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Chapter 3--The Crisis of Authority in Our Times |
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Chapter Three
The Crisis of Authority in Our Times
The rationale for the selection of things to say regarding Marx and issues he raises in the preceding chapter was that discussing those particular ideas gave me opportunities to build a case for my general point of view. That point of view (or “philosophy”); the one I have been developing in the preceding two chapters and will continue to develop in the following ones; the one that has roots in Deweyan naturalistic pragmatism, in Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy, and in contemporary critical realism; can be called ethical construction.
“Ethical construction” is a phrase that is intended to suggest a useful general approach and general attitude toward solving problems. It is “construction” because it is about building. It is “ethical” because it is about rules and norms, mores. It is:
-- a view of the agent or agency doing the constructing and problem-solving;
-- a view of the material out of which solutions to problems are ethically constructed;
-- a view of the objectives in terms of which the degree of success or failure in problem-solving is to be evaluated;
-- some linguistic and conceptual choices.
I will next restate and further develop the point of view outlined in Chapter One, using this four-part format loosely copied from Aristotle’s idea of four principles or causes (archein), as a prologue to commenting on how the interpretations of left wing and right wing economics offered in Chapter Two contribute to building a case in favor of ethical construction. I will not exhaust any of the four topics (agency, material, objectives, or form).
The agency that solves a problem is human action. (See Hampshire 1982, Aquinas 1992). It is praxis, which Aristotle characterized as action guided and accompanied by talking. It is typically cooperation. It is typically rational, which is why humans are called homo sapiens sapiens.
Rationality can be distinguished, following Max Weber, into its modern and traditional forms, Zweckrationalität and Wertrationalität. In its modern form rationality is planning. We analyze a problem; gather data; use science to relate causes to effects and therefore to relate proposed actions to their expected consequences; use technologies to expand our capacities; agree on a plan; sometimes (if the scale is large enough) break down the plan into projects and operations; evaluate progress; and revise our actions in the light of the evaluations.
In its traditional forms, Wertrationalität, rationality is following the customs of our tribe. Obeying customs is typically personalized as obeying spirits or gods or, for monotheists, God. Stories organize practice. (See Hesiod´s Works and Days) We obey God, who is a person and therefore easier to think about than a set of rules, and God takes care of us. He (or in some cases She) is our God, and we are his people. He is our pastor; we are his sheep. He (or She) is our Father (or Mother) and we are his (or her) family. The customs and the associated relationships among persons -- the kinship patterns, the relationships of human to divine-- have evolved since time immemorial, and although nobody knows why they work, on the whole they do work. Even before there were customs –cultural codes—there was DNA –biological codes. Some problem-solving was biologically programmed hundreds of thousands of years ago, such as drinking water when thirsty.
Culturally guided action can be regarded as a continuation and a refinement, as a more efficient form, of biologically guided action; while modern rationality, Zweckrationalität, can be regarded as a continuation and refinement, as a more efficient form (but let us not be too confident too soon –it may yet produce the death of the biosphere and the species) of culturally guided action. Looked at another way, modern rationality is a set of customs modern people happen to have. It is not necessarily an optimal set of customs; indeed it has been denounced as patriarchal, death-loving, materialistic, repressive, individualistic, cold, Euro-centered… to name a few. Zweckrationalität might be improved by inventing new rationalities or reviving old ones or raising the status of alternative contemporary rationalities. Wertrationalität in some of its diverse forms (some being more functional than others) can be seen as traditional wisdom, as a form of rationality that has been tested by time, that is likely to be connected with deep human instincts not fully comprehended and taken into account by modern deliberate decision-making. It can be seen as the accumulated conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious experience of a people over many generations.
Generalizing, to cover both modern and ancient cases, to cover both conscious deliberation and unconscious habit, to fudge the question to what extent thought is individual and to what extent it is collective, I speak of human action as guided by cultural structures. The guidance is structural because its form is patterned wholes; its effects are not achieved by a single element but by parts in relationship to wholes; indeed the relationships precede and form the parts. (Piaget 1970) It is cultural because it uses the tools for guiding action that are characteristic of our group-oriented species: words, images, numbers, signs and symbols generally, rituals, stories, music.
