Book Review of Samuel Bowles' The Moral Economy

I recently published a review of Samuel Bowles' fine new book, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens. You can read the entire review at The New Rambler. Below is a slightly revised excerpt from the end of the piece:

Carrots and sticks must be part of a moralized judgment, not independent of competing conceptions of the good. In the words of the Victorian jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen, “the law is to the moral sentiments of the public … what a seal is to hot wax. It converts into a permanent judgment what might otherwise be a transient sentiment.” Incentives can’t be an alternative to social scripts for a life well lived; they must strengthen them.

Samuel Bowles formulates a critique of contemporary liberalism that is in many respects largely familiar. Richard Titmuss’ 1977 book, The Gift Relationship, sparked a fierce debate among economists and philosophers in arguing that altruism was far superior to markets in promoting blood donations. Kenneth Arrow replied with an influential critique, leveling two major objections: Titmuss failed to adequately theorize how market incentives crowd out moral motivations, and Titmuss failed to bring adequate evidence to bear in defense of the theoretical claim. Bowles’ contribution in this book is in many respects his response to both objections. The mechanisms of situation-dependent social cues and endogenous preference formation provide the theoretical account Titmuss lacked, and the major advances in experimental economics and game theory provide compelling evidence for the phenomenon’s empirical validity.

More importantly still, Bowles has demonstrated how Titmussian critiques of market economics apply just as powerfully to the philosophical doctrine of liberal neutrality. Perhaps not entirely comfortable with some of his conservative bedfellows on this latter point, Bowles is reluctant to appeal explicitly to the language of “soulcraft,” as George Will put it decades ago. He is happier lamenting the loss of altruism and other-oriented moral motivation. Yet his argument may prove more than he would like. For if it is true that political and economic institutions can’t help but shape our deepest assumptions about the world, Aristotelian Legislators can’t limit themselves merely to the cultivation of “social preferences.” They must recognize instead that sound policymaking requires a fairly thick underlying vision of the human good.

The Moral Economy appeals to an ancient truth. Incentives and self-interest are no substitute for moral motivation and altruism. The state cannot rudely impose laws on society with the alchemical hope that the right institutions, the right prices, and the right political form can successfully shape any people, any preferences, and any political matter. As Aristotle understood well, and which political economy has only recently recognized, the coercive power of the state depends on and is inextricably bound up with the character and culture of the community.

The entire piece can be read here.

Martha Nussbaum on Anger and Retribution

It is never good news to find yourself disagreeing with Martha Nussbaum. And yet her newest book, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice, while full of her characteristic philosophical breadth and eloquence, just screams out for refutation. I do not attempt to provide such a refutation here. Nussbaum’s is an impressive contribution to a longstanding debate, and a short blog post in no way affords her work the respect it is owed. But I will try to identify and briefly explicate my three principal objections

1. Nussbaum misreads the Oresteia

I have noted that it is always unnerving to find yourself disagreeing with Martha Nussbaum. This is especially the case in matters of classics exegesis. But no matter.

Nussbaum opens the book with an intriguing re-interpretation of the Oresteia. At the end of the cycle, the carnal, animalistic impulses of the Furies somehow morph into the gentle, judicious judgments of the Eumenides. The transition from Furies into “blessed ones” is representative of the evolution of justice from blood vengeance to the rule of law. Yet Nussbaum goes one step beyond this traditional reading, arguing that the Furies aren’t just forced to accept the constraints of law imposed by the civilized state around them. More than that, the Furies have fundamentally transformed their very nature. They no longer embody the primal impulse for retributive justice. They are now reason-giving and impartial, motivated not by anger, but by benevolence. As she puts it: “Aeschylus suggests that political justice does not just put a cage around anger, it fundamentally transforms it, from something hardly human, obsessive, bloodthirsty, to something human, accepting of reasons, calm, deliberate, and measured.”

This seems to me to go too far. It is true that Athena ends the cycle of blood-vengeance by institutionalizing a permanent body to dispense a new, procedural justice. Yet unlike Apollo, who scorns the ancient past, Athena seeks reconciliation with it. She knows that the Furies remain “the court of last appeal, the final blood avengers,” and she recognizes that their ancient passions cannot be excised; they must be built into the foundation of political justice. After initial resistance, the Furies agree to make their new home both within and beneath the city of Athens themselves. They become the Eumenides on Athena’s promise that they will continue to dispense their ancient justice, only now through the proper procedure.

