Not all redistributionist schemes are reducible to envy

The Moorfield Storey blog has a brief rundown on "liberalism, as originally and properly understood."  That post gives a brief summary of what, I imagine, most present day libertarians and people who identify as "classical liberals" or "nineteenth-century liberals" believe.  And it's not too bad a view.

My main problem with it, though, is its parting discussion on inequality and "socialism" or modern-day, American liberalism.  Under pure (or as pure as possible) classical liberalism, there will be much wealth creation, and

[w]hen this happens there w ill be economic inequality. But so what? Why should everyone be equally poor? The poor will have their living standards vastly improved, and the wealthy will be even wealthier. If prosperity is our goal then why worry about an inequality of results?

And this is the crucial difference between liberalism and socialism (or what goes by the name “liberalism” in America today). Liberalism, based on an ethics of achievement, advocates equal freedom, which leads to unequal results. Socialism, based on the ethics of envy, demands equal results, which requires limiting freedom. Thus with liberalism we have freedom, prosperity, and unequal wealth. With socialism we have equality, poverty, and no freedom. As much as we might want there to be a third alternative, it doesn’t exist.

For starters, I do believe that economic inequality is not necessarily a bad thing.  I think its goodness or badness has to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.  And I'm not going to presumptively say it's always bad.  I also don't have much of a problem with the notion that "socialism" requires some limiting of freedom and that limiting freedom is a bad thing, although I'm not so sure that limiting freedom is always the worse option and I do believe if it is an evil, it can sometimes be a necessary one.

I object, however, to the implication that redistributionism is necessarily the same thing as the search for "equal results" or is reducible to "the ethics of envy."  Now, the Moorfield Storey Blog's authors do not say "redistributionism," and not all redistributionism is socialism, but I think their framing of the issue suggests that all redistributionism is indeed reducible to the "ethics of envy."

I should define what I mean by "redistributionism."  The term can have two senses.  The first is "downard" redistribution.  That refers to schemes that try to transfer wealth from those who have more to those who have less.  The second is "upward."  That refers to the opposite, or the transfer of wealth from those who have less to those who have more.

In practice, resistributionist schemes aren't so neatly divided.  Social Security, for example, operates  as a regressive tax on workers in order to supplement the incomes of older people who in the aggregate have more.  And as far as I know, what one receives from Social Security is partly a function of how much one has worked, but is not a function of means.  In other words, it's not that the poorer seniors receive more and the richer ones receive less.  That is a redistribution in the second sense.  But one of the functions of Social Security--and the goal of the Francis Townsend supporters it was meant to satisfy--was to create something like a floor-level income for the oldest persons, a minimum below which they were not supposed to fall.  Establishing such a floor can in practice act as something that seems like a downward redistribution when, for example, an older person who has worked all his or her life but earned too little to save for retirement receives a basic income.  Even in those cases, there are complicating factors.  The older person has already lived to x age, while any given younger worker who contributes may not live so long.

By the standards of Moorfield Storey's authors, the downward redistributionism is necessarily an effort to satisfy "envy," to satisfy some people's sense that "those others have more than I, therefore I want some of that or I deserve some of that."*  It's the "therefore" in the preceding quotation that implies envy.  Wanting something because others have it is pretty much a good working definition of envy.  And that is probably one motivation for schemes deemed "socialistic" or "New Deal and beyond American liberal" if we assume New Deal liberalism and its successors to be primarily downward redistributionist.

I have my doubts, both about how the New Deal worked in practice and what most policymakers' intentions were, but downward redistribution was indeed in the air and was probably part of the mix.  The Townsendites I mentioned above based some of their appeal on the narrative that some in America really did have more than enough and should share it.  And Francis Townsend's counterparts on the "thunder from the left" that challenged FDR ca. 1935--I'm thinking primarily of Father Coughlin and Huey Long--based their appeals on a presumed surfeit of wealth commanded by a small number of people.  And that type of discussion did not end with the depression.

Note the post 2008-recession complaints about some of the 1% who "hoard" wealth instead of interjecting it into the economy.  It's hard not to see a tinge of envy in most of those complaints.

But it's not only envy.  It's something else, perhaps not instead of, but in addition to, envy.  It's a desire to have a measure of security or to ensure that people's basic needs are being met.  It's not so much, or at least not always, that people are saying "they have more and I want it," but "life is hard and it would be easier if certain basics were guaranteed or less costly."  What counts as the "basics" changes.  Two hundred years ago, running water in the US might not have been seen as a basic.  Now it is.  30 years ago, cell phones were not a necessity.  Now they are, if not a necessity, less of a luxury.  (When my wife and I order food delivered, and our doorbell doesn't work, we tend to take it for granted that the delivery person will have a cell phone to call us to come down and get the food.).

Now, envy is implicated even here.  The rising definition of "basics" is presumed upon a certain general wealth.  If nobody had running water, we probably could not demand it as a basic need.  Also, if we return to my one sentence, that "life is hard and it would be easier if certain basics were guaranteed or less costly," the last four words should read "less costly for me."  We probably can't do away with scarcity by fiat, so someone is presumed to be capable of paying for it all.  And it's quite easy to posit a certain elite group that has--or hoards--the wealth.  It's hard not to see envy at work there.