So much for agency.
The materials that ethical construction (or “cultural action”) has to work with are pre-existing culture and physical reality. “`Real,’ finally, is a subdivision within the field of the `already out there now’; part of that is mere appearance; but part is real; and its reality consists in its relevance to biological success or failure, pleasure or pain.” (Lonergan 1957, p. 277) To speak more adequately, the real is the verified. (Ibid.)
So much for material.
The objective of ethical construction is, to borrow a phrase from Antonio Gramsci, to adjust culture to physical function. It is to achieve clean and adequate water to drink, pure air, healthful and sufficient nutrition, safety, housing, clothing, an environment free of contaminants; and also freedom from depression, a good night’s sleep, a warm feeling of being accepted and appreciated, respect, a sense that one has some control over one’s life (like that of Freud’s little Hans who preferred control to pleasure), happiness, friendship, beauty (these last two being what G.E. Moore finally found to be the main components of a non-natural quality called “good”), opportunity, liberty, and absence of humiliation. The latter items on this list are sometimes called “emotional,” “psychological,” “mental,” or “social” needs; nonetheless, whatever the merits may be of qualifying them with other adjectives, they are physical needs. They are manifest in physical feelings. Emotions have a physical basis, even though cultural interpretation is sometimes needed to distinguish one emotion from another. Failure to achieve the objective of satisfying such needs has somatic consequences. Michel Foucault illustrated this point (albeit unintentionally) when he reported that in 16th to 19th century France and Germany repressive spiritual disciplines, which thwarted all expressions of sexuality, were resisted and opposed by bodies going into convulsive seizures. (Foucault 1999, p. 198 ff.)
The ultimately decisive standards (although often not the operative standards in everyday practice) come from nature, not from culture. It is not the case, for example, that the benefits of respect and the harm of humiliation come from arbitrary social standards. It is the other way around. Two of the ways to measure the degree of success or failure of a society in solving the problems set by the human body, as it has been constituted by evolution, is to measure the extents to which the citizens of the society enjoy respect and are not humiliated. (What varies from culture to culture and from person to person is what counts as respect and what counts as humiliation.) (See www.humiliationstudies.org)
Nevertheless, even though we rely on natural indicators to measure health and sickness, and in general to measure success and failure in ethical construction, it must be recognized that nature does not care whether we succeed or fail. Even though nature has fashioned the human as a tear-shedding animal, an animal for whom it is natural to be in love, who will, if the affections are well cultivated and not badly cultivated, shed tears for the misfortunes of others; nevertheless, nature itself is indifferent. If the earth should fall into the sun tomorrow, rapidly extinguishing the lives of all six billion of us, nature would shed no tears. If a technocratic elite should succeed tomorrow in seizing control of all weapons and all communication systems, and decide to exterminate half of us as unnecessary and to subdue the other half of us as their slaves, nature would not care about that either. We need more than nature to legitimate the culture of solidarity that Gramsci had in mind when he assigned us the pragmatic task of adjusting culture so that it would physically work.
We need to specify that “works” means “works for everybody.” Plato achieved this specification in Book IV of The Republic when he invited his dialogue partners to step out of their egos and to engage in planning a city. He changed the point of view to a social point of view. Similarly, John Rawls asks us to don a “veil of ignorance” and to consider what justice would be in a social order we would choose while the veil of ignorance prevented us from knowing what our role in that social order would be. He claims that we would then choose a form of justice that benefits the worst off, since we ourselves might be those worst off. We do not need an ethics of nobility, dedicated to producing a higher human type while trampling on the masses, which arguably is what nature favors. Ethical construction needs rather what Friedrich Nietzsche identified as a “herd morality” (although he overstated its defects and understated its merits), which he identified with the tradition which began in the West with the Jews; and continued with the Christians as principles of love and service to others were extended through St. Paul from Jews to gentiles; and continued with modern ideas of democracy germinated in a European soil nourished by centuries of Judeo-Christian idealism; and continued further in the socialist and anarchist movements that Nietzsche observed around him in 19th century Europe; and which continues today in those movements which extend democratic ideals to insist on everyone’s right (not just some people’s right) to health care, to a pension, to access to lifelong education, to safe working conditions, to decent wages, and so on.