It seems to me that the Furies, then, have not undergone a transformation in their fundamental essence. It remains their responsibility to oversee the people of Athens, and when man defies their justice, “their crushing hatred hits him, their implacable rage grinds him down to dust.” Vengeance and anger still constitute the most basic foundation of justice. While the new court of Athens is composed of wise and judicial citizens, Athena has literally built this system on top of the ancient structure of blood-vengeance. Athena’s new civic justice remains nourished and legitimized by the primal passions of an older age.

I think there is wisdom in Aeschylus’ teaching (as I have interpreted it). On my reading it is impossible to do away with the anger and retribution of ancient justice. Those impulses aren’t vices to be tamed, they remain the very foundation of our thinking about justice and desert.

2. Nussbaum’s emphasis on the “payback wish” misrepresents the strongest case for retributivism

Nussbaum’s critique of retributivism is grounded largely on her dismissal of the “payback wish.” By this, Nussbaum understands retributivism to be motivated primarily by an incoherent, futile belief that punishment will somehow restore cosmic balance to the universe. But of course, sophisticated retributivist theories never place too much value in a kind of schadenfreude—the sentiment conjured up by Nussbaum's “road of payback.”

Nor should retributivists be particularly troubled by Nussbaum’s insistence that such payback is “futile.” By this, Nussbaum means that the executors of retributive justice will never “get back” what they lost. The crime against them has been committed, and no punishment will restore what has been taken. That is all certainly the case. But it is also irrelevant. Sophisticated accounts don’t treat retribution as merely restorative. The original crime of course cannot be undone. But that’s not the point. Retributive anger is essentially other-regarding, not self-regarding. Retribution tracks deserved treatment; it has nothing to do with the fanciful wish to get something back. Retribution is not, as Nussbaum would have it, a futile exercise in self-satisfaction, it is a resonant principle of other-oriented justice.

This realization leads us to a much deeper problem with Nussbaum’s analysis. On her view, the central problem with anger and retribution is that they are “backward-looking.” True justice requires a transition from that backward-orientation toward the future. But what exactly is wrong with the kind of backward-lookingness she associates with retributivism? To see the limits of the view, let’s consider cases of deserved good-treatment. Acts of kindness or generosity trigger in the recipients certain reciprocal moral obligations. Those obligations aren’t grounded in a kind of abstract consideration of what will make the future go best. They are instead sensitive to real, morally significant acts taken in the past. The duties of gratitude, for example, are moral obligations that guide future conduct rooted in a consideration of what came before. This has nothing to do with producing cosmic harmony, as Nussbaum suggests. It is instead a simple recognition that moral desert can be rooted in the past and can nonetheless shape future-oriented obligations.

To take another example, consider the moral pull of the call for reparations for the descendants of American slaves. This particular issue is itself quite complex and deserving of a fuller treatment. But the case for such reparations is not most plausibly rooted in some general belief that greater redistribution will ex ante make things go best. Instead, the policy is attractive precisely because of the historic wrong it tracks, and because of the demands of deserved treatment those historic wrongs evoke.

Many more difficulties remain with Nussbaum’s critique of retributivism that can be adequately addressed here. I remain convinced that retribution is the basis of just punishment in large part because all the other alternatives seem to justify far more than is acceptable. For instance, if punishment is to be justified entirely on some account of what makes the future go best, it is difficult to understand the wrongness of punishing the innocent. Nussbaum does have some things to say on this point, but none that prove particularly compelling to me. But this broader point of dispute demands a more systematic treatment than I can provide here.

3. Nussbaum’s discussion of incarceration and the justice system is wholly inadequate

Perhaps the least satisfying section of Nussbaum’s book is her brief discussion of the American criminal justice system. America’s mass incarceration, on her view, stems directly from our incoherent retributivist impulses. She appends to this diagnosis an almost obligatory invocation of racism as a significant motivation in shaping America’s legal structure. I do not wish to argue that Nussbaum is wrong in this diagnosis of the American incarceral state. I wish merely to point out that her discussion is inadequate.