But it's not wholly envy.  It's something different, at the same time something more and something less.  To bait it as the "ethics of envy" is to elide some very important issues.



*I should also point out that whoever authors the Moorfield Storey blog is pretty consistent and would probably oppose upward redistributionism, too.  I wouldn't in fact be surprised if they believe that upward redistribution is the worse evil or if they believe that downward redistribution trends toward upward.

The harried ones, those Nobel seekers of truth

A specter is haunting America, the specter of anti-science.  In the recurrent ritual of disclosing what fools people can be, a recent article in The Atlantic discusses one of those periodic polls that discloses some purportedly disturbing example about Americans' scientific ignorance.  In this case, the poll in question reveals that

[a] majority of Americans don't believe in even the most fundamental discovery of 20th century physics, which 99.9 percent of members of the National Academies of Sciences do: that our universe began with an enormous explosion, the Big Bang.

The article goes on to discuss the possible reasons for these results and suggests that such attitudes don't present much that is new, and because it's not necessarily new, we shouldn't worry as much.  After all, science has been going along despite such appalling ignorance and/or anti-science.  In fact, the "good news" is that Americans compare favorably to respondents in other countries, which means that the situation in the U.S. is "[n]ot so bad, though probably not too heartening to our Nobel Prize winners."

This article is better than most.  It tries to historicize this ignorance, which I appreciate.   And it interrogates the way the questions were asked:

It is worth noting, however, that the way the question was framed gathers at least two possible different groups into the "not confident" bin: A) people who hold a different belief about the beginning of the universe and B) people who just don't know, and might have been scared off from saying they were "confident" in an answer.

To be fair, going further may have been beyond the scope of the article's point, and perhaps there was a word-limit the author had to observe, but I still wish the article had gone further.  Another reason--perhaps it's a subset of reason A)--someone might say they are "not confident" that the universe began with the big bang might be a different conception of what we mean by "universe" or even what we mean by "the big bang."

Is the universe all that is in existence?  What does it mean to exist?  Was the pinpoint of energy/matter/whatever from which the Big Bang came enclosed in anything?  Can we speak of a "universe," the sum of all things, as being enclosed in something without suggesting that the something doing the enclosing is also part of the sum of all things and also the--or "a"--universe?  What about cycles?  Maybe the "universe" expands and contracts, and what we call the Big Bang was what happened right after the last contraction, and soon the universe will roll again into a tiny ball and then expand outward into the overwhelming question of our last end and first beginning.

Maybe there is an answer to those questions that doesn't disturb the universe as "99.9 percent of members of the National Academies of Sciences" know it.  I have my doubts that science, as science, is capable of answering some of those questions.  I suspect there's not a scientific way to define the universe that is falsifiable.  One might conjure a definition, and then use that definition as a metric to prove or disprove the universe's origins or oscillations.  But I have a hard time believing the actual definition can be scientifically known.

Yeah, but....are all these respondents thinking along those lines, are they really positing a philosophical challenge to what they might see as pat answers to our existence?  Maybe not.  Or at least I'll stipulate that most are not doing so explicitly.  Maybe the non-confidence really does relate to "faith-based" and religious-based conflicts to which the article alludes (and thankfully doesn't dwell on) in passing.

But to paraphrase (and perhaps benignly misinterpret) William James, can't the cash-value of religious beliefs about the nature of the universe act as a shorthand for these questions, for the mystery of what are the contours of our being and of the world in general?  To ask the question is to make the argument, and yes, I believe religiosity can and often does do this.  How often?  I don't know, but I suspect that it's more frequent than a poll can capture.

(Pseudo)Name Change!

As of today, I'm changing my online persona from "Pierre Corneille" to "Gabriel Conroy."  No particular reason.  Just that I think it's time for a change. 

On the passing of Fred Phelps

Fred Phelps, the antigay pastor who made a name for himself demonstrating at the funerals of soldiers by holding signs that say "God Hates Fags."  His "argument" was that the US is too tolerant of gay people and that god punishes the US by killing its soldiers.  He didn't limit himself to soldier funerals.  He also demonstrated, for example, at Laramie in the wake of Mathew Shepard's death.

Mr. Phelps's peculiar ability to unite social conservatives, pro-gay activists, and everyone in between in opposition to his offensive tactics makes his death something few people mourn.

His death has also been the occasion for some to demonstrate a remarkable charity.  George Takei has written:

I take no solace or joy in this man's passing. We will not dance upon his grave, nor stand vigil at his funeral holding "God Hates Freds" signs, tempting as it may be.

He was a tormented soul, who tormented so many. Hate never wins out in the end. It instead goes always to its lonely, dusty end.

And, as one commenter at Popehat, where I found Takei's quotation, said:

I’d rather there was a huge silent line of people along the route to the cemetery holding up signs that say “God Loves Everyone”.

And again, as commenter Zane said at a post over on OT:

When I think about Fred Phelps, his legacy, and his death, I’m only sad.

He wasn’t an effective messenger of his hate. He alienated those who might have looked at him as an ally. I’m certainly grateful for that. The end of his life seemed especially pathetic if the reports are true.