In the West lip service to democracy that extends to the social and economic spheres is on the whole standard discourse, even though it does not reflect standard practice, and even though its opponents are active and vocal. Similar tensions between ethics of social stratification and leveling ethics exist in Islamic thought, in India, in China, in Japan, in Africa, and as far as I know everywhere. Humanity as a whole through international organizations and treaties has officially opted against a class-divided ethics and for egalitarian social democracy, by declaring the existence of universal civil, economic, and social rights. Consequently, to establish the point that the pragmatic key word “works” ought to mean “works for everybody,” ethical construction can rely on official documents. It can rely on the United Nations and on treaties ratified by the world’s governments, even though it cannot rely on nature, and even though it cannot rely on airtight arguments.
So much for objectives.
Ethical construction is a way of thinking that sees in prehistory and in history processes through which human institutions have evolved to cope with physical reality, on the whole more successfully than unsuccessfully.
(Cf. Habermas 1979) It is an approach to building a better world here and now which envisions itself as having many analogs and antecedents at other places and at other times. A fundamental way that cultural structures cope with the physical world is by organizing the meeting of basic human needs, such as nutrition. It is often convenient to refer to the structures that organize the meeting of basic needs as “basic structures.” In pastoral societies basic cultural structures govern activities relating to sheep and goats. The basic institutions of the Hopi people relate to maize. A culture of fisher folk organizes the catching and sharing of fish. Irrigation rules were basic in ancient Egypt along the lower Nile.
A basic structure does not govern everything. It is not a concept that implies that every (or any) culture is logically organized to form a coherent whole.
Although there is nothing in the definitions of “basic structure” and “constitutive rules” that makes the two concepts refer to the same referents, they tend to do so. The constitutive rules of the games people play, the rules that make the games what they are and the people who they are, tend to coincide with the survival strategies codified as basic structures.
The basic structure of the contemporary global economy, and of most of its local components, tends to be the market. A market is a place where goods and services are bought and sold. It is constituted by the rules that govern buying and selling. Those rules tend to determine whose basic needs are met and whose are not. (Sen 1982) I copy Anthony Giddens advisedly in using the word “tends” frequently. Patriarchy could also be called a (or even the) basic structure of the contemporary global economy. (See Hartsock 1987) War could be called its basic structure (See Reardon 1985), as could domination through violence generally. (See Leo Tolstoy’s accounts of the use of military repression to maintain a class system in which some people produce food but eat very little of it, while others eat most of the food but do very little of the work (Tolstoy 1894)). (See generally the account of the interplay between economic, political, religious, and other factors in determining historical outcomes in Anthony Giddens’ Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Giddens 1981, 1985), but see also the accounts of the leading role of commerce, especially long-distance commerce, in the formation of the modern world-system in the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel.)
So much for the prologue.