No serious, good-faith effort is made to engage with the suggestion that incarceration has substantially reduced crime and has produced significant improvements to social welfare. The tone of Nussbaum’s discussion here implies that such an empirical hypothesis is so absurd as to merit no serious consideration.

Nussbaum points us to the important work of James Heckman, and rightly insists that social science research has produced a broad range of encouraging interventions that might reduce crime without increasing incarceration. This is important research that I too hope to see more jurisdictions experiment with. But the extraordinary confidence Nussbaum exudes in these correctives seems misplaced. Her citation of Heckman’s work on the Perry Preschool program, for instance, simply fails to grapple with a wide range of scholarly criticisms of the efficacy preschool as a social investment. Preschool still of course has serious, scholarly champions. But the literature is mixed, and Nussbaum acts irresponsibly to suggest otherwise. She acts especially irresponsibly to suggest that opposition to universal preschool stems in large part from racism.

Philosophers like Nussbaum have much to contribute to ongoing debate over issues like incarceration and criminal justice. But just as social scientific positivists delegitimize themselves by refusing to engage seriously with normative questions, so too do moral philosophers delegitimize themselves by refusing to engage seriously with empirical research.

Conclusion 

There is much to be admired about Martha Nussbaum’s important contribution to the debate over the moral basis of punishment. I have outlined a few objections which I take to be rather damaging of her overall argument. But any fair-minded reader should appreciate the book’s extraordinary philosophical depth and literary elegance. All things considered, however, Nussbaum’s critique of retributive justice and anger remains thoroughly unconvincing. Anger is not some unfortunate evolutionary relic to be done away with. While, as with all emotions, it must be balanced against other moral sentiments, anger remains an invaluable part of our moral vocabulary and thinking. As a professor of mine likes to remark, anger always entails an implicit claim about justice. The project of moral philosophy should be to excavate that claim, not to excise the emotion that produced it.

Richard Hofstadter on Immigrants and the Progressive Movement

I had always assumed that immigrants fit reasonably well into the progressive coalition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course populist racism posed a major challenge to integrating newly-arrived immigrants into the working class. But I always imagined this challenge was rather easily overcome by the shared economic interests of immigrants and the native working class.

I recently came across a fascinating passage in Richard Hofstadter's 1955 The Age of Reform that made me realize this analysis was far too simplistic, and that there was much more antagonism between immigrant communities and the progressive movement than I previously thought.

I quote some of the most provocative passages at length, with the most striking bits in bold:

In politics, then, the immigrant was usually at odds with the reform aspirations of the American Progressive. Together with the native conservative and the politically indifferent, the immigrants formed a potent mass that limited the range and the achievements of Progressivism. The loyalty of immigrant voters to the bosses was one of the signal reasons why the local reform victories were so short-lived. It would be hard to imagine types of political culture more alien to each other than those of the Yankee reformer and the peasant immigrant. The Yankee’s idea of political action assumed a popular democracy with widespread participation and eager civic interest. To him politics was the business, the responsibility, the duty of all men. It was an arena for the realization of moral principles of broad application—and even, as the case of temperance and vice crusades—for the correction of private habits. The immigrant, by contrast, coming as a rule from a peasant environment and from aristocratic societies with strong feudal survivals, was totally unaccustomed to the active citizen’s role. He expected to be acted on by government, but not to be a political agent himself. To him government meant restrictions on personal movement, the arbitrary regulation of life, the inaccessibility of the law, and the conscription of the able-bodied. To him, government was the instrument of the ruling classes, characteristically acting in their interests, which were indifferent or opposed to his own. Nor was government in his eyes an affair of abstract principles and rules of law: it was the actions of particular men with particular powers. Political relations were not governed by abstract principles; they were profoundly personal.[3]