At the end of it all, he was another person with deep flaws. His obsessions spoiled his potential and ruined his family. His vision of god was the one I feared as a child–the angry, unreasoning and omnipotent abusive parent. He brought pain to others in the bizarre belief that he could save people from the eternal torment that such a god would surely bring.

He died, apparently, an outcast from his church, estranged in one way or another from his children, and without having made things the least bit better from his perspective.

I can’t but feel sad for the misery he caused among his family, his followers, his neighbors, and among his targets. I also feel sad for the misery and fear he likely felt. The world and he are both probably better off for his death, but what unhappier thing could ever be said about anyone?

These statements testify to goodness of certain people who hate everything Phelps stood for, but who nevertheless choose to express some sympathy toward a fellow human being on account of his human being-ness.  I believe such sentiments make the world a better place for having been uttered.

But I can't leave it at that.  The charitable response, while in my opinion the right one, is also the expected one.  Mr. Takei, for instance, would have faced some criticism had he not found it within him to be charitable about Mr. Phelps's death, had he decided instead to choose to indulge hate, or had he not had the wherewithal to rise above whatever personal feelings he might have had against the man.  If Mr. Takei had expressed joy or had offered a witty remark that reminded people of the way Mr. Phelps and the people he represented harmed people, he would have in my opinion and from a public relations standpoint made a tactical error.  Whatever he's like in real life, Mr. Takei has publicly cultivated the persona of passionate, but kind spokesperson for gay rights.  And taking the vindictive path would have lessened others' respect for him.

And not all people have taken the path that Mr. Takei has.  Russell Saunders at the OT says the following:

I do not regret the happiness I feel knowing I no longer share an oxygen supply with him.  I do not believe in the existence of a hell, even for the likes of people like him.  If there is a judgment that awaits him, let his loved ones hope it is before a judge more merciful than the one he worshiped.

I have never met Russell in person, but I do have a lot of respect for him.  I love reading his posts and his comments over at the OT.  His presence at that blog helps make it the great site it is.  Therefore, as I go on to disagree with the argument behind his statement, I do so with respect for him.

I can't, don't, and won't say Russell doesn't feel what he says he feels.  And inasmuch as he is stating his feelings on the matter and not making a larger argument for how one should feel, I haven't much to say against what he wrote.  And to be clear, his blog post ("read the whole thing," etc.) is not really what I'd call vindictive.  He does stipulate that he doesn't believe in a hell "even for the likes of people like" Phelps.

But there seems to be an implicit argument in what Russell is saying.  It seems to be that certain people have hurt others so much and caused so much harm, that their death doesn't deserve to be mourned. 

But I think I see it a bit differently. I would like to believe that in our better moments, even the worse person has some redeeming value as a person and is not completely lost.  Or if he or she actually is completely lost, then that fact is to be regretted.

On some level, that idea comes from the hope I have in other people or in human nature or in the possibility that there is such a thing as ultimate goodness or god or goddess or the immortal soul.

On another level, the idea comes from a certain confusion that I entertain about myself.  I have never done what Mr. Phelps has done or targeted people or gone out of my way to spread a hate-filled agenda.  But I'm not entirely innocent of such matters, either.  I have said and sometimes continue to say (not merely think, but sometimes say) culturally and racially insensitive things.  I arrange many of my actions and make many of my judgments based on my arbitrary and prejudicial views on other people.

Most--probably all--of the examples I can think pale in comparison to the things Mr. Phelps has done.  In comparison, in fact, they seem trivial.  These include some jokes I've told, or some moments on the blogosphere where I have been unnecessarily hostile to another commenter based on what I know to be certain prejudices.  But I have a hard time seeing the distance between Mr. Phelps and me that I'm supposed to be seeing.

When I die, will people have some reason to toast to my death and not my life?  I doubt people would be so inconsiderate, but that's not the question.  Would they have any good reason to?  Knowing what I in my most private moments might be capable of, I'm not sure they wouldn't.  I'm not saying I'm unique on this score, either.  In fact, I strongly suspect--and perhaps on some level I hope--that I'm all too typical in this regard.

I feel inconsiderate saying what I've said about Russell's post.  As I said, I value his contributions at OT.  I did not comment there because I did not want to interject a preachy note to what he said....and because saying what I'd want to say takes such a long time (as in this blog post), and even then I'm not sure I've made the point I want to.

I also must acknowledge that I am not of the demographic that Mr. Phelps targeted and with very rare, minor, and trivial exceptions I am not generally of any of the demographics that America's hate mongers tend to target.  I have the privilege of disinterested and thoughtful reflection on the matter.  Mr. Takei's, the Popehat commenter's, and Zane's charitable remarks are in their own way remarkable.  But my "plus one!" addendum is, while not bad, just not all that impressive.

The old cliche that charity begins at home is true.  It would be more impressive if I forgave and expressed charity toward those people who made minor slights toward me or sometimes one-upped me in a blog post discussion or made me look foolish.  In that case, the stakes would be much lower, but my charity would be more sincere and more costly to the sense of entitlement that helps me carry a grudge.

How do you swagger? Historian, historicize thyself!

[Note:  this is the third of a series on being a jerk in academe.  For the introduction to the series, click here.]

Historians are difficult people to be around and, I imagine, to live with.  We can be jerks in so many ways, it's hard to count.  But one (and only one of many!) of the ways we can be jerks is by calling out irrelevant ahirstoricism.