In the light of the foregoing prologue, it is hopefully clearer than it previously was that the preceding Chapter Two is not an introduction to Marxist economics or to economics generally. It is a brief reframing of Marxist economics and of economics generally within a comprehensive framework relating biology, culture, and modernity that can be called ethical construction. (For a less brief reframing of economics as culture see Richards 2000) Its references to basic rules are references to basic structures. Its discussion of constitutive rules leads up to a paragraph from Marx which is interpreted as a paragraph about the constitutive rules of capitalism. Marx is said to be unavoidable just because he is the best-known critic of those constitutive rules, which are at the same time the basic structure we still live with today. The constitutive rules constitute a dynamic, i.e. a moving force: the dynamic of capital accumulation. Keeping that dynamic strong; i.e. keeping the economy moving so that goods are produced, workers are working, consumers are consuming, and governments have income flows to tax, requires a particular kind of cultural structure called a regime of accumulation. Rosa Luxemburg’s work is interpreted as following out the consequences of those same constitutive rules, that same basic structure, the one that makes production depend on generating more money than the initial sum that was the point of departure, and makes generating money dependent on sales. The anti-Marxism of von Mises comes down to insisting that departures from the basic rules of contract and property derived historically for the most part from the roman jus gentium are irrational and undesirable; while his and van Hayek’s philosophies advocate certain kinds of freedom (notably the freedom of juridical subjects to dispose of their property and to enter into those and only those contracts they choose to enter into) which amounts to advocating certain basic rules. Kalecki, like Keynes, shows that once the basic structure is given, instability is inevitable. The conclusion I implicitly draw (although neither Kalecki nor Keynes explicitly draws it) is that no possible economic science can show how to make capitalism stable, because instability inheres not only in whatever policies economists may recommend on the bases of their studies, but on constitutive rules they take for granted in their studies. Without disparaging the historical account of the origins of the ideology of development after World War II given by Antonio Escobar, I follow Toye and Toye in finding that “development” replaced “full employment” as a goal when the latter proved not to be feasible, and I implicitly add, going beyond Toye and Toye that Keynes’ famous conclusion that full employment rarely occurs and when it does occur it is temporary is not so much an empirical discovery as a logical deduction from modern ethics. Lastly, the defeat of labor by globalization documented by Jeffrey Winters is interpreted as a consequence of the legal norms that give property owners control of their property. I conclude chapter two by saying we need philosophy for the reason Herbert Marcuse gave: that we need to study the possible and not only the empirically given; but this reason takes on a meaning Marcuse himself did not explicitly state: we need to modify the basic structures of the modern world, which requires bringing them into view and examining them, which requires the persistent questioning of the assumptions of other disciplines that has historically been characteristic of the discipline called philosophy.
The Crisis of Authority
Although I fear that it was not completely clear in Chapter Two exactly when I did and when I did not agree with other people’s views I was summarizing, I hope it was fairly clear that for the most part I took the phenomena described to be real ones (both those described by the Marxists and those described by the anti-Marxists). I hope it was fairly clear that compared to conventional wisdom I ascribe the causes of historical trends more to the summing up of the consequences of many people following the rules of buying and selling, and less to violence, domination, and dishonesty.
One of the real phenomena described, roughly but nonetheless truly, was the tendency of society’s discretionary income to accumulate in the hands of a minority, analyzed by Michael Kalecki in terms of what he called A. Another quite general and pervasive phenomenon considered in Chapter One and Chapter Two, one so general and so pervasive that it seems odd to call it a phenomenon, it might perhaps better be called a condition of the possibility of culture, is the dependence of human action on respect for rules. Rules in turn, as Wittgenstein has shown (Chapter One) depend in the last analysis on cultural authority, not on violence (if one obeys from fear of violence one is not following a rule; one’s behavior lacks H.L.A. Hart’s “inner aspect” even though externally it may be similar to what it would be if one were following a rule) but on conventional practices. If there is no social authority social life dissolves; what is human about human action dissolves. Questions about whether the rules (or customs, or norms, or institutions) are good or bad, better or worse, become moot questions because there are no rules.