Not being reared on the idea of mass-participation, the immigrant was not especially eager to exercise his vote immediately upon naturalization. Nor was he interested in such reforms as the initiative, referendum, and recall, which were intelligible only from the standpoint of the Anglo-American ethos of popular political action. When he finally did assume his civic role, it was either in response to Old World loyalties (which became a problem only during and after the first World War) or to immediate needs arising out of his struggle for life in the American city—to his need for a job or charity or protection from the law or for a street vendor’s license. The necessities of American cities—their need for construction workers, street-cleaners, police and firemen, service workers of all kinds—often provided him with his livelihood, as it provided the boss with the necessary patronage. The immigrant, in short, looked to politics not for the realization of high principles but for concrete and personal gains, and he sought these gains through personal relationships. And here the boss, particularly the Irish boss, who could see things from the immigrant’s angle but could also manipulate the American environment, became a specialist in personal relations and personal loyalties. The boss himself encouraged the immigrant to think of politics as a field in which one could legitimately pursue one’s interests. … Where reformers identified patriotism with knowledgeable civic action and self-denial, the bosses were satisfied to confine it to party regularity, and they were not embarrassed by a body of literature purporting to show that to trade one’s vote for personal services was a form of civic iniquity.”

That passage includes the following fascinating footnote:

[3]“C.f. Henry Cabot Lodge’s complaint that the idea of patriotism—devotion to one’s country—was Roman, while the idea of devotion to the emperor as the head of state was Byzantine. It was the Byzantine inheritance, he said, that the Eastern immigrants were bringing in. Henry Cabot Lodge...  

The boss’s code of personal loyalty and the reformer’s code of loyalty to civic ideas could not easily be accommodated, with the consequence that when the two had dealings with each other there were irreparable misunderstandings.”

I don't know enough about the Progressive Era to assess Hofstadter's account. And I don't what (if any) lessons Hofstadter's analysis has for our political present. But as I see things, today's progressive coalition is split between identitarianism on one side and Scandinavian-style social democracy on the other. I go back and forth thinking whether these bedfellows are fundamentally compatible with one another. If Hofstadter's history is correct, and if the general principles apply in our own time, perhaps that gives us a reason to think the two aren't so compatible.

Two Concepts of Nationalism

A terrific conversation over lunch a couple weeks ago got me thinking about an important distinction between two concepts of nationalism.

The first concept is the nationalism of national greatness. It is a nationalism of building high and travelling far, of lasting glory and heroic accomplishment, of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen. This is the sort of nationalism underlying that common lament: “We just don’t do big things anymore.”

The second concept is the nationalism of cultural particularism. It is a nationalism that builds out from tangible life and which identifies the nation as an embodiment of a distinctive culture and set of mores. This is the sort of nationalism that can be described as properly traditionalist, clinging to parochialism and prejudice (words I do not hurl as terms of abuse).

Both concepts of nationalism are united in their hostility to globalism, in their rejection of a cosmopolitan worldview that admits of no relevant distinctions or differences across peoples or cultures. Similarly, the two concepts are united against the derisive anti-nationalism of a certain strand of the radical left, which castigates the nation (and in particular our nation) as a continued source of grave mischief and injustice. But that thin unity produces frequent political commonality, making it harder to see just how radically opposed these two conceptions of nationalism are.

The nationalism of greatness is, of course, given its most powerful statement today by Donald Trump. But it would be a mistake to read that guiding vision of nationalism as merely an extreme, populist explosion. To the contrary, restoring national greatness has been a central conviction of most of our recent, significant political figures and thinkers. Bill Kristol and David Brooks for example, two staunch members of the #NeverTrump movement, vigorously lamented in 1997 the loss of a great American spirit. In their words, “What’s missing from today’s American conservatism is the appeal to American greatness.”

The nationalism of greatness finds expression too in our progressive politics. It is reflected in a collective yearning to fully draw out the dialectic of American liberty, in a conviction to fundamentally transform the nation in alignment with our guiding ideology. No clearer statement of that progressive vision of American greatness exists than President Obama’s 2012 inaugural address. There President Obama placed the state of our political present in the context of a great unfolding narrative, a constant struggle to make more real the founding ideological purpose of our nation:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone: to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.

In this regard, both conservative and progressive nationalisms of greatness share common ground. The right of course cannot insist that American conservatism bears much in common with the blood and soil, throne and altar conservatism of the Old World. Instead, the great project our nation has undertaken is an essentially creedal one. Our nation’s greatness is a function of her loyalty to our ideological mission. As a result, the nationalism of greatness finds itself utterly incompatible with the nationalism of the particular. For if the nation’s greatness is to be assessed by its collective strivings, little time can be spent on the little platoons of social life, on the complexities of parochial communal life.