Ahistoricism is supposedly the cardinal sin for historians, unless we're talking about all the other cardinal sins, such as plagiarism or making up sources.  Unlike academic fraud, but like pride, however, ahistoricism is a sin every historian can plausibly be accused of.  If the historian adopts some sort of founding assumption for his/her study, he/she assumes away certain contingencies and therefore rests on a non-historical foundation.  Simply using the abstraction called language--even though it's a conventional abstraction, constructed socially--he/she must of necessity be at least one remove from the contingencies of the past.  What this boils down to is that if the historian advances an unpopular (in the discipline or to its practitioniers) idea, there's always something ahistorical an opposing historian can detect in it.[1] 


Here's the definition of ahistoricism as far as I can understand it:  It refers to the belief or claim (or assumption) that something is timeless and has not evolved or otherwise been affected by the passage of time.  One way ahistoricism can manifest itself is through an appeal to "tradition" or to the way things used to be, without acknowledging that "tradition" or the way things used to be were in their turn created or informed by historical circumstances.  Usually, this appeal to tradition is made as a counterpoint to a seemingly unprecedented (in degree or kind) present-day change.

There are some conceptual difficulties to the notion of ahistoricism.  For one thing, it feeds a viewpoint that history is about assessing "change over time."  Indeed, if you ask most professionally trained historians if history is about "change over time," at least a solid majority will say yes, assuming they're not being particularly argumentative that day.  "Change over time" is probably the bread and butter of history as it is practiced since the professionalization of the discipline in the late 1800-something.  But it creates a bias toward seeing change and not seeing continuity or persistence.  It's not that historians never see continuity or persistence, but they're challenged to see it as something that must be explained.  That's not a bad thing, just the bias you sign up for when you become a historian.

Another conceptual difficulty is that ahistoricism assumes away important notions of what constitutes truth.  Truth, or that truth which we can know or elucidate, is contingent on time (and place, and social class, etc.).  To be clear, I am not taking the postmodernism of the 1970s through 1990s and projecting backward, forward, and outward to the historical discipline as it has always existed (to do so would be, well, to engage in ahistoricism).  In fact, there have been, are, and always will be (*cough* ahistorical? *cough*) historians who believe in objective truth and in the ability of historians to know or at least get close to that truth.  Rather, what I'm saying is that a burden is placed against that notion of truth that posits the existence of ideal "forms" that determine or are represented by what mere mortals call reality.  In other words, Plato and his mythical Socrates have an uphill battle in convincing a professional historian of anything.[2]  Not that we should all be Platonists, but we should indeed be wary of presumptively shunting aside a huge tradition of thought.

Well, those difficulties are not ones I'm well equipped to elaborate on.  I'm not a philosopher, after all, and I'm not going to publish "Pierre Corneille's Guidebook to the Historical Profession" anytime soon (not the least because the absolutism à la Louis XIV went out of style a long time ago).  I just mention them to suggest that even within the profession, ahistoricism or its opposite (err, historicism) are not without their difficulties, even if they serve as founding assumptions. (To ahistoricism, I'll add historians' supposed aversion to counterfactuals.  It's probably true that we should eschew counterfactuals unless we want to devolve into making up a list of might-have-been's that are never false because they cannot be disproven.  But historians need to realize that whenever they hazard a statement of causality, they are indulging in a counterfactual claim.  To say that X causes Y is to say that if X hadn't happened, then Y wouldn't have happened, or it would have been less likely to have happened.)

Where all this comes into play in our ability to be jerks is the way we sometimes use the "that's ahistorical" card as a club against people who make ahistroical statements where their ahistoricism is either innocuous, or not the whole story.  What I'm saying is, sometimes people make ahistorical claims, and when they do, and even when the making of such claims represents a misunderstanding that needs to be corrected, we shouldn't throw out the amateur historian with the bathwater.  Sometimes even a ahistorical claim has an element of truth in it, or at least an element of something discussable.

To use a not particularly momentous example, I'll note something I often read in self-help books and other pop-psychology or pop-therapy books.  I like reading those books because well, they interest me and every once in a while, I stumble across one that's really thoughtful.  But most of those books, even sometimes the thoughtful ones, dabble at least a little bit in the following type of claim:

Stress [anger, anxiety, narcissism, [3] et cetera, und so weiter] is a challenge many people face.  And in today's ever more complicated world, these challenges are greater than ever.

That isn't a direct quote, but a paraphrased amalgam of the type of statement I see very often in those books.  When I read such phrasing, I turn over uncomfortably, not in my grave (I'm not there yet), but at least on my couch (on which I lounge in the early evening when I get home from work).  Frankly, when people make such statements, they just assume the truth of it.  Our world is ever more complicated, and therefore, the challenges are greater than ever, and therefore you need this book more than your great parents would've.

This phrasing is ahistorical in at least two ways.  First, in these accounts, stress (anger, anxiety, narcissism,[3] et cetera, und so weiter) are fixed, discrete ideas, not something the definition of which might change and has changed over time.

