought to wrongly violate the rights of the liberals or wrongly protect the rights of illiberal oppressors at the expense of their historical victims. This is a dilemma, but it seems that one might reasonably decide that the latter is the less acceptable outcome—and, thus, think that the RFRA is unjustifiable.
All of these arguments, of course, assume that one takes for granted a certain set of liberal assumptions. I actually think that this is a mistake when it comes to thinking about politics, as I take the liberal framework to be ultimately unstable. However, this is not the place to discuss my objections to liberalism. Rather, given that both liberals and conservatives have decided to debate the RFRA on liberalism’s terms, my only goal here is to suggest a few possible arguments that liberals might make to fend off conservative efforts to co-opt liberal principles.
While reading Jennifer Nedelsky’s Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law, I came across the following powerful passage on how the imposition of homelessness harms not only its immediate victims, but also all those who coexist with them in a given society:
Homelessness is another form of suffering and often violence that urban North Americans have become accustomed to. What does it do to us to walk around a homeless person on the street once a week or once a day? How does it affect us to routinely see such vivid examples of a lack of collective care, of the failure of multiple social institutions? At some level we must confront the question of how it can happen in a rich society that people are cold and begging on city streets. When we see a lineup of homeless people seeking shelter in a church on a cold winter night it must generate at least an unconscious sense that if something goes badly wrong for someone there may be only the most limited kind of help available: shelter for one night, if there is a space. We live with a knowledge of vulnerability to disaster and of callousness, of indifference to suffering that characterizes the community we live in. Or perhaps there is a knowledge that, for some, there is no community, only an indifferent collectivity. How can this not be frightening at some level (even if we tell ourselves it could never happen to us or anyone we care about)?
I remember the first time I encountered a homeless person. It was 1978, and I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I was visiting Philadelphia for a job interview in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. I was crossing a busy street with the chair of the department on our way to an appointment. In the middle of the street, right in front of me, a manhole cover opened, and a man climbed out of it. I stopped in shock. The chair hurried me on, saying casually that the man lived down there. He seemed to think that no further explanation or comment was necessary. I can still remember the shock of seeing the man emerge and of what seemed to be the chair's casual disregard. Now I think about how I am not shocked when I routinely encounter homeless people in Toronto. Now I, too, take homelessness near my home for granted. Even if it distresses me, it no longer shocks me. And maybe when I am in a hurry, as the chair was, I, too, scarcely notice it.
But I am not under any illusion that it does not harm me to participate in such harm. Even if I am not always conscious of it, I know that there is a direct relationship between my legally protected right to exclude even a cold and hungry person from my home and that person being on the street. If she and I did not both assume my right to exclude, she would not be out in the cold. As is often the case with property rights, there is no need for me to call the police, to make manifest the way my property is backed by the power of the state, for me to exercise the power my property provides. My right to exclude creates an asymmetrical relation of power and advantage between me and the homeless person, and it creates a relation of responsibility—in this case an absence of (legal) responsibility on my part for her immediate well-being. I can hurry by secure in the knowledge that I have violated no rights of hers and thus remain under an illusion that my entitlements are in no way responsible for her predicament.
This illusion can provide the protection that most illusions do. It can permit me to avoid thinking about the problem. But like any painful matter that we push away from our consciousness, it affects us anyway. We live with a sense of shame, vulnerability, and insecurity, with a sense of being enmeshed in some kind of failed set of social institutions and relations. People may tell themselves stories about whose failure this is, even attribute it to the individual failures of the thousands of homeless, to try to insulate themselves from both responsibility and vulnerability. But I do not believe that such stories can actually keep at bay either the shame or the insecurity of participating in this collective failure of responsibility. These feelings may, however, take the form of contempt or fear of the homeless or anger at those who want to make them confront the problem or just an inchoate anxiety and insecurity.
Here’s a bit more:
In chapter 3, I discuss the example of Sweden's policy of generous support for a quadriplegic law student, enabling her to study without calling on basic care from her family. Seeing the publicly funded care this student received reassures every member of the society that if they or their family members should have an accident that rendered them incapacitated, or if they should bear a child with such physical limitations, collective care would be forthcoming. Again, the benefit is not just potential, but actual, in the sense of the security of living in a compassionate and responsible society.
In these stories the nature of the potential and actual harm varies. In the Swedish story and the stories of homelessness, the security and insecurity arise in part because people can imagine the possibility of finding themselves in such circumstances (even if consciously they do not). Thus, the actual harm—of fear, insecurity, knowledge of collective failure of care and responsibility—is shaped by the potential harm. Something similar is true for women who have not been sexually assaulted. But the actual harm exceeds this. Witnessing violence is harmful. We know this about children. Sometimes we recognize it for adults in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But, collectively, we seem to imagine that people can inure themselves to the violence that is routine in their society. People get used to living around loud noise so that they don’t hear it anymore, but that doesn’t mean their ears are not damaged. Being surrounded by violence and the threat of violence damages people.
The intrinsic harm of harm to others is important because in many cases our societies permit harm to “others,” whom members of the dominant group have no potential of becoming. That is part of the function of harm organized by categories such as gender, race, or ethnicity. In these cases, the actual harm to the dominant group can come in multiple forms: the harm of being witness to violence, the harm of knowing one's community permits this violence (even if one will not be vulnerable to that form of violence), the harm of being the “innocent bystander” who does nothing to stop the violence, and the harm of being a perpetrator of the violence or one who reaps its benefits.
I don’t have much to add here. I just thought this was a powerful account of how the material deprivation imposed via the assertion of property rights both terrorizes and traumatizes all of us living under capitalism.
The assumption that more/better education is the cure for inequality is one shared by both major political parties, with any disagreement turning on what, exactly, is the best way to enhance education (more public school funding vs. charter schools).
That assumption that improved education for the disadvantaged might reduce inequality is a plausible one given that the more educated members of the workforce make more money on average. Indeed, it is quite tempting to conclude from this observation that, if only everyone had a college degree, everyone would make the same high earnings as college graduates do today. Thus, both poverty and income inequality would be eliminated. Call this economic theory—where earnings correlate directly with educational attainment—the “human capital” model of the labor market.
However, there is a competing model of the labor market where a fixed number of high-paying jobs channel wealth to a necessarily small share of this population. Per this model, the set number of high-paying jobs are then allocated to whichever workers have the most extensive educational credentials (with individual hiring decisions then being relative judgments comparing each worker to her peers—as opposed to an objective comparison of her skills to those necessary to effectively do the job).
If the zero-sum model accurately describes the economy, then any effort to reduce inequality or poverty via education policy will necessarily fail. Say, for example, that a given policy succeeds in providing a college education to a person who would not have gotten one otherwise and that person goes on to attain a high-paying job as a result. This would appear to be a success for the policy—until one considers the broader picture. Given the model’s assumption that the number of high-paying jobs is fixed, the educated person’s success can only come at the expense of someone else, namely, the person who would have otherwise held the high-paying job. This displaced worker must now settle for the low-paying job that the beneficiary of the education policy would have otherwise held. Thus, even though the policy increased the average educational attainment of the population, it succeeded only in shuffling around which person held which job without reducing income inequality or improving the average economic well-being of the population.
So, which model describes our present-day economy? Given the difficulty of controlling for confounding variables, it is difficult to derive any certain conclusions from the available data. However, recent Pew data on college education and earnings differentials provides at least some reason for thinking that our economy is zero-sum.
Consider the relation between education and income. In a human capital economy, a more-educated population should earn more income, on average. Given the model’s assumption that income correlates with ability—with education theoretically increasing such ability—a more-educated population should have more ability per capita and, thus, should make more income per capita (i.e., have a higher average income).
By contrast, in a zero-sum economy there are a fixed number of high paying jobs awarded to those most skilled relative to their peers. Thus, the average education of the population would have no effect on average income; the only role education would play would be in determining how the various fixed incomes are allocated. Given this, one would expect average earnings to remain flat, even as the population becomes steadily more educated. And it is this prediction that seems to accord with the relevant data, as steadily increasing educational attainment from one generation to the next has been met with practically no growth in the median earnings of the 25- to 32-year-olds of those respective generations:
What about the income differential over time between those with a college degree and those without one? On a non-zero-sum model, this “college premium” should remain constant regardless of what portion of the population has a college degree. This prediction follows directly from the model’s assumption that income correlates with skill level. As long as a person has achieved a higher educational status, they should receive higher earnings on average, irrespective of the number of other people who have attained that same skill set. The same goes for people with less education: as long as their skill set is held constant, they should make the same amount of money regardless of the educational attainment of others.
The zero-sum model yields a very different prediction. Assume that all of the top-paying jobs go to college graduates such that every college graduate occupies a top-paying job. This would leave the next tier of jobs open to non-graduates. However, per the model’s assumption that the highest-paying jobs will go to whoever is relatively most-skilled, as more people are awarded college degrees, these second-tier jobs that formerly went to non-graduates would now go to degree-holders. The result would be a decline in the median earnings of both college graduates and non-graduates, as the pool of jobs held by college graduates would now include lower paying jobs while the pool of non-graduate-held jobs would lose its highest-paying jobs. (However, depending upon the variance of incomes, the drop in median earnings for one group might be trivial while the drop for the other might be significant, or the respective median earnings might decline at a similar rate.)
So what does the data say? When looking at the incomes of 25- to 32-year olds over time broken up by education level, the changes in income would appear to largely—though not exactly—line up with the predictions of the zero-sum model:
As the proportion of the population with a bachelor’s degree has risen, the median incomes of non-degree-holders has plummeted, seemingly aligning with the zero-sum model’s prediction that additional workers with bachelor’s degrees will simply capture the best jobs from non-degree holders. This would neatly explain the decline in the latter’s median earnings. (That said, the slight increase in the median earnings of degree-holders—which runs contrary to the predictions of the zero-sum model—would have to be explained away).
Finally, compare how the two models handle recent data on poverty and educational attainment. The human capital model predicts that those living in poverty should have similar educational credentials over time, as absolute educational attainment correlates directly with income. By contrast, the zero-sum model predicts that the poorest workers might have widely varying educational credentials across time, as it is relative educational attainment that determines income. Those living below the poverty line could very well all have bachelor’s degrees; if everyone else had a professional degree or master’s, those with only a college education would be displaced from all of the high-paying jobs.