Likewise, the nationalism of the particular is skeptical of the grand abstraction of “national greatness.” Such a modern construction forces contrived unity where none exists and tramples genuine commonality when it organically springs forth. The worship of national greatness leads inexorably to the vulgarity and atomization of mass society the particularist detests. To the particularist, “America” as an idea is far too big a thing to love. She loves her family, her school, and her neighbors. She loves the small rituals that give meaning and dignity to the pedestrian. But it's more than just that litany of communitarian goods; she values the norms that structure her society, the shared cultural expectations of how things ought to run. Her patriotism, so far as it exists, is an abstraction of a sort, but an abstraction that coheres the concrete, tangible sources of value. She does not begin from America’s ideological purpose and work her way down, but rather begins from the communities of meaning that surround her and builds up. The American flag does not represent Liberty, it represents the way of life she has inherited.

The difference between these two concepts of nationalism is the difference between gigantism and localism. A partisan of national greatness would be quite comfortable equating patriotic citizenship with voting every few years and paying taxes. Indeed, as a friend notes, this is precisely the account David Brooks recently espoused. Citizenship to the localist, on the other hand, has virtually nothing to do with participation in a distant government—what Tocqueville denounced as the “administrative centralization” wholly divorced from true patriotism. It builds instead from the simple duties and reciprocities of ordinary life.

An example might help here to fix some intuitions. Consider loyalty to one’s alma mater. I root for Yale over Harvard every November not because Yale better expresses my ideological worldview, not because Yale is a greater institution or even a better one. Frankly, I have little interest at all in Yale as such. I root for Yale because of the friends and professors and clubs I found as an undergraduate. Those personal, intimate loyalties I built up at Yale are affecting for all sorts of different reasons. Some friendships were forged over academic argument, others through decidedly non-academic shared personal difficulties. When I root for Yale, I don’t intend to honor her administrators or her institutional worldview. I intend merely to honor a constellation of personal loyalties that mean a great deal to me. That’s the sort of thing I mean by a nationalism grounded in the particular.

I conclude with a passage from Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue:

Patriotism cannot be what it was because we lack in the fullest sense a patria. The point I am making might be confused with the commonplace liberal rejection of patriotism. Liberals have often—not always—taken a negative or even hostile attitude towards patriotism, partly because their allegiance is to values which they take to be universal and not local and particular, and partly because of a well-justified suspicion that in the modern world, patriotism is often a façade behind which chauvinism and imperialism are fostered. But my present point is not that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. Patriotism is or was a virtue founded on attachment primarily to a political and moral community and only secondarily to the government of that community. … When however the relationship of government to the moral community is put in question both by the changed nature of government and the lack of moral consensus in the society, it becomes difficult any longer to have any clear, simple and teachable conception of patriotism. Loyalty to my country, to my community—which remains unalterably a central virtue—becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me.

Though his point is somewhat orthogonal to mine, Macintyre's dichotomy between a patria that embodies the moral community and a state as brute, institutional bureaucracy is a close cousin to the dichotomy between the nationalism of greatness and the nationalism of the particular.

John Schaar on Equal Opportunity

John Schaar condemns equal opportunity as wickedly conservative in a classic 1967 paper. It's a shame this line of thinking hasn't gotten much attention.

No policy formula is better designed to fortify the dominant institutions, values, and ends of the American social order than the formula of equality of opportunity, for it offers *everyone* a fair and equal chance to find a place within that order...The facile formula of equal opportunity...opens more and more opportunities for more and more people to contribute more and more energies toward the realization of a mass, bureaucratic, technological, privatized, militaristic, bored, and thrill-seeking, consumption-oriented society--a society of well-fed, congenial, and sybaritic monkeys surrounded by gadgets and pleasure-toys.a

G.K. Chesterton on the Wisdom of Fables and Fairy Tales

I recently stumbled across a very fine C.K. Chesterton introduction to a 1912 edition of Aesop’s Fables. With all his characteristic insight, Chesterton brings out the distinction between the wisdom of fables and the wisdom of fairy tales. Fables need animals to embody human types, strengths, and weaknesses. These animals and the roles they play are perfectly predictable. They cannot overcome their type, as it inheres in the very essence of what they are. Fairy tales, on the other hand, require not animals but humans. The characters there demonstrate not the littleness and predictability of a tragically limited human, but rather the heroic potential of human possibility.