Second, not much or anything is said about stress (anger, anxiety, narcissism, et cetera, und so weiter) in the past, except as illustrations that such have always been with us, but now it's really bad, because with on-demand tv, cell phones, and emails, there are more demands on our time than ever.  I'm not in principle against the notion that modern conveniences (especially cell phones!) come with their own stressors or make life potentially more stressful than in the past.  On the other hand, those of us likely to be stressed out by our access to on-demand tv, cell phones, and emails are likely to belong to that class of people on earth who have avoided the sharper edges of the dire scarcity in basic living essentials that likely was a not unimportant cause of stress for our predecessors and for others in our present-day world not so fortunate. 

This post isn't really a takedown of self-help and pop psychology literature.  In fact, I'm trying to say that the ahistoricism of these works' authors is largely irrelevant.  Stress (anger, anxiety, narcissism, et cetera, und so weiter) can be a problem today even if it (and they) is (are) only as bad, or even not as bad, as in the past.  And even though the notions of what constitutes it (and them) might be socially and historically constructed along some plane, along another plane, it (and they) is (are) instantiation(s) of suffering, and if the book in question offers a way for someone to address or cope with the suffering, then maybe that book is good despite the fact that it's not a work in history.

Don't get me wrong.  The books are often very poorly considered, and maybe in another post I'll advance a deeper criticism of what I see as some of the debilitating assumptions and approaches their authors employ.  But their ahistoricism is not their primary offense.

The self-help industry can take care of itself, with or without my calling attention to its ahistoricism.  (And who knows, maybe some works don't fall into these traps.)  I'm not too afraid that whatever cartel is responsible for printing these books will send their goons to dismantle my blog any time soon.  But I cite this as one way in which historians might make a criticism.

Another way--and one more akin to being a jerk--is in discussions with others when the historian believes that simply calling out those others' ahistoricism is dispositive of the wrongness of their argument and the rightness of his/hers (the historian's).

Over at the Ordinary Times Blog (formerly The League of Ordinary Gentlemen), for example, there is a commenter who frequently criticizes social conservatives as refusing to accept "modernity."  The attitude his language expresses strikes me as akin to "these simple folk need a good dose of federal government--perhaps accompanied by a one- or two-year stay in New York City or San Francisco--to cure them of their provincial benightedness."  (That's actually more of what I read into his comments than anything he's actually said.  So I am putting words into his mouth that he probably would say he didn't intend.)

That, to my mind, oversimplifying and condescending stereotype of a large group of people irritates me.  And I'm tempted to pull out the historians' toolkit and challenge him on his use of "modernity," a word at least a majority of whose users (I'm convinced) haven't a strong idea the meaning of.  (I was introduced to it as a historical concept in my MA program in 1997, and I still haven't figured out what it means.)  I'm tempted to bring to light the argument that so-called anti-modern movements are actually manifestations of modernity and arise because of modernity.

I'll have to admit a few things.  First, that comes very close to the philosopher's almost tu quoque I criticized in my last post. I'm pointing out how the definition of what something is against is so bound up with that something, that those who are against it are in the sense constituted by it.  Technically that's true, but it doesn't really say much.  This commenter would probably point out, rightly, that this group of people overwhelmingly opposes things that he, and I, favor:  legal right to same sex marriage, for example.  I personally believe that invoking their opposition to "modernity" (where modernity, whatever it means, = "good" and anyone who opposes it = "bad") is an extremely poor, even question-begging, way to go about it.  But that's probably closer to what he means than a pedantic rendering of "modernity" and oppositional movements to it.

Second, that pedantic objection of mine does not really express my true objection (and personally, I get annoyed when some historians say "the anti-modernists are actually modernists because they're opposed to the modern"....ugh!).  In fact, I think many of these social conservatives embrace the norms often associated with "modernity" much more than this commenter gives them credit for.  The norms in this case are respect for individual autonomy and limitations placed on the state's ability to intrude into private affairs and a reliance on capital and information networks and the (in some ways) liberating and (in some ways) restrictive effects of that reliance.  (Whether these norms are in fact characteristic of that "thing" called modernity might be open for debate, but I will say they're probably part of the bundle of what a lot of people mean by "modernity.")  Now, when I say that social conservatives are largely already on board with modernity, that doesn't mean they as a group have no objections to it, but I do think that most of them have bought into its basic assumptions, and the commenter I referenced above might find that the ways in which they do object are not consonant with his purported embrace of "new deal" liberalism.

That second point, in fact, is probably closer to what historians mean when they say anti-modern movements are in fact in cahoots with "modernity."  But notice how much more nuanced it is than what I was tempted to say at the beginning, that they can't be anti-modern because (of course!) they're reacting against modernity.

And, for the topic of this already long blog post, that affects the price of tea in China inasmuch as it's very easy for me to call out out that commenter on ahistoricism but not very well engage his principal idea, which in my opinion, deserves to be criticized.

In sum, ahistoricism is often a grave error, but before we historians criticize this "sin," we ought to keep in mind how closely it is aligned with the argument we're engaging.  If someone's argument is not intended to be historical, and commits an ahistoricism as merely a rhetorical or hyperbolic flourish, then maybe we need to let it slide in favor of addressing what the person really (or at least probably) intended.