Here, again, the zero-sum model seems to better fit the data, as the educational attainment of people living in poverty has steadily risen over the past forty years:
What this suggests is that upskilling/educational attainment is best understood as a kind of arms race, with each worker trying to outcompete her peers and gain relative advantage over them—or, at the very least, avoid being relatively disadvantaged such that she is condemned to live in poverty. But, given the zero-sum nature of the enterprise, any one worker’s gain is another worker’s loss, with the end result being that everyone spends an increasingly significant amount of time and effort trying to gain skills without anyone ending up better off on average.
To conclude, it appears that the human capital model dismally fails to account for any of the observed data. By contrast, the zero-sum model does an apparently quite adequate job of explaining the changes in income associated with changes in average educational attainment. While it is possible that the former model might be made to conform to the data, doing so would require a significant amount of explanatory work. Absent such explanation, there would seem to be reason to believe that the economy is zero-sum and education policy will be ineffective at reducing inequality or poverty.
Addendum: Crypto-White-Nationalism, Neoreaction, and J. Arthur Bloom
In a recent essay, I defended a tweet wherein I implied that J. Arthur Bloom, an editor for both the Daily Caller and Front Porch Republic, is a closet white nationalist—or, at the very least, a fellow traveler of some variety.
Now, Bloom has added a meandering update to his initial critical blogpost, effectively doubling down on his suggestion that my suspicions are nothing more than wild conspiracy. Most of the update is ad hominem posturing,[1] with Bloom digging through my last 5 months of tweets and blog posts to try to find any random tweet that he thinks might discredit me so that he can avoid dealing with the substance of my arguments. Needless to say, I think he comes up empty, but I will spare readers the tedious exegesis that would be required to directly respond to Bloom’s analysis-free attempt at derailing.
The most substance one gets out of Bloom’s is a denial that he has any sympathy for at least certain segments of the far right:
I don’t think I’ve ever quoted Evola, am disgusted by fascism, I wrote a critical piece about some of the people he mentions, and run a highly pro-Israel opinion section at TheDC.
The denial seems categorical but Bloom is perhaps choosing his words a bit carefully—albeit not too carefully given that he quoted Evola only five months ago. Setting that mistake to the side, note, first, that being supportive of an ethno-nationalist state like Israel doesn’t do much to bolster Bloom’s case that he’s not a white nationalist of some variety. Indeed, white nationalists will happily endorse black nationalism if that entails black people exiting the United States. So it isn’t obvious that supporting a specialized Jewish homeland beyond America’s borders is particularly exculpatory. Indeed, it is hard not to hear in this response echoes of the old joke: which is worse, the anti-Semite or the philo-Semite? The anti-Semite, because at least he isn’t lying.
With respect to Bloom’s insistence that he loathes fascism and certain white nationalists, I take his words at face value. However, again, that doesn’t get Bloom very far given his own insistence that one might both be skeptical of fascism and certain white nationalist movements while still supporting white nationalism. In fact, it seems clear from the context of the previously-linked tweet that Bloom is suggesting that he is the one who is sympathetic to white nationalism, despite his distaste for both Richard Spencer and Aleksandr Dugin.
So not only does Bloom’s denial fall flat, it seems to neatly align with other seemingly clear—albeit subtle—endorsements of white nationalism on his part. However, it is worth moving beyond these particularities to expand upon one argument from my previous essay.
One thing that I mention in said essay is that Michael Goldfarb, editor of the neoconservative Free Beacon, independently came to the exact same conclusion about Bloom that I did. Given Goldfarb and my serious differences in ideology, it is hard to dismiss our shared conclusions as either conspiracy or some sort of pathology of leftism. Indeed, it is hard to see how one could provide a remotely plausible explanation of our concurrence that doesn’t implicate Bloom in some way.
The seemingly best candidate for an exculpatory explanation is that both Goldfarb and I are hostile in our own respective ways to Bloom’s ideology and coincidentally settled on the “white nationalism” accusation as a means by which to marginalize him. (One might wonder why, of all the representatives of paleoconservatism, we decided to pick Bloom as our target. The particular choice of Bloom as our scapegoat seems inexplicable, but for the sake of argument let us grant to Bloom that this is a plausible story.)
The problem with even this most-charitable-of-interpretations is that even people explicitly sympathetic to white nationalism appear to have also arrived at the conclusion that Bloom is a closet white Nationalist. Thus, fringe-right blogger Nick B. Steves writes:
I’m on Daily Caller Opinion Editor and mutual Twitter-follower J. Arthur Bloom’s reading list, along with a few more of my regular reads. I see Bloom as a fellow traveler with significant alt-right and paleo-right sympathies. His coolness to Richard Spencer and White Nationalism in this piece earned him some not entirely undeserved suspicion in reactionary circles, many of whom operate on a strict principle: “Pas d’ennemis a droit, pas d’amis a gauche.” Still, in my many interactions with Bloom, he seems to both understand and sympathize with various reactionary principles and critiques. He is also responsible for publishing Laliberte’s and Morganston’s DC pieces. He’s in a useful position for us and our cause; and I believe he is more than a useful idiot.
Steves then links to a tweet by white nationalist Mike Anissimov wherein the latter suggests that, due to Bloom’s open sympathy for “neoreaction”—an ideology congruent, if not strictly identical, with white nationalism—Bloom would soon be purged from the media.
So, in addition to a neoconservative and left-wing antifascist suggesting that Bloom is a white nationalist, you also have someone who supports white nationalism who has come to believe the exact same thing. (One notes that Steves is as unconvinced as I am that Bloom’s Daily Caller piece is an indication of hostility toward white nationalism).
Another interesting thing about Steves is that he happily corroborates the opening section of my previous essay where I suggest that white nationalists go undercover in order to subvert mainstream opinion. This assumption is tacit in the above blockquote, but is made explicit in another essay titled “Neoreaction’s Darkest Power,” which candidly characterizes “neoreaction” as a rebranding of white nationalist ideas. First, Steves notes that any perceived endorsement of white nationalism—at least in its traditional trappings—will immediately discredit the endorser in all but far-right contexts:
Long, long ago things like kings and czars, slave-holders, white-hooded optimates (and later white-hooded white trash), wife-beaters, brown-shirts, skinheads… When [the Progressive] sees stuff that looks remotely like this, his memetic immune system activates. He will not listen to anybody who remotely looks white nationalist.
In my previous essay, I noted that the obvious solution to this problem was for white nationalists to go undercover. And, indeed, Steves suggests that they have done just that, repackaging their white nationalism—or, at least its core ideas—in the form of “neoreaction:”
Neoreaction defeats the natural defense mechanisms of the Progressive by not looking remotely white nationalist. Or Nazi. Or even remotely working class. Neoreaction may even have gay or Jewish friends. He might have gone to Ivy, or been so privileged he didn’t need to. These ideas might be a bit odd, vaguely libertarian, but older and far more exotic, and oh-so interesting, and such high verbal IQ, and (therefore) quite clearly harmless. This is how our Neoreactionary Alchemist strikes, he puts these carefully crafted, putatively harmless memes into the Progressive while his defenses are down. Moldbug was the first and greatest master of this.
So Steves—a prominent figure and outspoken proponent of neoreaction—admits that the movement is white nationalism’s core ideas dressed up to avoid detection by those hostile to the ideology. And, given Bloom’s enthusiasm for neoreaction, Steves—like both Goldfarb and me—has come to believe that Bloom is sympathetic to core white nationalist ideas but is trying to obscure this fact so as to maintain his position of influence within the DC media elite.
But of course, absent explicit confirmation from Bloom, Steves might be just projecting, falling victim to the same conspiratorial delusions that have overtaken both Goldfarb and me. Fortunately for us, there’s this:
So there you have it. Steves suggests in an essay that neoreaction is a way of masking the identity of white nationalist ideas so as to introduce them into the mainstream. And, Bloom—who has been using his connections to actively promote neoreaction—explicitly endorses the essay by “liking” it. As far as documentable crypto-white-nationalism goes, it doesn’t seem to get much more clear-cut than this.
[1] …with Bloom at one point mocking me for what he takes to be pretentious language. Glass houses, J. Arthur!
On Crypto-fascism and Brown Scares: A Reply to J. Arthur Bloom
I. Unmasking Crypto-Fascism
Happily, we live in a time when white supremacism, fascism,and other fringe-right ideas are excluded from mainstream political debate. Toopenly express sympathy for Nazism or the Confederacy is to be relegated to the margins of the public sphere—to be not only barred from any respectable public forum, but also denied standing in day-to-day political discussions, having forfeited all credibility simply by virtue of one’s stated views.
While some on the fringe right happily accept exile (with the highest-profile members getting a TakiMag column as a consolation prize), others are less willing to give up their mainstream influence. Indeed, to do so would be to give up any real chance of advancing the basic tenets of their ideology.
So what’s a neo-fascist missionary to do? The answer, of course, is to go undercover. Speak in dog whistles and lean heavily on implication; repackage old ideas to make them both attractive and not-so-easily-recognized; and hide behind obfuscation and esotericism. Thus, citations of David Duke are replaced by allusions to Evola, classic varieties of white supremacism are rebranded under the heading “tradition,” and scientific racism is passed off as “race realism”[1] or “human biological diversity.”
The role of the anti-fascist/anti-racist, then, is to identify closeted extremists such that their influence might be curbed. By situating their ideas within the broader constellation of fascist views that have rightly been judged intolerable, one can bring into stark relief the particular flaws of the views being advanced. At the same time, one can make clear that many of the views are being put forward in bad faith so as to cynically advance a fringe-right political agenda.
This is, unfortunately, a thankless task: absent an explicit admission of Nazi/Confederate/white supremacist sympathy—which, of course, will never be given—there will always be plausible deniability for those clever enough to hide their true views. The best the antifascist/antiracist can do is provide enough circumstantial evidence to justify the inference that a person’s stated views are really just proxies for a set of actually-held views too extreme for contemporary, fascist-hostile public discourse. Thus, in building the case against crypto-fascists, one must make do with guilt-by-association, subtle displays of apparent sympathy for the fringe right, and endorsements of views congruent with—though not necessarily constitutive of—white supremacy/neo-Nazism/etc.[2]
II. Bloom, Dampier, and Nazi-Soviet Comparisons
All this is a prelude to why I recently seized upon a tweet by J. Arthur Bloom, an editor at both the Daily Caller and Front Porch Republic (formerly The American Conservative) and a rising figure in the right wing intellectual scene. I had been keeping tabs on Bloom for a while due to his steady and favorable retweeting of a number of far right individuals—though, of course, only their most innocuous comments.