Neither depiction of human nature is complete. Yet nor is some synthesis between the two necessarily desirable. Full of familiar contradiction, the two genres reflect the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of human character.

Aesop, or Babrius (or whatever his name was), understood that, for a fable, all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march on, as the pawn in chess must march on. The fable must not allow for the crooked captures of the pawn; it must not allow for what Balzac called "the revolt of a sheep" The fairy tale, on the other hand, absolutely revolves on the pivot of human personality. If no hero were there to fight the dragons, we should not even know that they were dragons. If no adventurer were cast on the undiscovered island—it would remain undiscovered. If the miller's third son does not find the enchanted garden where the seven princesses stand white and frozen—why, then, they will remain white and frozen and enchanted. If there is no personal prince to find the Sleeping Beauty she will simply sleep. Fables repose upon quite the opposite idea; that everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself. The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy. Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not Aesop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot be anything but themselves: it is their tragedy that they could not lose their souls. 

This is the immortal justification of the Fable: that we could not teach the plainest truths so simply without turning men into chessmen. We cannot talk of such simple things without using animals that do not talk at all. Suppose, for a moment, that you turn the wolf into a wolfish baron, or the fox into a foxy diplomatist. You will at once remember that even barons are human, you will be unable to forget that even diplomatists are men. You will always be looking for that accidental good-humour that should go with the brutality of any brutal man; for that allowance for all delicate things, including virtue, that should exist in any good diplomatist. Once put a thing on two legs instead of four and pluck it of feathers and you cannot help asking for a human being, either heroic, as in the fairy tales, or un-heroic, as in the modern novels.

"Fractured Republic" Reflections Part Three: The Benedict Option and the Melian Dialogue

This is part three of a three-part review of Yuval Levin's The Fractured Republic. See also the introduction, part one, and part two of this review.

Yuval Levin concludes his discussion of culture in The Fractured Republic by invoking the so-called “Benedict Option.” Building off philosophical work laid by Alasdair MacIntyre and popularized among contemporary conservatives by Rod Dreher, the Benedict Option calls on conservatives to step back from the national culture wars and to focus instead on tending to their own gardens. By building strong, vibrant alternatives to the progressive mass culture, conservatives can preserve the permanent things of traditional social life while inviting others to join their thriving and (ironically) counter-cultural way of life.

A vigorous defender of subsidiarity, Levin is a natural ally for partisans of the Benedict Option:

Conservatives should think about the preconditions for moral living in terms of building cohesive, attractive, moral subcultures in those mediating layers of society, rather than just struggling for control of the old institutions of a once-consolidated “mainstream” culture. It means focusing inward and close to home.

As he goes on to explain, cultural communities no longer begin from shared moral assumptions in our bifurcated society. The “solipsism of our age of individualism” has brought with it emancipation from the enabling constraints of traditional life, undermining institutions and practices that once served as common touchstones and bearers of shared meaning within an always-diverse populace. Given the intractable division within contemporary American society, Levin recommends we give up on finding “wholesale solutions” to govern our nation's increasingly disparate subcultures.

All sides in our culture wars would be wise to focus less attention than they have on dominating our core cultural institutions, and more on building thriving subcultures. For social conservatives mourning the loss of their dominant position in some of those core institutions, it is particularly important (and particularly difficult) to keep this imperative in mind.

Levin may well be right that it would be wise for all parties to withdraw from contesting the national culture. Yet herein lies what has always been my great frustration with the Benedict Option. The progressive left simply isn’t going to step back from waging the national culture war. They are winning. The spectacular decline of conservative cultural priorities on virtually every issue of consequence over the last several decades is stunning. As a friend of mine puts it, the Overton Window’s leftward drift has accelerated so dramatically, you can now see it move with the naked eye.

And yet all the great progressive victories have come despite the aggressive presence of organized, well-funded conservative campaigns to resist the left's cultural conquest. Imagine just how much faster cultural conservatism will collapse in the absence of such an organized, national political focus.