[1]In my dissertation, for example, some members of my committee were rather critical of my use, in my conclusion, of the term "economic liberty" and my suggestion that it's something we should take seriously when assessing political regulation.  Their criticism was that my use was ahistorical, even though I noted ways in which the concept fell short as a way of helping others and even though I had at least a couple of paragraphs that tried to explain the way some late twentieth century conservatives used the term as a rallying cry for supporting entrenched business interests.  My committee members weren't fully wrong.  I might have looked more closely to how the term, or at least the concept represented by the term, had been used during the time period I studied (I didn't do that at all), and my decision to discuss it only in the conclusion seemed to some of the committee members, quite rightly, as an eleventh hour argument.  Still, I got the sense that even uttering "economic liberty" in the presence of people with certain ideological dispositions was to indulge in fighting words.  Not that I didn't really know that to begin with, so I can't claim to be too shocked.

[2]  This includes, by the way, the proposition that their explorations are anything like a true dialogue in which the interlocutors really have a chance to speak their mind.

[3]As an admittedly irrelevant aside (hence my inclusion of it in a footnote and not the main text), I'll say there are no self-help books for narcissists, or at least I haven't found any yet, even though there are plenty about "dealing with the narcissists in your life."  I can imagine narcissists complaining, "why doesn't anyone write a book for us?"  But it doesn't (necessarily!) stop there.  I think there is a certain kind of self regard that leads some people (e.g., me) who read self-help books to feel themselves particularly aggrieved or in need of special care or attention.  And most of those books I have read have, if one pokes into their implications deeply enough, some variant of the sub-theme "you're a great person, and it's others who are wronging you."  Perhaps a large number of these books are written for narcissists, but the authors don't have the heart (or the financial independence) to admit it.  I'm not claiming any sort of high ground here about this literature's readership.  I intend this speculation is as much as a self-criticism as an accusation about others.

How do you swagger? The almost tu quoque trick question

[Note:  this is the second of a series on being a jerk in academe.  For the introduction to the series, click here.]

Now I'm going to explain how philosophers sometimes "swagger."  But to do that, I'm going to provide a little background here.

When I was a freshman in college, I took an introduction to biology class that had three components.  The first was the regular three-day-a-week lecture.  The second was the one-day-a-week lab.  The third was a philosophy component.  For that philosophy component, we met one hour a week in a class taught by a professor who specialized in bioethics and in particular, the question of animal cruelty.  All three components worked together very well, and collectively they constituted one of the best classes I ever had.  The lectures were done well, and the biology professor, in addition to introducing us to the nuts and bolts of the science, also asked us to engage some of the more fundamental questions about why scientists believe what they do and whatnot.  (He also occasionally made strawman arguments about what Christians believe, and I found those arguments and the bully-pulpit style in which he delivered them to be rather disconcerting, but that's a discussion for another post.)

Even the lab was good, helped (in my opinion) by the fact that neither the biology professor or philosopher really cared for dissecting, on the (again, in my opinion) very reasonable grounds that what one learns from dissecting in a freshman-level biology class is not going to be of much use even to those who go on to become doctors and veterinarians.

The philosophy of science component was particularly stimulating.  The course itself and the readings we did challenged my perception of what science was and could be.  For the first time I read (and probably misinterpreted) Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.*  In particular, we were challenged to interrogate the claim that "science is value free."  For the first semester, we had to write a paper on that topic, and although I forget the exact parameters of that paper, the question was more or less "discuss critically the idea that science is value free."

Although every one of the small handful of philosophy classes I've taken have insisted that there are no right answers, there always has been one, and in this case, one element of the "right answer," so to speak, was to point out that the statement "science is value free" is itself a value statement, not only a statement about what science is, but about what it is supposed to be, on the ground that even discussing the value-freeness of science is to engage in a discussion of values and to assign values to science.

This "right answer" irked me.  One reason its irked me was that I didn't come up with it and received a lower grade than I might have (lower by a few points....I still got a pretty good grade).  Another reason is that it seemed like an unfair rigging of the game.  A hapless science researcher, doing his or her research, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and complaining about young earth creationists, is confronted with the question "is science value free," and simply by answering, he or she concedes the point.  It seemed to me that the question was posed in bad faith, and the gotcha was that nothing is value free.  Quod erat demonstratum.

At least, that's how I interpreted the "right answer" at the time.  In fact, I believe a more charitable way to look at the point is not to think of it as rigging the rules of the game, but rather as a way to demonstrate that value assumptions are not so easily got rid of by saying, for example, that scientists are only trying to find "the truth." Not only is "truth" definitely a value, but one might plausibly have to subordinate other values to get there.

One of the examples the professor gave was what was (and probably is) known as "stage 2" testing for some lifesaving medications.  In this type of testing (which I presume was double blind), some terminally ill patients were given potentially lifesaving, but so far not FDA approved, medications, while others were given placebos.  This was done in the name of trying to figure out how effective, if effective at all, a proposed medication was.  The professor's point was that at least some terminally ill patients were being denied potentially lifesaving treatment all in the name of finding out "the truth" (and, he might have added, in the name of getting a government agency to sign off on the treatment).  In this situation, he argued, a researcher couldn't just plead off by saying "science is value free."  In some cases, perhaps, such an overriding of values is called for, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.**

Pointing out these kinds of basic assumptions is what philosophers are supposed to do.  And if any circumstances are appropriate for such pointing out of basic assumptions, a philosophy class is one of those circumstances.  But there's a certain gotcha'ness that almost, though admittedly not quite, can venture into what seems like tu quoque territory, tu quoque being the argument by which person A tries to refute person B's argument by pointing out that person B is a hypocrite or at least not personally representative of what person B is arguing for.   There's a sense in which once one points out that another person relies on assumptions he or she is arguing against, that person's overall point has been refuted.