However, in the tweet in question, Bloom goes one step further. He approvingly links to an essay by a writer who goes by “Henry Dampier,” a fringe-right figure whose declares himself to be “for hierarchy, against equality” in his Twitter bio. A bit of cursory research on Dampier find the author critiquing white nationalism from the right; endorsing the view that “Ideally we would today only allow male landowners to vote... as was intended [by the Founding Fathers];” and associating with a number of recognized white nationalists. For example, a bit of slightly-less-cursory research reveals that Dampier’s 83 friends on Facebook include American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor; “the neo-Nazi movement's favorite academic,” Kevin MacDonald; white nationalist, Holocaust denier, and artist Charles Krafft;[3] The Bell Curve author, Charles Murray; Colin Liddell, who runs the white nationalist online mag Alternative Right—and Bloom.
Given these views and associations, one might reasonably wonder what Bloom is doing regularly reading and sharing Dampier’s work. But setting those details to the side, the particular essay shared by Bloom in the seized-upon tweet should raise red flags. Cheekily titled “Better Dead Than Red”—perhaps in homage to all those killed by Nazis in Soviet territories—one passage of the essay stands out, in particular:
Imagining that the Nazis won World War II is a popular jumping-off point for a lot of speculative fiction. The reader is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win.
Unfortunately, a more brutal, cruel, and anti-human government won World War II — the Soviet Union.
Now, there is a lot going on in this passage, so it is worth taking some time to dissect it. First, there is the assertion that the Nazis were less “brutal, cruel, and anti-human” than the Soviet Union. This is already a tendentious claim that only people of a certain ideology are interested in advancing. By practically any metric, whether body count or evilness of motivation, the Nazis come out worse than the admittedly genocidal Soviets. The most up-to-date and accurate estimates maintain that approximately 6 million people were deliberately killed under Stalinism—a horrifically high figure that, nonetheless, falls far short of the 11 million non-combatants killed by Hitler. Things look even worse for the Nazis once one notes that this comparison fails to factor in the fact that Stalin had a significantly longer time period to carry out his murderous plans. And the comparison becomes more lopsided, still, once one factors in the significant extent to which Germany’s militaristic aggression responsible for WWII and the mass killing that resulted.
So much for body count. But what about motive? As Timothy Snyder notes, although Hitler is generally the dictator who gets associated with genocide, Stalin, too, often had ethnic motivations lurking behind his extermination of certain populations (e.g., when he starved to death millions of Ukrainians during the 1930-1933 famine). However, Snyder nonetheless concludes that:
Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.
Which motive one finds most reprehensible will have much to do with one’s political views. I will admit there is something about the racially-motivated systematic extermination of the Holocaust that strikes me as more horrific. The logic of racist mass killing seems built into Nazi ideology in such a way as to make the Holocaust seem more planned and deliberate—and, thus, more evil—than the Soviets’ butchery. But this is perhaps just the political temperament that separates me from Dampier and Bloom.
At the very least—and this is the key point—even if one cannot bring oneself to label either party the “real villain” given the villainy of both, it seems clear that there is no basis—whether one looks to body count or motive—for declaring the Nazis to be better than the Soviets. No basis, that is, except for hidden ideological sympathy for the Nazis.
However, Dampier does not rest content with the patently false—and, thus, likely ideologically-motivated—assertion that the Soviets were more brutal than the Nazis. No, he contends that it would have been better had the Nazis won the war. In stating that the reader of speculative fiction “is supposed to feel glad that the Nazis did not in fact, win,” Dampier is implying that this view is naïvely mistaken; but if it is mistaken to think “It’s good that the Nazi’s didn’t win,” then it logically follows that it would have been good had the Nazis won.
Let that sink in for a moment. Indeed, imagine what would have followed from a Nazi victory in WWII. For one thing, the Holocaust would have carried on, uninterrupted, until it reached its logical conclusion, namely the total extermination of Europe’s Jews, Gypsies, leftists, people with disabilities, and any other group that ran afoul of the Nazis’ racial vision. And this simply assumes that the Nazis had been somehow stopped in their tracks. However, given the seemingly zero-sum nature of the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, any Nazi victory would seemingly entail either full occupation of the USSR, or, at the very least, significant incursions into the latter’s territory. This would have increased the number murdered by the Nazis dramatically. As Snyder writes:
Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated.
The suggestion then, that it would have been better had the Nazis won, goes far beyond the Nazi apologia of the strict assertion that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Indeed, it is so implausible an assertion that it is hard to see how anyone who did not have tacit Nazi sympathies would put it into print.
Of course, it is not particularly surprising that someone whose online associates include a large number of infamous anti-Semites and white nationalists would hold such a view. What is significant, however, is that an editor for a number of prominent conservative publications would approvingly share this sentiment on Twitter. This is what I sought to emphasize when I pointed out Bloom’s tweet linking to the essay.
III. Neocons and “Brown Scares”
Now, however, Bloom has taken me to task for reading too much into things. In a blog post that obsessively combs through my Twitter archive and publically-available personal details—one can almost hear Bloom quietly snickering “You want to keep tabs on my activity? Well, two can play at that game!”—Bloom accuses me of being a “consummate brown scarer” who is not to be taken seriously.
First, he defends himself by arguing that, while the quoted passage of Dampier’s article is perhaps “a heterodox version of the story,” it is not particularly controversial, as “‘Yalta could have gone better’ is a fairly well-accepted point of view.”
One notices right away the non sequitur: the particular outcome of the negotiations following the defeat of Nazi Germany has nothing to do with claims comparing the Nazi and Soviet brutality or the assertion that things would have been had Germany won the war. It is unclear whether Bloom really believes that Dampier’s quoted paragraph asserts merely that “the post-World War II peace conceded far too much to the Soviet Union,” or if this is just the best spin he could come up with to obscure the actual content of the essay he shared. Either way, it seems clear that his characterization is a convenient misinterpretation of plainly-stated text.
Having effectively sidestepped the charges leveled against him, Bloom goes on the offensive, attacking me for “making common cause with neoconservatives” by cc’ing Michael Goldfarb, a “registered foreign agent and chairman of the Free Beacon, a neoconservative website that publishes unverified, fake propaganda from Senate offices intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine.” This aggressive strategy, however, proves ill-advised: like a person struggling to escape quicksand, Bloom manages to only dig himself in deeper.
First, Bloom conveniently declines to elaborate on why I might have reached out to Goldfarb—so let me take this opportunity to fill in the gaps. Last summer, Goldfarb wrote a blistering takedown of Bloom, “whose pompous byline is outshined only by his paranoia about Jews—on both the left and right—and their plot to marginalize, using charges of anti-Semitism, young prodigies like him,” to use Goldfarb’s words.
Seizing upon a Fourth of July tweet where Bloom cheekily documented his visit to Jefferson Davis’ grave—a joke that really only makes sense if you assume Bloom has Confederate sympathies—Goldfarb angrily declares Bloom’s views to be “neo-Confederate, League-of-the-South bullshit.” Goldfarb also lays into Bloom for “good old-fashioned Jew-baiting,” accusing Bloom of using “neoconservative” as a dog whistle for “Jews,” focusing in particular on a passage by Bloom describing how neocons will “use their money machine” to defeat the populist aspirations of “the hayseeds in flyover country [who fill] their bodybags” and “the rowdy rednecks [who] start getting the impression they’re citizens instead of subjects.”
As Bloom notes, Goldfarb and I have pretty serious political disagreements—indeed, we probably disagree on most substantive political questions. And yet, we both seem to have independently arrived at the exact same conclusion about the exact same guy. Curious.
Notably, Bloom tries to explain away my accusations by painting me as a hysterical witch-hunter, hopelessly stabbing at brown shadows. Per his account, it is not his objective views that have given rise to my beliefs, but, rather, I have projected my oversensitive subjectivity onto him. However, this inference becomes much less plausible when one takes into consideration the fact that very differently-situated people have come to hold identical beliefs. You can only dismiss so many people as feverishly projecting before it starts to become apparent that maybe the problem lies not with them but with you.
IV. The Devil’s in the Details
That said, it is worth engaging with the substance of Bloom’s charges that I am a “consummate brown scarer.” Bloom seeks to sweep my concerns under the rug by undermining my credibility, so it is worth pushing back a bit against his particular arguments. Specifically, in order to support this contention, Bloom appears to have spent a not-insubstantial amount of time digging through my old tweets and favorites to find those most ripe for cherry-picking. So what was he able come up with?
Bloom’s Exhibit A is my assertions that “Ukraine and Russia are both full of fascists, and Cathy Young and David Frum are ‘apologists’ for the former.” Let’s consider these two points separately. First, it is curious that Bloom sneers at the suggestion that the Ukrainian revolution had significant fascist elements, as that fact is a fairly well-documented phenomenon. Indeed, in this video, one finds a Right Sector militia member declaring that what he wants for the Ukraine is “national socialism... Not like under Hitler, but in our own way, a little bit like that.” So it is unclear why Bloom thinks that documentation of this fact is supposed to undermine my credibility.
Next, consider the bit about David Frum and Cathy Young. With respect to whether or not they are, in fact, “apologists,” I will simply point to this tweet by Frum and let the reader decide whether my characterization is accurate in light of the evidence presented in the previous paragraph. More significant, though, is the fact that, only two paragraphs earlier, Bloom viciously denounced Goldfarb’s publication for publishing “fake propaganda… intended to gin up the case for war in Ukraine.” Yet, this is the exact criticism that I level at Frum and Young—and that Bloom casually dismisses as frivolous. It seems, then, that Bloom’s sharp criticisms of neoconservatives’ pushing for war in the Ukraine evaporate as soon the neocons start running interference for neo-fascist groups.
Bloom next accuses me of asserting that the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation “are ‘ideologically proximate’ to Nazis” based upon my claim that ideological proximity should be considered when deciding whether or not to attribute significance to a person following a neo-Nazi Twitter account. This accusation is deceptive for a number of reasons.
First, the point was not specific to either Heritage or Cato, but was a more general comment that ideological proximity has to be factored into inferences about who someone associates with on Twitter. This seems obvious: if you are a leftist following a fringe-right person, you are likely doing so to keep tabs on them; if you are a far right person following a slightly-further-right person, you are likely doing so because you are sympathetic to their views.