Levin recognizes this reality to some degree, and he notes that religious freedom, for example, can only be protected through a vigorous, offensive campaign to “keep open the space in which cultural conservatives might appeal to the larger society.” Yet the repeated insistence that conservatives concede the national culture reflects a failure to appreciate the enduring wisdom of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue: In war, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

In calling on conservatives to give up on the national culture while praying that the dominant cultural left will do the same, Levin asks conservatives to suffer far more than they must.

Against Usury

The following is adapted from a speech I gave at the Yale Political Union in the Spring of 2015 on the topic: Resolved, Nationalize Banks. Much of the speech was delivered in jest, though not all of it. 

Mr. Speaker, when oh when did the Chair of the Party of the Left become such a staunch apologist for the neo-liberal consensus?! If we are to believe the previous speaker, the choice before us is between a slightly more capitalistic, and slightly more socialistic economy. Our options on this telling are limited to blindly obeying the dictates of a morally insidious “invisible hand,” or sheepishly bowing to a cadre of Ivy-educated technocrats. Mr. Speaker, this is a false choice. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, both socialism and capitalism are so steeped in the filth of modern liberal ideology, that to defend either is to endorse a vision of human nature as perniciously absurd, as it is absurdly pernicious.

Mr. Speaker, impassioned debate over the proper division between commercial and investment banking and the optimal level of risk and leverage, is to ignore the central moral evil at the heart of our modern financial system. I speak of an evil so repugnant, that it has been roundly rejected by virtually every moral and religious tradition in the history of mankind. I speak of an evil condemned by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Cato, and by the great traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. I speak of course, of the moral outrage that is usury.

For millennia a dirty word, usury today has become an object of veneration. Economics courses across our morally and fiscally bankrupt nation preach the virtues of interest as the motivating force behind commercial and economic success. This has become a central plank in the unassailable dogma of the docile modern mind. Yet it remains manifestly obvious that an economic system built on usury—that is to say an economic system built on the wealthy taking advantage of the poor—is morally abhorrent.

“No!” some of our neo-liberal peers may reply. “Usury is not taking advantage of the poor; it is an economic institution that affects pareto optimal results!” So deep lies our indoctrination that we have grown blind even of self-evident moral facts. But to briefly state the argument, interest enables a wealthy lender in a position of utter domination to profit off of the labor and struggle of an impoverished man entirely at his disposal. It is to objectify labor and dehumanize the laborer. In its effort to transform private vice into public virtue, it eviscerates the moral bonds between neighbors any rightly constituted state exists to promote.

Mr. Speaker, the moral question at the heart of this resolution is does our banking system participate in evil. And Mr. Speaker, be it in the hands of a group of small, elite, wealthy oligarchs who work on Wall Street, or in the hands of a group of small, elite, wealthy oligarchs who work for the Federal Government, so long as our banking system participates in the usurious world of global finance, our shared wealth and prosperity will be a crime.

To be clear, I am arguing for nothing short of an utter rejection of the modern financial system. I am advocating for what might reasonably be described as a system of “neo-feudalism,” for a return to the pre-modern economy. To combat our fetishization of materiality, we must return to a more traditional and philosophically coherent understanding of “property” not simply as “private” or “public”, but as essentially corporate. We must undo the vicious divorce between persons and their proper social roles, and we must structure our economic system to strengthen, rather than undermine, communitarian wellbeing.

To overcome alienation, we must recognize that “private property” is a cancer in our culture. What wealth we have is necessarily held in common, not as measured by income redistribution or gini coefficients, but as measured by a proper understanding of the duties and trusts that hold our intertwined lives together.

Mr. Speaker, I do not have the time now to discourse at length on what a banking system in a properly constituted society would actually look like. But in brief, our best models lie not in the great socialist experiments of the 20th century, but in workers’ cooperatives and credit unions. We should look not to the failed acts of massive state empowerment, but to smaller yet far more impressive distributist successes, like that of the Mondragon cooperative in Spain. Simply shifting ownership of our irredeemable banking system from privately employed oligarchs to publicly employed oligarchs will do nothing to combat the true moral evil at the heart of our global economy.

Mr. Speaker, the state should not nationalize banking, the state should criminalize banking!

"Fractured Republic" Reflections Part Two: A Democratic Solution to a Democratic Problem

This is part two of a three-part review of Yuval Levin's The Fractured Republic. See also the introduction and parts one and three of this review.