In the case of the scientist, it seems quite clear to me that the researcher would admit that seeking "truth" is a value, but that the researcher did not mean that when he or she said science is value free.  In other words, insisting on the starting value-claim seems to miss at least part of the point.  Pointing out the starting assumption is indeed important and needs to be done, and I personally experience a pretty high level of Schadenfreude whenever scientists are knocked down a few pegs by being reminded that they, too, belong to the human race and engage in value-begging and question-begging assumptions.  Still, scientists should be given their due after the quality of their founding assumptions has been pointed out.

Now, I say that this is a way that "philosophers" swagger.  Maybe that's wrong, although the few explicitly philosophy-inclined persons I know do that kind of assumption-calling occasionally.  Maybe it's more accurate to say it's a philosophy-lite swagger, in which people who have maybe taken a philosophy course or two, or who style themselves as particularly perceptive, use this assumption-calling as a way to refute arguments.

I know I do that sometimes.  One libertarian commenter at the League (now called "Ordinary Times") occasionally calls out liberal commenters on their moralism.  In particular, he calls out those who might say, (to use a made up, but within the pale example), that derivatives trading is "immoral" and ought to be abolished.  In one case, I tried to remind that person that calling out other persons' moralism is in its own way a "moral" claim, and that the libertarian principles that person believes in are in some ways reducible to moral claims about the rightness of certain forms of regulation or about creating a just society.  I think I was right, and I think anyone who calls out moralism in others does well to place his or her own moralism into context, if only to provide a fuller picture of what he/she is objecting to.

Still, my calling out elided an important point.  This commenter wasn't claiming that he was free of moral assumptions so much as he was pointing out a certain type of lazy argument, an argument that assumes because a certain situation is undesirable, it is therefore so wrong that anyone who engages in it is morally suspect, and that the right remedy is, in this case, some sort of law declaring the wrong thing wrong without even addressing why people engage in the "wrong" thing to begin with.  (I submit that another problem with poseur philosophers is that they write in long convoluted sentences whose meaning is hard to decipher.  Even so, I hope the last pre-parenthetical sentence of this paragraph is clear.)



*Pointing out other people's alleged misinterpretations of Kuhn seems to have become a cottage industry among those who "truly understand what Kuhn was saying" almost as if Kuhn wrote the Bible, and proper interpretation of the Bible is the way to find the good life in this world.  My own take is that (some of) the misinterpretations of Kuhn might be useful.

**I've since come to realize, by the way, that my professor's example was a bit too neat.  The problem of some being denied potentially lifesaving medications in order to test the effectiveness of a product is not nonexistent.  See, for example, protests in the 1980s over such testing schemes for anti-HIV medications.  However, I suspect that in a lot of cases, the difference is not always between potentially lifesaving treatments and placebos, but between treatments that might have some effect (say on a patient's protein production or whatnot) and no effect.  As a friend of mine, who had a relative who suffered from pancreatic cancer and agreed to participate in a study, said, there was really no possibility offered that his relative would improve at all, and the researchers were very upfront about this reality.  Still, the attitude has existed.  Paul de Kruif, in his book Microbe Hunters, also demonstrates the attitude that at least some people place a value on finding a control group in order to gauge the effectiveness of potentially lifesaving treatments.  The book is his account of how early twentieth-century scientists combated what were then very serious diseases by isolating the microbes responsible and issuing treatments.  For one such disease (I forget which), he notes a unique situation in which doctors with a prospective treatment for a particular disease were confronted with a ward-full of sufferers.  Instead of cordoning off half of the sufferers to receive placebos and giving the treatment to the other half, they decided to treat everyone.  De Kruif says this move was understandable, but he laments the decision, portraying it as a lost opportunity to discover the truth about that treatment's effectiveness.

How do you swagger? Addenda to my post on economists

In the last post in my series on being a jerk in academe, I talked about what I interpret as the argumentative style pursued by some economists.  I feel I need to clarify a few things.

By implication I suggested in that post that this style might have something to do with economists as a class, that when they talk to non-economists, they tend to adopt a certain posture that does little to encourage people to listen to them.

In that post, I wrote:

Again, I'm not trying to bait economics by the argumentation style of two people, Landsburg and the blogger I mention.  They all have valuable points. But I'm at a lost [sic!] to understand how the tone is designed to make it easier to listen to what they have to say.

Well, I'm no wholly at a loss.  In fact, I'm partially at a gain. I realize making provocative, outlandish claims,can, from time to time, goad someone to think differently or engage old topics in a new way.  It worked with me, or I wouldn't have written about them.

And it's not just the economists who do this.  I do it, too.  My insistence that the American Revolution wasn't a just war is, in addition to being a defensible statement in my opinion, is something I offer too often as a gadfly as a sneaky way to shock people.