Even if one takes my tweet to be a comment on the specific fact that Cato and Heritage followed the Nazi party on Twitter, given the ideological distance between the Cato libertarians—at least the ones with whom I’m familiar—and the Nazis, I don’t consider the association telling. With respect to the Heritage Foundation, I will concede that I believe their views are more aligned with the Nazi party than those of anti-fascist groups, as per the tweet. I consider this to be obviously true. Indeed, the fact that Heritage at one point followed the Nazis on Twitter seems perhaps a bit more significant given that one of its staffers was forced to resign after it was revealed that his doctoral dissertation argued that Hispanics are genetically inferior to white Americans with respect to IQ.
(Subsequently it came out that the staffer had also contributed to Alternative Right—which, readers will recall, is run by one of Dampier’s many white supremacist Facebook friends—a white nationalist website founded by Richard Spencer, the chairman of the white supremacist National Policy Institute… and former editor of the American Conservative, the publication where Bloom got his start. The staffer also identified Charles Murray—who, readers will recall, is also friends with Dampier on Facebook—as a “childhood hero.” Another interesting connection: it appears that Bloom is a familiar reader of Alternative Right.)
So here, again, we have another totally benign tweet that Bloom tries to characterize as hysterical “brown baiting.” That said, given Bloom’s regular friendly interactions with various fringe-right figures on Twitter, it is understandable why he would want to discourage people from reading into such things.
Bloom’s final “damning” piece of evidence to support his claim that I see Nazi phantasms everywhere is a Twitter exchange I had with Reason writer Elizabeth Brown wherein I supposedly “brown-bait” her. Some brief context: Malcolm Harris wrote an article arguing that the state shouldn’t intervene when private individuals use force to deny neo-fascists the opportunity to speak. Brown then wrote a blog post attacking Harris, arguing that the state shouldn’t regulate speech. This rebuttal was obviously non-responsive, I pointed this out to Brown on Twitter, and she eventually issued a correction. Is there “brown-baiting” going on here? If so, I can’t see it. Indeed, one begins to wonder if it isn’t Bloom who is the hypersensitive one when it comes to charges of fascist sympathy.
If Bloom’s touchiness weren’t telling enough, there’s also the sense of desperation that pervades his post. Why go through the effort of scrounging through my digital history/writing out an entire blog post dedicated to character assassination if I were totally off base? Vindictiveness, perhaps? But that hardly seems worth the hassle. At one point in the essay, Bloom writes that “it’s only natural for the intellectual class to act like a cornered animal.” However, by the close of the essay, the metaphor seems more suggestive of Bloom, himself, backed into a corner, desperately lashing out to try to fend off what he knows to be the now-inevitable conclusion.
Footnotes
[1] If you follow the link, you’ll find an explicit admission by a white supremacist that novel terms like “race realism” are deliberately introduced so as to garner mainstream support:
Granted, any label “we” take on will be attacked, ignored, and called racist – however, the term “race realist” seems to have been developed in an attempt to gain mainstream traction, which has not happened. It has a propagandistic sound to it that is quickly detected by egalitarians, who are annoyed by what they perceive as a poor attempt at repackaging old and vile ideas.
[2] I say a bit more about this methodology and possible accusations of “McCarthyism” and “brown scaring” in this post – see, in particular, my responses to questions two and three.
I should also note that I self-consciously use the labels “white supremacist,” “neo-fascist,” “white nationalist,” “neo-Confederate,” “neo-Nazi,” “fascist,” interchangeably. This imprecision admittedly blurs real distinctions in ideology, but also helps to highlight the common threads of racial hierarchy and anti-Semitism that unify these otherwise-distinct groups. Further, given the difficulties inherent in identifying a crypto-“fascist,” it is practically impossible to identify the specific subset of the far right with which the person in question covertly identifies. By using these terms interchangeably, I intend to convey that, while the evidence underdetermines which particular term is the accurate description, at least one the terms used likely characterizes the person’s views.
[3] While not necessarily an endorsement, one might be interested to note that Bloom has featured Krafft’s art on his Tumblr, right-wing art.
The Hidden Substance behind "anti-PC" Procedural Arguments
In this post, I want to try to briefly clarify some features of the “PC” debate reignited by Jonathan Chait’s recent essay on the subject. Specifically, I want to address Freddie deBoer’s widely-shared response—not because I think it’s a brilliant piece of political thinking, but because it serves as a nice illustration of the hidden confusion that sustains this particular debate.
After paying lip service to the general left-consensus that Chait is Bad, deBoer’s essay basically rehashes Chait’s essay in different words, following the same basic argumentative structure of drawing upon intuitive examples of unpalatable ideology policing, and, from them, concluding that the left’s policing of speech/ideas has grown oppressive. Thus, just as Chait leads with the story of a conservative student harassed after writing a column mocking left-wing identity politics, deBoer opens by writing:
I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 19 year old white woman — smart, well-meaning, passionate — literally run crying from aclassroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the word “disabled.” Not repeatedly. Not with malice. Not because of privilege. She used the word once and was excoriated for it. She never came back.
Like Chait, deBoer then goes on to provide a number of similar cases and concludes from them that idea/speech policing is out of control, having grown both oppressive in its own right and harmful to the broader project of building a strong left capable of seizing political power.
To see why the left has reacted so negatively to these essays, it is helpful to begin by considering the coalition-building piece of the argument. Specifically, note that how certain tendencies affect the left’s political efficacy is an empirical question, yet neither essay presents any real empirical evidence that might help us answer it. Rather, to support their claims, deBoer and Chait seemingly rely entirely upon anecdotes—but, of course, the plural of anecdote is not data. Thus, for every person deBoer has seen fleeing an organizing meeting in tears, never to return, there might well be some young woman of color who is excited and energized by how seriously her concerns are taken and, as a result, decides to become a deeply involved and committed organizer. And, for any bit of theorizing one might do about how certain tactics turn off moderates, another might easily counter with theories about how the only people who are turned off weren’t really that sympathetic to the cause to begin with; that those who are overly-policed will stay just as committed while relocating to a different group with a different approach to identity politics; that moderates aren’t as important to a movement as truly committed, radicalized people; etc.
I’m not necessarily endorsing any of these theories; my point is simply that, given the total absence of any actual empirical evidence to resolve what is a strictly empirical question, one can pretty much come up with any theoretical bullshit one wants to justify a preferred position with respect to tactics.
But, if evidence isn’t what leads people like Chait and deBoer to adopt a negative view of ideology policing, what is it that leads them to hold the positions that they do? The apparent answer is that there is something about the tactic itself that they find objectionable, with their empirical claims being an ad hoc rationalization of the visceral distaste they feel.
Even if this suggestion is correct, one can’t be too critical of deBoer and Chait. While it is certainly a bad habit to try to rationalize one’s normative intuitions through empirical claims, almost everyone is guilty of this tendency, so it would be unfair to crucify Chait and deBoer for our collective sins.
However, one cannot rest at the conclusion that deBoer and Chait simply find the tactics viscerally objectionable. To see why, consider the following (significant) modification to deBoer’s opening anecdote:
I have seen, with my own two eyes, a 19 year old white woman — smart, inquisitive, passionate — literally run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using racial slurs and defending Nazi ideology. She was excoriated for it. She never came back.
In this case, one could hardly be sympathetic to the student. Yes, she was intimidated into leaving the community, but this seems an appropriate response given her views and her speech. I would expect both Chait and deBoer to agree that there are at least certain views that are so dangerous or offensive or odious that to air them in certain settings is to forfeit the expectation of certain procedural protections, e.g., freedom from excoriation.
But as soon as one is willing to make even this very modest concession, then what is at issue in the “PC” debates shifts from the tactic of policing to the odiousness of the views being policed. In practically every setting, there is some view that is so objectionable that the policing tactics described in Chait and deBoer’s respective pieces become not only acceptable but also morally required. The only question that remains, then, is which views are objectionable to the point where they have crossed this particular threshold.
Once one recognizes that questions about tactics come down to questions about the objectionableness of various ideas/speech, it becomes clear that arguments presented as merely criticizing tactics are, in fact, tacitly smuggling in all sorts of premises about the extent to which various behaviors are objectionable. Thus, when people decry the pervasiveness of ideology policing tactics, they inadvertently reveal that they don’t consider the ideas/speech/behavior being policed to really be all that bad—or, at least, as bad as the pro-policing contingent believes them to be.
The substantive views smuggled in by deBoer and Chait’s tactical critiques help to explain why the left has gotten so up-in-arms in response to the two essays. For, even if those on the left are not consciously aware of what is going on, they intuitively recognize that these criticisms are Trojan horses. Though the arguments masquerade as friendly criticism—i.e., coming from those who agree about ends but disagree about means—they are, in reality, hostile attacks on substantive normative positions regarding what ideas/speech are truly objectionable.
If what is at issue is really ideology rather than tactics, one becomes able to also explain why so many people have been critical of Chait and deBoer while, at the same time, admitting that ideology policing is a problem on the left. This simultaneous attack and concession would appear to be a contradiction—that is, until one recognizes that what is really being expressed are merely differing opinions about what ideas/speech are truly objectionable. To admit that there is a problem is simply to assert that there are certain views that are currently policed that aren’t so bad as to actually warrant policing. Everyone except those on the most extreme fringe will agree upon this. The issue, then, is where to draw the line, and it is disagreement over these details that divides the critics from Chait and deBoer.
That these supposedly tactical criticisms are actually ideological attacks in disguise shouldn’t come as a surprise. Indeed, the right deploys these exact same arguments all the time to advance their attacks on the normative claims of the identity politics left! However, agreement on other political subjects tends to lull people into incorrectly assuming that there is general consensus along all political axes.
The point of all this is not to advance a particular view about what ideas/speech are objectionable to the point where a given set of policing tactics is appropriate. Rather, I want to simply make clear that the debate turns on this substantive ideological issue—and that this fact can help to explain otherwise-puzzling features of this intra-left feud.
More importantly, my hope is to provide new direction to a seemingly intractable disagreement. Tedious essays like those written by Chait and deBoer will inevitably get us nowhere because they merely grouse about policing while leaving the outstanding substantive disagreements untouched. If progress is to be made in this debate, one cannot simply argue that policing is bad because almost everyone agrees that it is unacceptable given certain views and conditions, but appropriate given others. Merely pointing out case studies that rub one the wrong way will fail to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree and is more an exercise in rallying the troops than reasoning. What is needed, instead, are arguments about what particular ideas/speech are objectionable; why they are objectionable; how objectionable those respective ideas/speech are; and what policing tactics are appropriate given a particular degree of objectionableness.