Yuval Levin reminds readers that political nostalgia for an era of midcentury national harmony rests on an unproductive impulse to restore a romanticized, imagined past. The underlying forces of social diffusion that have brought about the peculiar historical developments of the past century cannot be undone. And so, in a formulation inspired by James Madison’s famous closing words in Federalist 10, Levin argues that “we must seek diffusing, individualist remedies for the diseases most incident to a diffuse, individualist society.”

This prescription of democratic solutions for democratic problems again reflects Levin’s intellectual debt to Tocqueville’s masterful study of American democracy. But as I suggested in my previous post, I am skeptical that bolstering individual choice can effectively temper the excesses of an atomized democratic culture. Tocqueville too, I suspect, was far more pessimistic about democracy's capacity to regulate democracy than Levin may wish to believe.

To Levin, the “defining feature of twenty-first century America” is our contemporary “bifurcated concentration.” The forces of individualism dissolve mediating bonds across society, while cementing ever-more ossified and separate subcultures. In Levin’s words:

Individualism involves a corrosion of people’s sense of themselves as defined by a variety of strong affiliations and unchosen bonds and its replacement by a sense that all connections are matters of individual choice and preference. It breaks up clusters of people into more isolated individuals held together by more casual affinities and more utilitarian relationships—each bets understood in relation to the needs and wants of the individual.

Like Tocqueville, Levin takes this to be an inescapable development in a democratic social state. Against a long tradition in Western political thought, the two doubt the possibility of a mixed regime that combines aspects of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy to limit the political defects of each. In Tocqueville's words, "What is called mixed government has always seemed to me a chimera. ... in the end one discovers that in every society there is one principle of action that dominates the others." Instead, what is needed is the cultivation of essentially democratic institutions, which can nonetheless be used as if they were aristocratic in tempering the wilder temptations of the demos.

America's distinctive brand of Protestantism, for instance, plays a critical role in preserving freedom in American society. Tocqueville catalogs at length the harsh, invasive laws drawn from Leviticus which structure life in Puritan New England. Yet unlike in Europe (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), religion in America does not derive its power from an external source of authority—an independent papacy, for example. Instead, laws enforcing stringent codes of religious morality are democratically voted on and ratified. Religion both limits and asserts democratic sovereignty.

Alongside religion, juries, voluntary associations, gender norms, and local townships all follow this basic pattern. Rather than checking democracy from outside, they build on democratic first principles to regulate American culture from within.

Such a culture of democratic self-regulation is Levin’s basic diagnosis for American society today. Gone are the days of a unified national culture. Rather than yearn for their return, we should invest in building an even more decentralized society. Individual choice is to be celebrated and expanded, rather than restrained in the interest of conformity and community. Our priority should be “to make the most of the narrowing circles of cohesion and reliance that we now tend to inhabit—not by constructing massive, centralized stores of authority, but by building smaller, decentralized networks of trust.”

But the self-segregation Levin extols is no substitute for community. Replacing unchosen bonds of obligation with custom-designed experiments in living may well deepen the ruthless atomization and the unrelenting worship of the gnostic self that plague contemporary life. A carefully chosen and curated set of Facebook group affiliations cannot compare with the rich, humane bonds of communal life. As Chesterton puts it in a masterful celebration of that which is given, not chosen:

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises.

Perhaps, then, what is needed is contradiction within our civic culture. Forthrightly aristocratic institutions—churches, universities, and the like—must regulate democracy not from within, but from without. To adequately check our worst impulses, they must derive their legitimacy precisely from their non-democratic roots. As the Tocqueville of Volume II of Democracy in America and later writings saw, we would do well to abandon our alchemical faith that democratic institutions alone can cure democratic ills.

T.S. Eliot on "Social Justice"

T.S. Eliot in a footnote in "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture"

I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the current term 'social justice.' From meaning 'justice in relations between groups or classes,' it may slip into meaning a particular assumption as to what these relations should be; and a course of action might be supported because it represented the aim of 'social justice,' which from the point of view of 'justice' was not just. The term 'social justice' is in danger of losing its rational content--which would be replaced by a powerful emotional charge. I believe that I have used the term myself: it should never be employed unless the user is prepared to define clearly what social justice means to him, and why he thinks it just.