My point about this type of talk being about economists as a class comes from what I observe to be their tendency to talk as if they assume everyone already shares their values and as if their values are not in some ways choices about what to value, sometimes universalizing their values to be some sort of objective truth.

This was part of the point I was trying to make about the letter Landsburg wrote to his daughter's preschool teacher.  In part, that point got lost in my poor writing.  I should clarify what the situation was and what I wanted the takeaway to be:

Landsburg has a strong distrust of some elements of the environmentalist movement, especially those near-religious elements that suggest we have an almost spiritual duty or obligation to take steps to preserve the environment.  Under this view, if we don't take those steps, if we "sin," then we face an assured destruction not unlike the calamities invoked in Revelations.  (That's not wholly Landsburg's point.  Robert H. Nelson has noted this aspect of some forms of the environmentalist movement, but I think Landsburg would probably find Nelson's interpretation congenial, at least insofar as it applies to environmentalists.  He has another point about economists.  See his The New Holy Wars:  Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in America).  This environmentalist worldview is sometimes used to impose obligations, via shaming or more direly, via government policy, that compels Landsburg to live in a way he doesn't want to live.  There's also an implicit claim by Landsburg that many of the policies and obligations imposed, such as recycling programs, might not work as well as their proponents think they do, and might come with their own externalities.

Now, Landsburg saw his daughter's preschool give an assembly where the preschoolers recited many of the mantras of the environmentalist movement.  Landsburg sees this as the equivalent of a school giving religious instruction to his daughter, and without his consent or approval.  Instead of talking with his daughter's teacher, however, he writes the teacher a letter in which he assumes that the teacher ought to have known that environmentalism is like a religion and that he feels so strongly about the issue that he finds the assembly as imposition of her (the teacher's) religion on his daughter.

My criticism of Landsburg is twofold. First, the snide tone of the letter was unnecessary.  There were simply nicer ways to explain his objections when she asked why he didn't like the assembly than to say, in a letter, "I reject you right to ask that question."

Second, he shouldn't assume the teacher or anybody else sees the environmentalist movement as obviously a religious-like movement.  Even today (about 20 years after Landsburg wrote his book), I imagine if you polled most people in the U.S., they would not think environmentalism is a "religion" in the same way that Christianity, Judaism, or Islam are.  Therefore, someone can believe in the separation of church and state or church and school (I believe this was a private school his daughter attended) and yet out of ignorance or out of having a different definition of religion, simply not recognize that teaching envrionmentalist-centric obligations is like teaching a religion.  To be fair, I do think Landsburg has an argument here.  A lot is done in the name of helping the environment that seems questionable and based on apocalyptic assumptions about what will happen if we don't.  But when people think about secularism in our schools, their (understandable, in my view) default assumption is usually that it's about what formal religions (with their clerisies and thou-shalt-not's) to inculcate or avoid inculcating, and not about claims that at least on the surface are grounded in scientific (and much that is said in support of evironmentalism at least claims to be scientifically backed) notions of the good.  If Landsburg actually discussed this with the teacher, then maybe she would have been receptive to some of his ideas.  (As a side note, I'm bothered by the assumption that once we have shown something is like a religion, we have therefore discredited it.)

Now, I criticized this example as a sneaky way to suggest an objective truth that might be more contestable than the claim of objectivity.  I think that's a type of approach we all can be and often are guilty of, whether we're economists or not.  But economics is given such deference in policy discussions (although perhaps not in actual policies), that economists are wont to talk as if they believe that theirs are the only values.  They have a podium from which to speak, and they are speaking as if the choir and only the choir are before them.

That's not to say they're wrong about any given policy or argument.  While I'm not sure I understand fully how economists define "wealth," I suspect their definition ought to be part of the equation at least for public policy and for one's own personal sense of how wealthy one is.  And  I, for one, buy the argument that freer trade increases aggregate wealth, the argument that voluntary exchange is a good thing (although I find it hard to distill purely voluntary exchange from coercive networks that I feel are embedded in our society), and the assumption that it's usually better to have more choices than fewer.  And for what it's worth, for all my talk about economists' "values" and the non-objectivity of those values, I believe that a majority of people in the western world have already drunk that particular flavor of kool aid.  For good or for ill, most of us like our things, and we like the fact that many of those things are cheaper and more available than before.  Even a nontrivial number of the dissenters seem to base their objections on the claim that some people (i.e., the less affluent) are denied a fair portion of the pie that they want to grow bigger.  (Of course, others, like some environmentalists, offer more fundamental objections.) But these are points that economists either need to be make and defend, or need to show that their interlocutors already agree with them.

Perhaps I was too quick to suggest that economists are peculiarly susceptible to the type of swagger where, so confident of the truth of their religion, they must proselytize it as if there be none others.  After all, I based my illustrations on only two examples, Landsburg and the blogger who discussed sweatshops and the sex trade.  I cannot claim to have been systematic in my "review" of the literature.  In fact, I cannot claim to have reviewed the literature because, well, I haven't.

But I do ask my economist and economics-trained friends to ask themselves whether they do at least sometimes adopt that type of swagger, and then to ask themselves if they are creating more noise than converts.  In fact, this whole "series" of blog posts is much more a call for introspection than it is an attempt at condemnation.