Finally, let me conclude by suggesting that those on the left have put far more theoretical effort into answering these questions than have liberals and libertarians. Indeed, much writing about identity politics concerns itself with these very issues! It is perhaps for this reason that I find essays like Chait’s/deBoer’s so tiresome, even when I find myself sympathetic to some of the examples they present.
Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, Just Their Own Think Piece
The following excerpts presented without comment:
And then you have to look at the generation that raised them, that coddled them in praise—gold medals for everyone, four stars for just showing up—and tried to shield them from the dark side of life, and in turn created a generation that appears to be super confident and positive about things but when the least bit of darkness enters into their realm they become paralyzed and unable to process it.
“Generation Wuss”
Where do such feelings come from? Blame it on doting parents, teachers and coaches. Millennials are truly "trophy kids," the pride and joy of their parents. The millennials were lavishly praised and often received trophies when they excelled, and sometimes when they didn't, to avoid damaging their self-esteem.
“The ‘Trophy Kids’ Go To Work”
They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it.
“The ‘Millenials’ are Coming”
This new generation was brought up to believe that there should be no winners and no losers, no scrubs or MVPs. Everyone, no matter how ineptly they perform, gets a trophy. As these kids have moved into the workforce, managers complain that new graduates expect the workplace to replicate the cosy, well-structured environment of school.
“Why Writers are the Worst Procrastinators”
Gen Y is one of the first generations who grew up in a world where “everyone wins”, and as such, we often feel we are heroes who “deserve” everything in the world. We deserve a car when we turn 16, we deserve the new iPhone the day it comes out, we deserve to be “internet famous”, and we deserve near-perfect people to establish friendships and relationships with us.
“Overcoming ‘Special Snowflake Syndrome’ as a Millenial”
Grade inflation promotes ego inflation, the opposite of healthy self-confidence. "We want to encourage effort, especially among young kids," says Jean M. Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. "But the 'everybody gets a trophy' mentality basically says that you're going to get rewarded just for showing up. That won't build true self-esteem; instead, it builds this empty sense of 'I'm just fantastic, not because I did anything but just because I'm here.'"
“When Everyone Gets a Trophy, No One Wins”
From the triumph of Botox to the rise of social networking and soccer teams that give every kid a trophy, Jean M. Twenge is constantly on the lookout for signs of a narcissism crisis in America… By comparing decades of personality test results, Dr. Twenge has concluded, over and over again, that younger generations are increasingly entitled, self-obsessed and unprepared for the realities of adult life. And the blame, she says, falls squarely on America’s culture of self-esteem, in which parents praise every child as “special,” and feelings of self-worth are considered a prerequisite to success, rather than a result of it.
“See Narcissists Everywhere”
Having studied recent increases in narcissism and entitlement among college students, she warns that when living rooms are filled with participation trophies, it’s part of a larger cultural message: to succeed, you just have to show up. In college, those who’ve grown up receiving endless awards do the requisite work, but don’t see the need to do it well. In the office, they still believe that attendance is all it takes to get a promotion.
Adam Smith, Self-Defeating Ambition, and the Perpetuation of Capitalism
I’ve been reading Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and recently came across this striking passage (IV.i.8):
The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich. He finds the cottage of his father too small for his accommodation, and fancies he should be lodged more at his ease in a palace. He is displeased with being obliged to walk a-foot, or to endure the fatigue of riding on horseback. He sees his superiors carried about in machines, and imagines that in one of these he could travel with less inconveniency. He feels himself naturally indolent, and willing to serve himself with his own hands as little as possible; and judges, that a numerous retinue of servants would save him from a great deal of trouble. He thinks if he had attained all these, he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation. He is enchanted with the distant idea of this felicity. It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness. To obtain the conveniencies which these afford, he submits in the first year, nay in the first month of his application, to more fatigue of body and more uneasiness of mind than he could have suffered through the whole of his life from the want of them. He studies to distinguish himself in some laborious profession. With the most unrelenting industry he labours night and day to acquire talents superior to all his competitors. He endeavours next to bring those talents into public view, and with equal assiduity solicits every opportunity of employment. For this purpose he makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises. Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. It is then, in the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments which he imagines he has met with from the injustice of his enemies, or from the perfidy and ingratitude of his friends, that he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tranquillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover of toys; and like them too, more troublesome to the person who carries them about with him than all the advantages they can afford him are commodious.
There are two things that I think are worth noting here. First, the passage nicely reveals the self-defeating nature of the motivation that underpins much of capitalist activity. Capitalist society tends to glorify the sort of ambition described here, and for good reason: without such motivation, people would be far less inclined to engage in the sort of economic exertions described above—exertions that conveniently produce great economic benefit for the dominant economic class (to whom the bulk of our GDP accrues). However, Smith persuasively demonstrates that ambition cuts off its own legs: it seeks contentment as its final end, but through its very pursuit, it effectively delays and destroys what contentment would have been otherwise attainable. Thus, from a utilitarian perspective, capitalist ambition appears to be a cruel and deceitful trap.
Second, the passage reveals the means by which such a cruel system perpetuates itself, namely through its inegalitarian structure. Note that Smith’s unfortunate protagonist is a “poor man’s son” who has been denied access to economic plenty and, thus, lacks the key experience that would reveal to him the futility of ambition. If the son had the relevant comparison point—i.e., had actually experienced being wealthy—he might recognize the pursuit of riches as folly. Alas, it is only too late that he acquires full access to the relevant facts that might have saved him from much unnecessary suffering.
Meanwhile, other victims of capitalist deprivation watch the son’s rise to riches and it sparks in them the same ambition. And so the cycle continues, with the economically powerful continuing to reap the benefits produced by the labor of the strivers.
***
Smith’s account also helps to explain why the children of privilege (at least in my experience) tend to be far more apathetic with respect to the accumulation of wealth than their less-fortunate peers. In part, this attitude is supported by the familial guarantee of basic economic security—material security that others must struggle to attain. If you know your parents will always be there to pay your health insurance bill, accumulating wealth is no longer a strict necessity. And, of course, many luxuries far beyond the basic means of subsistence will inevitably be handed down as well.
That said, much of the indifference of second-generation economic elites appears to stem from the fact that they are intimately familiar with the fruits of wealth. Having grown up with such wealth, they recognize the limited contentment that it can bring—certainly too little to justify the hardships they would have to endure to accrue a similar fortune. So, instead of striving for riches, they go to art school/major in English/work at a non-profit/etc. Perhaps they fall into a lucrative career because they don’t know what else to do after graduating from an elite liberal arts college. Or maybe their parents have a connection that makes landing such a career a practical guarantee. They certainly won’t turn down easy money. But the sort of striving and ambition described by Smith seems anecdotally absent among those who grew up with luxury.
***
There is a bit of conventional wisdom on the political Left that the victims of capitalism also tend to be the system’s fiercest and most passionate defenders. Now, perhaps, a bit of light can be shed on this puzzle. Those who believe that capitalism still has much to offer will want the system preserved so that they can finally get their payout. From the point of view of the excluded and ambitious, the contentment of riches is just over the horizon and will soon be attained barring any sort of serious disruption or break from the status quo.
By contrast, those disillusioned with capitalist-style acquisition—who have discovered that the benefits promised could not justify the costs incurred—might be far more amenable to alternative economic arrangements. They are in a position to see how the economy functions as a baited trap and, as such, might be inclined to try to save future generations by disassembling capitalism’s internal mechanisms.
Of course, there are many factors that push those who have “made it” to resist reform (e.g., protecting the current holdings that they have suffered for; a “hazing mentality” that attempts to infuse past suffering with meaning by imposing it again on future generations; etc.). However, what is hopefully now clear is why capitalism’s losers might also stand complicit in the preservation of capitalist structures.
One of the recurring features of the political left is its understanding that work is a problem that needs to be solved. Beyond this general tendency, its criticisms of work are both numerous and diverse. First and foremost, work critics object to the hedonic cost of work. Work—at least for a huge portion of the population—is understood as distinctly unpleasant, characterized by “frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia,” as Bertrand Russell so nicely put it. Or perhaps the experience of work is better captured by Bob Black who describes labor as “boring and tiring and humiliating,” standing in distinct contrast to the “generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance” of leisure. Such accounts of workplace suffering are pithy but also unnecessary: they state what is already intimately understood and frequently expressed by those who work for a living. That work ushers in unhappiness is a truth obvious to practically all who labor under late capitalism.
Related is the complaint that work trades off with more valuable activities. Robert Lane, for example, has discussed at length the activities that make people happy—e.g., spending time with their families, leisure, socializing with friends, participating in their communities—and how less-enjoyable labor increasingly consumes the time that might be otherwise allotted to them. Other critics worry that work cuts into not only the primary sources of happiness, but also those activities that they deem necessary for human flourishing in a non-hedonic sense of the word. For example, time at work is zero-sum with the amount of time a person spends learning, developing talents, or participating in the democratic process. According to this view, too much time laboring stunts the worker’s personal growth and inhibits their ability to develop fully as both a citizen and as a person.
Beyond the unpleasantness and time-intensive nature of work, many on the left see the practice also as a manifestation of unfreedom and political oppression. Chris Bertram, Corey Robin, and Alex Gourevitch, for example, chronicle how bosses use the threat of termination to control their employees’ bathroom usage, clothing choices, and speech. Others, in the tradition of Marx, see work itself as a form of unfreedom, a viewpoint reflected in the usage of terms like “wage slavery” to describe contracted labor. Such critics emphasize that state-enforced private property rights place workers in a position where they must either work for holders of property or starve. Thus, much as a mugger forces her victims to choose between their money and their lives, leftists accuse the holders of capital—whose ultimatums are backed by the coercive power of the state—of forcing workers to choose between their labor and their lives.
Finally, those critical of work often suggest that the distribution of the fruits of labor is unfair. Here the claim is that bosses and capitalists do little of the work and reap a disproportionate share of the benefits thanks to their asymmetric economic power. One version of this claim is the classic Marxist account of exploitation wherein capitalists use the means of production as leverage for extracting value from workers. However, one need not subscribe to the specifics of this theory to appreciate the general leftist distaste for economic relationships characterized by inequality imposed by some members of the group. G.A. Cohen, for example, writes of a hypothetical camping trip where one member attempts to impose such inequity:
Harry loves fishing, and Harry is very good at fishing. Consequently, he brings back more fish than the others do. Harry says: “It’s unfair, how we’re running things. I should have only perch, not the mix of perch and catfish that we’ve all been having.” But his fellow campers say: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harry, don’t be such a schmuck. You sweat and strain no more than the rest of us do. So, you’re very good at fishing. We don’t begrudge you that special endowment, which is, quite properly, a source of satisfaction to you, but why should we reward that pre-eminence?
Through this analogy, Cohen is suggesting that there is something objectionable about any social arrangement where people exploit their advantages to gain more social goods than their peers. Given the massive inequality associated with economic production under late capitalism, those who share this distaste for shmuckiness have much to be unhappy about. Low-skilled workers at the bottom of the workplace hierarchy are saddled with the most unpleasant work for the lowest wages, while the Harrys above them leverage their natural advantages into interesting work and hefty compensation.
The problem for critics of labor—and the left in general—is presenting a feasible alternative. Too often the attitude is one of nihilism, that the negative aspects of production so severe that even the mere destruction of the current system would be preferable to the status quo. Yet this “throw a wrench in the gears” approach is untenable. Ultimately, human beings both want and need the material goods produced by work, and any political program designed for their benefit must provide some effective method for addressing these wants and needs.
One proposal that has received a significant amount of attention is the automation of work. The idea is that, by developing ever-more powerful robots, we might one day replace the drudgery of human labor with the effortless production of machines. John Maynard Keynes was a vocal proponent of such a future—one that he, in fact, believed to be inevitable given the steady improvements in productivity afforded by new technologies. In a world where machines and robots supply us with goods and services, human labor would become unnecessary, freeing us to engage in the activities that fulfill us.
Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt that such a future is possible. First, despite massive gains in productivity over the past century, the amount of time people (and Americans in particular) spend working has not declined in proportion—with the amount of hours worked declining only slightly over the past three decades. Explanations for the persistence of work vary. One less-plausible theory is that the labor-savings of automation are forfeited by consumers who have been brainwashed into using their productivity to purchase more goods rather than enjoy more leisure. Another, championed by Robert Frank, posits that people feel compelled to work to fuel their consumption because judgments about what qualifies as a “high-quality” material good are contextual. The basic premise of this argument is that we only arrive at the conclusion that a thing is “good” by comparing it to what else is available. Thus, if you had a first-generation iPod in early 2002, you would likely be thrilled with the device, while today it would seem disappointingly limited. The problem with such contextual judgments is that they culminate in an arms race of consumption—one which, in turn, requires escalating production that outpaces gains in productivity. If one person works a little harder to produce an above-average good, she has raised the bar for what counts as “average,” effectively forcing everyone to work harder to afford an “average” version of that good. Thus, the more that people strive to live an “above-average” material existence, the harder it becomes to maintain that existence.
Some thinkers have proposed that structural features of society preclude improvements in productivity from decreasing the burden of labor. For example, G.A. Cohen argues that capitalist competition necessitates that gains in productivity be translated not into leisure but increased output that can then be reinvested in the means of production. Those who opt to produce less, he argues, will fail to develop improved technology at the same rate as their competitors, and will eventually be run out of business as result.[1] And Jacobin’s Peter Frase has raised the worrying possibility that the increased output from improved productivity will simply flow to the politically and economically powerful.
Finally, the possibility of automation is threatened by the logistical problem of how exactly to mechanize many of the jobs that make up our economy. While certain repetitious factory work can be easily replicated by machines, it is difficult to envision robotic construction, maintenance, or food preparation. Humans are able to account for—and adapt to—subtle demands in a way that is extremely difficult to automate. Though we may one day have technology sophisticated enough to entirely replace the human element of labor, we cannot expect that it will come any time soon.
So if mechanically eliminating work is a distant and tenuous possibility, what else can be done? If work itself is inevitable, then the next best option is to target the harmful features of labor that make work objectionable in the first place. And the best way to do this is through the unconditional provision of mind-altering substances to workers.
Of all the complaints about labor, most rest on the premise that the practice is psychologically unpleasant. For example, the accusation that capitalists force individuals to work loses much of its force if the laborers enjoy the work. Though one might maintain that workers are still unfree—noting, for example, that workers still have no reasonable alternative to working—this state of affairs does not seem so objectionable if the worker likes what she is doing. Indeed, if the worker enjoys what she is doing to the point where she would perform the task even if her options were unconstrained, it is hard to see why requiring her to do that task is problematic. Admittedly, workers would still be subjected to bosses’ tyranny; however, removing the background of negative emotions associated with work would do much to ameliorate the cumulative feeling of oppression many experience in the workplace.
Similarly, if work could be made pleasant, the unfairness inherent to the present economic system would be significantly lessened. Note that capitalist economies tend to be unfair in two respects: some individuals take home a disproportionate share of the goods produced while others bear a disproportionate share of the burden of producing those goods. If work could be made fun and pleasurable, that would do much to rectify at least the second-half of this problem. In addition, though little would be done to remedy the uneven distribution of material goods, the political importance of the distribution of material goods would lessen in proportion to consumption’s diminishing share of life’s joys. To put the point somewhat differently: if one labors only for the sake of the goods produced, then the appropriation of those goods carries great weight. However, if one enjoys the process of labor such that it might be done for its own sake, the importance of its material byproducts becomes secondary.
So if work itself cannot be abolished, then the next best thing to do would be excising the unpleasantness from the work. One way of going about this excision is by modifying the work, perhaps through gamification or some other such measures. However, implementing such changes is impossible in many cases and could end up adding only stress to the already-unpleasant mix of affective states associated with labor. Instead, we should recognize that unpleasantness is not a property of the work itself, but of the interaction between the work and the psychological state of the laborer. The same task, which might be enjoyable on a typical day, becomes unbearable after a bad night’s sleep or the development of a low-grade fever. This fact, while not revelatory, is significant in its implications for those who object to the pains of labor: even if little can be done about the work itself, the lives of workers might still be improved through the selective modification of our mental states.
Indeed, many people already try to control their mental states to make their work more bearable. Trying to get enough sleep, eating before going to the office, and listening to enjoyable music at work—all these behaviors are attempts to put a positive psychological spin on one’s work experience. And, more relevantly, there is the widespread use of caffeine and nicotine throughout the workforce. However, such substances are relatively mild, are paid for by the worker herself, and put only a minor dent in work-related mental discomfort.
Today, we have a broad array of neuropharmacological substances at our disposal that might help to make work bearable. This is not to suggest that workers use street drugs whose primary effects are better-suited for recreation. Obviously, high doses of most recreational substances would interfere with the ability to carry out production and increase the unpleasantness of labor. However, there are countless varieties of neuroactive chemicals ranging from amphetamines to modafinil (and maybe even certain hallucinogens), which, at low, controlled doses, could potentially make currently-tedious jobs seem fun, interesting, and meaningful.
Determining which particular compounds would be best-suited for this task is a question that is better left to medical experts. What is important here is the normative point: work is a problem that can appropriately be solved by pharmacologically modifying the brain chemistry of those who labor. Until this premise is accepted, work will continue to seem both natural and inevitable—with little effort expended to redress its harms as a result.
Importantly, the chemical solution to the problem of work also resolves the objection that plagues any work-critical ideology: who will do the unpleasant jobs that need to be done to keep civilization functioning? Practically any claim that wage labor is involuntary and coercively sustained is met with this reply—that if necessary labor were made truly voluntary, no one would do it. However, if labor could be stripped of its negative hedonic effects, then production would be rendered compatible with efforts to both emancipate and promote the well-being of the producers. Necessary work could continue without unfairly imposing affective burdens on a particular subset of the population. At the same time, a neuropharmacological approach might also serve as a necessary prerequisite for any political reforms designed to make work truly voluntary. If labor were made enjoyable through chemical means, it would be able to attract participants without the threatened denial of basic necessities that powers the gears of contemporary capitalism.
That neuropharmacology might go hand-in-hand with political reform should soothe those who might view this proposal as an imposition on workers rather than a form of emancipation. To such critics, the suggestion that workers—who are already compelled to do the worst jobs—should now have their very mental states twisted to better suit the demands of capitalism will likely seem intolerable and unjust. However, if altered states of work-consciousness might make possible redistributive policies like a Basic Income Guarantee, this worry would dissolve: those who wanted to neither work nor do chemically-enhanced work could meaningfully opt out without facing intolerable economic consequences.
One final consideration: there are likely those to whom this proposal will sound a bit more like Brave New World than Utopia—who might object that it would turn workers into anesthetized drones, docile and dead behind the eyes. Such an objection is, above all else, a failure of the imagination. To imagine workers taking supplements that blunt the consciousness rather than intensify—that muffle experience rather than rendering it beautiful and rich with meaning—is, quite simply, to imagine the wrong sort of chemical supplements. There are scores of mind-altering substances, each with its own hyper-distinctive phenomenological effect. The assumption that work could only be improved by those substances that numb the mind rather than those that positively restructure how we perceive the world seems either naïve or uncharitable.
Further, this distaste for neuropharmacological solutions to social problems also tends to rest upon the unfounded assumption that there is something either unnatural or debasing about altering our states of consciousness. In reply, first note that the natural/altered dichotomy is a false one: no person refrains from deliberately regulating their brain chemistry, as even the acts of eating food or sleeping are methods of chemically modifying our brains so as to keep our consciousness in a desirable state. Second, education or even reading a novel physically restructures our brains—and, thus, how we perceive and understand the world—in a way calculated to enhance our ability to function under present political conditions. To accept these forms of self-enhancement as natural but reject the alternative methods proposed here would seem arbitrary. Third, there is already broad acceptance of the use of chemicals to enhance recreation; why must they be ruled out when it comes to enhancing work? Finally, there is little reason to fetishize the “given” brain state over those that can be attained through additional means. Indeed, that our brains happen to interpret work as unpleasant is an arbitrary quirk of the evolutionary process—one that should not be held as sacred and inviolable.
Admittedly, this proposal might strike many as fanciful or in some way unserious. However, such a perception is grounded in nothing beyond unexamined intuition—intuition that is heavily biased by status quo discussions had by those perceived as Very Serious People. Indeed, is a regime of chemical work-enhancement any more farfetched than the possibility that workers might one day seize the means of production? If anything, the former is probably more pragmatic and politically realistic, yet many on the left continue take the latter more seriously due to its pedigree.
If we are to take this as a serious proposal, however, it must be understood in terms of society’s obligation to those who labor. If it is true that some people must do unpleasant work to satisfy collective material needs, then principles of both utility and fairness suggest that those who shoulder the burden should be aided by those who are less-so-encumbered. Scientific research into labor-ameliorating substances should be funded with high priority and a legal regime should be implemented that would accommodate for regulated distribution and use. Unions and activists should push to establish social and legal norms whereby appropriate substances are distributed by employers—or directly by the government—to workers in much the same way that these provide health insurance. The proposal would thus represent a realization of workers’ cognitive freedom, granting them the option denied by both law and their socioeconomic position to experience labor as enjoyable and meaningful. Thus, through neuropharmacology, the problem of work may have found at least a partial solution.
[1] While this theory is interesting, it is seemingly belied by the fact that the average number of hours worked annually has declined over time.
Victim Becomes Victimizer: Israel/Palestine, Feuding Neighbors, and the Roots of Conflict
In a recent interview (excerpted in Vox), Amos Oz—one of Israel’s “most prominent peaceniks”—makes the case for war against the Palestinians via two rhetorical questions:
Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?
Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?
Now, obviously there are many important respects in which this case isn’t analogous to the actual conflict. Critics of Israel might suggest that a more apt analogy would specify that Israel’s “neighbor” does not live “across the street” but was, in fact, the original occupant of the home who was forced at gunpoint to move into the windowless basement. And, given the relative ineffectiveness of Hamas’ rockets, it would be more apt to say that the disgruntled neighbor is shooting a high-powered BB gun blindly through the walls. Given such modifications to Oz’s case, we might find ourselves less inclined to think that the present homeowner would be justified in charging into the basement, guns blazing, shooting wildly as the “neighbor” cowers behind his son.
Setting these objections to the side, Oz’s case is interesting in that it so closely parallels the logic of a brilliant short story and anti-war parable written by George Saunders [spoilers to come]. Titled “Adams,” the story opens with Roger, the narrator, coming home to find his neighbor apparently poised to sexually assault Roger’s children:
I never could stomach Adams and then one day he’s standing in my kitchen, in his underwear. Facing in the direction of my kids’ room! So I wonk him in the back of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and down he goes. Then I roll him down the stairs into the early-spring muck and am like, If you ever again, I swear to God, I don’t even know what to say, you miserable fuck.
Karen got home. I pulled her aside. Upshot was: Keep the doors locked, and if he’s home the kids stay inside.
So far so good. Few readers, I imagine, would think that Roger had overstepped the boundaries of justifiable self-defense—particularly when it is revealed that Adams also physically assaults his own wife and kids, thereby solidifying the sense that he is an immoral agent.
However, following his defensive measures against Adams, Roger becomes (reasonably!) worried that they might prove insufficient and that Adams might again return to harm the children. So, to guarantee his family’s security, he decides to invade Adams’ house and make sure that Adams got the message. Unfortunately for Roger, his incursion is complicated by the unexpected involvement of Adams’ family:
So I wonked him again, as Lynn came in, saying, Hey, Roger, hey. Roger being me. And then he rises up. Which killed me! Him rising up? Against me? And I’m about to wonk him again, but she pushes in there, like intervening. So to wonk him again I had to like shove her back, and unfortunately she slipped, and down she went, and she’s sort of lying there, skirt hiked up—and he’s mad! Mad! At me! Him in his underwear, facing my kids’ room, and he’s mad at me? ...
So I wonked him again, and when she crawled at me, going, Please, Please, I had to push her back down, not in a mean way but in a like stay-there way, which is when, of course, just my luck, the kids came running in—these Adams kids, I should say, are little thespians, constantly doing musicals in the back yard, etc., etc.—so they’re, you know, all dramatic: Mummy, Daddy! And, O.K., that was unfortunate, so I tried to leave, but they were standing there in the doorway, blocking me, like, Duh, we do not know which way to turn, we are stunned. So I shoved my way out, not rough, very gentle—I felt for them, having on more than one occasion heard Adams whaling on them, too—but one did go down, just on one knee, and I helped her up, and she tried to bite me! She did not seem to know what was what, and it hurt, and made me mad, so I went over to Adams, who was just getting up, and gave him this like proxy wonk on top of his head, in exchange for the biting.
After the incursion, the situation escalates further as Roger distributes propagandistic fliers to the neighbors (including Adams’ children) to try to explain and justify his actions. And, of course, Adams is (understandably!) enraged by what has transpired—a fact that is not lost on Roger, who, as a result, feels (also understandably!) compelled to take further action:
And I thought, If that was me, if I had that hate level, what would I do? Well, one thing I would do is hold it in and hold it in and then one night it would overflow and I would sneak into the house of my enemy and stab him and his family in their sleep. Or shoot them. I would. You would have to. It is human nature. I am not blaming anybody.
I thought, I have to be cautious and protect my family or their blood will be on my hands.
So I came home early and went over to Adams’s house when I knew nobody was home, and gathered up his rifle from the basement and their steak knives and also the butter knives, which could be sharpened, and also their knife sharpener, and also two letter openers and a heavy paperweight, which, if I was him and had lost all my guns and knives, I would definitely use that to bash in the head of my enemy in his sleep, as well as the heads of his family.
The problem is that, at this point, the situation has escalated out of control. The indignities and aggression to which Roger has subjected Adams in the name of self-defense are too significant for any reasonable person to bear—and Roger knows it. He, thus, decides to again invade Adams’ home to safeguard himself and his family from the otherwise-inevitable retaliation that his past actions were sure to have provoked:
That night I slept better until I woke in a sweat, asking myself what I would do if someone came in and, after shoving down my wife and one of my kids, stole my guns and knives and knife sharpener as well as my paperweight. And I answered myself: What I would do is look around my house in a frenzy for something else dangerous, such as paint, such as thinner, such as household chemicals, and then either ring the house of my enemy with the toxics and set them on fire or pour some into the pool of my enemy, which would (1) rot the liner and (2) sicken the children of my enemy when they went swimming…
So, entering through a window I had forced earlier that afternoon, I gathered up all the household chemicals, and, believe me, he had a lot, more than I did, more than he needed, thinner, paint, lye, gas, solvents, etc. I got it all in like nine Hefty bags and was just starting up the stairs with the first bag when here comes the whole damn family, falling upon me, even his kids, whipping me with coat hangers and hitting me with sharp-edged books and spraying hair spray in my eyes, the dog also nipping at me, and rolling down the stairs of their basement I thought, They are trying to kill me. Hitting my head on the concrete floor, I saw stars, and thought, No, really, they are going to kill me, and if they kill me no more little Melanie and me eating from the same popcorn bowl, no more little Brian doing that wrinkled-brow thing we do back and forth when one of us makes a bad joke, never again Karen and me lying side by side afterward, looking out the window, discussing our future plans as those yellow-beaked birds come and go on the power line. And I struggled to my feet, thinking, Forget how I got here, I am here, I must get out of here, I have to live. And I began to wonk and wonk, and once they had fallen back, with Adams and his teen-age boy huddled over the littlest one, who had unfortunately flown relatively far due to a bit of a kick I had given her, I took out my lighter and fired up the bag, the bag of toxics, and made for the light at the top of the stairs, where I knew the door was, and the night was, and my freedom, and my home.
So concludes Saunders’ story. I encourage everyone to read the entire thing here for full effect.
What makes the story so compelling is its depiction of how deadly conflict can emerge between people who are neither irrational nor evil. Though the story starts with the premise that Adams poses some threat to Roger’s children, this fact alone would not seem to presage a family engulfed in flames. Rather, the horrific conclusion arises from a toxic mixture of otherwise-reasonable normative premises—premises involving self-defense and retaliation of the sort that most people would find plausible.
More important, the story reveals how a legitimately-wronged party can transform into a moral monster strictly by acting on straightforward principles of self-defense. We recognize that, at first, Roger acts reasonably in response to Adams’ aggression. Yet, by the end he has caused far more harm to innocent children than Adams ever would have had he been left unchecked—a bitterly ironic outcome brought about by a seemingly innocent series of choices grounded in the (understandable!) urge to defend oneself and one’s loved ones from an aggressor.
So it is that victim becomes victimizer, getting caught up in a vicious circle whereby an unattainable degree of security is pursued by means of aggressive tactics that produce collateral damage and (the threat of) blowback. Each aggressive action only intensifies the very danger it was supposed to eliminate, thereby eliciting further aggression. And so the conflict escalates to the point where the only exit lies through the burned bodies of innocent children.
In this way, Saunders’ story illustrates the moral bankruptcy of the logic of self-defense. Through his parable we witness how the invocation of threatened children becomes a justification for total war and, perversely, the extermination of far more children than would have been killed otherwise. It is a moral logic that justifies the sacrifice of countless innocents—each beloved by her own family and friends—on the altar of our own sentimentality.
Therein likes the profound irony in Oz’s attempt to justify war through the analogy of the neighbor whose children are threatened. If anyone had so far failed to see Israel and its ongoing slaughter of civilians as Roger’s real world analog, Oz neatly closes the conceptual gap. Each time Israel—or any military retaliator! (the post-9/11 United States perhaps most prominent among them)—leaves so many bodies of innocents engulfed in flames, we ought to hear Roger’s voice speaking from the mouths of apologists claiming self-defense.
A brief disclaimer: this essay seeks to explain why Israel acts immorally even if one concedes that Hamas was the initial provocateur/aggressor in the conflict. Many might dispute this concession, citing past ceasefire violations on the part of Israel or the ongoing blockade and political pressure it has applied to Hamas. Alternatively, it might be argued that the murder of the three Israeli teens should not be understood as the “first shot fired,” as that action was carried out by a rogue/criminal group unaffiliated (or "loosely affiliated") with the official Palestinian political authority. On this view, the initial aggressor in the conflict would be Israel, with its use of the kidnapping/murder as a pretext for engaging in military operations against the Hamas-led government. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this last view, but do not know enough about the facts on the ground to make any sort of pronouncement on the matter.
This is the ninth in a series of posts wherein I reply to Jason Kuznicki’s objections to G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?. The previous posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, respectively.
In a companion essay to the one previously under examination, Kuznicki introduces a new line of argument against Cohen’s principle of Community. This argument concerns itself less with either of the specific components of the principle—i.e., the importance of shared experience and the ethic of communal reciprocity—and, instead, takes on the Community principle in its general form, namely that “people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another.” Kuznicki renames this principle “universal empathy” (UE for short) and redescribes it as the ethic according to which we would act in such a way as to instantiate the sort of political economy that “we would want if we cared sufficiently for all mankind.”
Kuznicki’s objection to Cohen’s principle of Community (and UE) is that caring for all of mankind would entail an unsustainable emotional burden. Imagine feeling the same grief for every person who dies as you feel for your loved ones! Or the mania that would consume you if you felt joy for every wonderful thing that happened to every person. Kuznicki argues that to live in accordance with the dictates of the principle would condemn us to non-functioning insanity and, thus, that it ought to be rejected as an ideal
I agree with Kuznicki that if Cohen’s principle demanded that we be as emotionally invested in the life outcomes of every person on the planet as we are in those of our own children, then so much the worse for Cohen’s principle. However, it is not at all obvious that this is, in fact, what Cohen’s principle requires.
First, note that the general form of caring articulated by the Community principle (and the notion of UE) is apparently distinct from the two modes of caring that appear to matter the most to Cohen (mentioned in the first paragraph of this post). Thus, even if general caring proves to be an undesirable ideal, the desirability of communal reciprocity and shared experience might independently agitate for socialist economic relations.
Second, note that neither Cohen’s principle nor Kuznicki’s subsequent rearticulation of said principle demand that we care equally about all of humankind. Rather Cohen simply argues that we ought to care about others period. Thus, his principle does not entail—per Kuznicki’s implication—that I must care as much about the death of a stranger as I would about that of my own child. Rather, Cohen seems to be merely suggesting that I care, period. So, already, the demands of the Community principle appear far more modest than Kuznicki would have us believe.
Further, it is far from obvious that a basic level of caring requires that one take on any emotional burden whatsoever (let alone one of the crippling sort described by Kuznicki). Is it a contradiction to care about a person but not feel any sort grief when they die? I don’t think it must obviously be so. Certainly one would have to think it a bad thing that harm befalls a person one cares about. But it does not seem that one must be personally emotionally invested in the life outcomes of another person in order to care about her. Rather, such caring might be purely attitudinal in nature, embodied in one’s stance toward others. If this is correct—and emotional investment is understood as a sufficient rather than a necessary condition for caring—the demands of the Community principle appear quite manageable.
Even if emotional investment is a necessary condition for caring, there are other implied constraints that limit the burden entailed by Cohen’s principle. First, it seems that a person could (a.) care about another person but (b.) not feel sorrow when something bad happens to them if (c.) she is not aware that this bad thing has happened. In other words, the emotional demand placed upon a person by caring appears to be subject to epistemic constraint such that a person must only emotionally respond to things that she knows happened. Given that one only hears about so many tragedies/triumphs on a particular day, such epistemic constraints place an additional cap on the emotional demands of the Community principle.
A further constraint is imposed by Cohen himself. While Kuznicki declares that the object of care must be “all mankind,” Cohen appears to have a narrower group in mind, namely on those with whom we engage in exchange. He writes:
The point is often made… that one cannot be friends with the millions of people who compose a large society: that idea is at best impossible to realize, and, so some add, it is even incoherent, because of the exclusivity that goes with friendship. But [the proposition that we ought to treat others as friends] need not be interpreted in that overambitious fashion. It suffices that I treat everyone with whom I have any exchange or other form of contact as someone toward whom I have the reciprocating attitude that is characteristic of friendship. And general social friendship, that is, community, is, like friendship, not an all-or-nothing thing. It is surely a welcome thing when more rather than less community is present in society. [emphasis mine]
So here, as with some of Kuznicki’s previous objections, we appear to have a case where a closer reading of Cohen’s text might have been helpful for allaying Kuznicki’s worries. For, it appears that his present objection rests on a premise that Cohen explicitly denies: we need not care for every person in the entire world but only those with whom we have direct social and economic contact. When this constraint is coupled with the epistemic one described above, Kuznicki’s complaint appears to be increasingly unfounded.
Even more significant, the blockquoted passage suggests that what Cohen has in mind is perhaps even more modest than either the constrained or the attitudinal caring described above. For, what he appears to be suggesting is that we need not literally care about the people with whom we interact, but rather we must merely treat them as though we care by approaching our interactions with the associated reciprocating attitude. If this is the case, then the principle of Community places no emotional burden whatsoever on its adherents: I might find my neighbor to be irritating and wish that she would leave the country—yet would be free to maintain that attitude so long as I treat her as though I care.
There is further reason to support this interpretation of Cohen’s principle beyond Cohen’s quoted text. According to Kuznicki’s, Cohen is telling us how to feel (specifically, he is demanding that we feel too much!). However, upon reflection this would seem to be an odd sort of injunction, as there is no obvious means by which one might get oneself into compliance. How, exactly, is a person supposed to change how they feel about the life outcomes of another person? Perhaps one can try to learn more about another person; to focus on their most sympathetic traits; to try to walk a mile in their shoes. But none of these methods is obviously effective nor easily carried out. In many cases, we may as well ask a person to change how they feel about spiders or about anchovy pizza. However, if we understand Cohen’s principle as telling us how to act, then it seems a far more reasonable proposition. Even if there is no apparent cure for the dislike that I have for my neighbor, I require only the modest self-control that I have been allotted to treat her well. Indeed, anyone not plagued by crippling akrasia would be able to act on Cohen’s principle, if interpreted as a maxim regarding action rather than emotion.
Given all this, I think we need not spend any more time worrying about Kuznicki’s objections to Cohen’s Community principle.
This is the eighth in a series of posts wherein I reply to Jason Kuznicki’s objections to G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?. The previous posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, respectively.
In this lengthy series of posts, I have so far limited myself to responding to Kuznicki’s objections to Cohen’s principle of Socialist Equality of Opportunity. However, Kuznicki also objects to Cohen’s ethic of “communal reciprocity”—which, the reader will recall is the ethic whereby “I serve you not because of what I can get in return by doing so but because you need or want my service, and you, for the same reason, serve me.” Kuznicki’s objection is that there is no real distinction between this form of reciprocity and the sort of market reciprocity whereby goods are offered only upon the condition of some payment:
Yet if there is a bright line between these two kinds of reciprocity, I am afraid can’t find it: Live long enough as someone’s friend, and your acts of communal reciprocity will almost always be rewarded. No one ever finds friends blameworthy for acting this way. Rather, friends are held blameworthy if they are unwilling to repay a kindness: Almost imperceptibly, acts of reciprocity shade into gift exchanges, coupon swaps, bike sales, yard sales, and increasingly market-like transactions.
This objection is a bit puzzling because Cohen provides a whole set of criteria for delineating between the sort of reciprocity that he believes to be in accordance with his principle of Community and that which he believes characterizes market exchange. He argues:
Communal reciprocity is motivated by a commitment to one’s fellow human beings; market reciprocity is motivated by cash.
Communal reciprocity is motivated by the desire to serve (while being served); market reciprocity is typically motivated by fear and greed.
Market reciprocity—unlike communal reciprocity—is characterized by a tendency to view one’s peers as either potential sources of personal (or familial) enrichment or threats to personal success in the market.
Those engaged in communal reciprocity derive satisfaction from both serving and being served; those engaged in market reciprocity only derive satisfaction from the latter.
Those engaged in communal reciprocity would still serve, even if they received nothing in return; those engaged in market reciprocity “would not serve if doing so were not a means to get service.”
Those engaged in communal reciprocity do not seek to maximize the ratio of returns to service performed; those engaged in market reciprocity do.
Those engaged in communal reciprocity value cooperation for its own sake—and thus the entire service/being served conjunction; those engaged in market reciprocity consider such cooperation only a means to an end.
Per communal reciprocity, I give because you need; per market reciprocity, I give because I get.
Under a system of communal reciprocity, I might give services to one person and receive them from another and be satisfied; within a system of market reciprocity, I perform a service for one person only if I receive some benefit from that person.
Those engaging in a system of communal reciprocity want to ensure all others in the system flourish; within a system of market reciprocity, members typically do not care about how others fare.
Communal reciprocity emerges from a reciprocating attitude; market reciprocity emerges from a non-reciprocating attitude.
Given these clear, numerous, and detailed criteria, it is surprising that Kuznicki is content to simply declare that “if there is a bright line between these two kinds of reciprocity, I am afraid can’t find it” and consider the matter settled. It seems that if he wants us to believe that the dichotomy is a false one, he must at least explain why the many supposed differences posited by Cohen don’t yield a true conceptual distinction.
The only argument Kuznicki gives to support his false dichotomy claim (appearing in the blockquote above) is that friendship involves reciprocity—and those who do not reciprocate are blameworthy as a result. Obviously, his conclusion does not follow from these few stated premises. In order to make his argument valid, we need to fill in a few unstated premises, namely that friendship entails norms of communal reciprocity and that non-reciprocation is only blameworthy according to market reciprocity norms. Thus, given the other premises he states explicitly, we reach his conclusion that market reciprocity norms must be identical to communal reciprocity norms.
There are a few problems with this argument, but most glaring is that non-reciprocation is considered blameworthy under Cohen’s account of communal reciprocity: you serve others and there is the (moral) expectation that they will serve you in return. Given what he says about reciprocity, Kuznicki appears to be under the mistaken impression that communal reciprocity forbids any expectation of reciprocity whatsoever. Yet Cohen is pretty explicit on this point:
I serve you in the expectation that (if you are able to) you will also serve me. My commitment to socialist community does not require me to be a sucker who serves you regardless of whether (if you are able to do so) you are going to serve me… The relationship between us under communal reciprocity is not the market-instrumental one in which I give because I get, but the noninstrumental one in which I give because you need, or want, and in which I expect a comparable generosity from you.
Thus, Kuznicki’s key premise—that non-reciprocation is only blameworthy according to market reciprocity norms—seems to be clearly false. And, by extension, so is his conclusion that there is no meaningful distinction between communal and market reciprocity.
Given that these refutations of Kuznicki’s objection are fairly evident in the original text that he sets out to critique, I fear that I may be misinterpreting him. Charity agitates for such a conclusion, but, at the same time, I am unable to determine what it is that he is up to if not the above-stated argument. If another interpretation of his argument presents itself, I will be sure to update this post.
One final observation: the blameworthiness that Kuznicki believes comes with the reciprocity of friendship appears, in fact, to be unique to communal reciprocity. Say that you are an advertiser who, very kindly, subsidizes my newspaper reading with a full-page ad. Am I morally blameworthy if I do not return the favor by purchasing your product? Of course not. You might be reasonably disappointed that you failed to sway me. But there would be no grounds for blaming me for failing to reciprocate, even if you continue to subsidize me for years on end. Thus, blameworthiness for non-reciprocation (or lack thereof) would seem to be yet another important difference between communal reciprocity and market reciprocity. (Here, again, we see how economic relations sustained between friends do not resemble those of the broader capitalist economy.)