When problem-solving is thus seen from a point of view (and talked about in a vocabulary) that acknowledges the causal powers of rules (Harré and Secord 1972) and the dependence of rules on moral authority, then solving humanity’s problems (including the fifteen listed at the beginning of Chapter One) becomes less a project (i.e. a series of projects) in political science, given the usual definition of political science as the science of power, and more a project in education, given the usual definition of education as the transmission of culture. Solving problems by ethical construction is not an educational project that in passing on a heritage to a new generation reproduces culture as it is (which is in any case impossible since each succeeding generation reinvents culture as it acquires it). It is what John Dewey called progressive education. It is education in democratic problem-solving that equips and motivates learners to extend democracy to social and therefore economic democracy. It is problem-posing pedagogy in which the teacher-learners and the learner-teachers create culture as they work together to improve presently existing social practices. Cultural action thus conceived does not naively ignore power politics; it wisely assesses where the power is and how to change it.
These considerations lead to a perspective on what is sometimes called the crisis of authority of our times. The perspective the foregoing paragraphs lead up to and the following paragraphs develop draws insights from two related observations: First, the production of culture is disproportionately shaped by the values and perceived interests of people with money, and institutions with money (such as foundations and governments). Second, the community norms which normally evolve over time to make institutions work more smoothly for everyone’s benefit, also tend over time, if patiently practiced and gradually improved, toward socialism. I will conclude a series of discussions inspired by these two observations by suggesting that in order to think constructively about the future of humanity it will be useful to examine the philosophy of Michel Foucault --regarding his philosophy as a phenomenon reflecting and illustrating some of the main characteristics of the times he lived in, regarding it as a source of challenges to test the validity of my point of view, and regarding it as a source of valuable resources that can be put to work in cultural action to transform the basic structures of the modern world.
If it is true, as I think can be reasonably concluded from the considerations discussed in Chapter Two, that reflecting on the basic constitutive rules of modern society leads to questioning them, then it would seem likely that there would be a class of people who would prefer that other people not reflect on the basic rules. Michael Kalecki’s analysis suggests that a class of people who would prefer that other people not reconsider the basic rules of every day life would be the ones who receive virtually all of society’s discretionary income (designated as A in Kalecki’s equation).
Kalecki’s equation expresses an analysis too simple to reflect the actual distributions of income from various sources in contemporary societies. A more common analysis would identify as sources of income rents, business profits, and salaries. In the salary category there would fall incomes equivalent to profits, and sometimes equivalent to rents, drawn by people who control firms but for one reason or another prefer to count their income as executive compensation rather than as profits. Many other types of income exist. Many footnotes would need to be added to incomes as reflected on accountants’ balance sheets and on tax returns, if one were to seek to characterize accurately who gets money and why. Nevertheless, in the end some of Kalecki’s main points would remain valid. The bulk of the population in most countries derives income principally from working, either by working for employers or by working for themselves using a small amount of property as an income-enhancing or income-producing asset, as, say a taxi driver who owns her or his own taxi, or, say, a retired couple who own a rental property. This bulk saves little and spends virtually all its income on consumer goods and services. The minority of the population with high wealth and income consists, except for a few highly compensated propertyless individuals with special skills such as some movie stars, mostly of people who combine advanced education with property ownership. The latter do most of the saving, and it is the latter who have discretionary income which can be used to fund activities which for one reason or another they want to fund. (*) Kalecki’s analysis is simple but it is not badly misleading.
I do not personally think that a preference among the minority with discretionary income for avoiding the ethical questions classically posed by Marx --that is to say questions about the basic rules of property, buying, and selling-- is warranted. I think everybody would be better off if society were less dysfunctional, including those who are now best off. I do not think that any improvement in today’s grossly unequal distribution of wealth and incomes that is at all likely to happen poses any real threat to anybody’s welfare. I do think the path to a less dysfunctional society starts with a realist critique of society as it is now. However, people have their own views concerning what they perceive as threatening their interests and ideals. It is important to notice that it is not just a matter of economic interests. Kalecki’s analysis suggests an economic reason why the owners of A would not want the rules questioned; but one must add to Kalecki that even the poor value freedom, and that the rich in addition to valuing their wealth also value their freedom. Historical experience –the shadow cast over the twentieth century by Fascism and Communism mentioned by Foucault -- provides good reasons to worry about the consequences of encouraging the questioning of the basic rules of the currently dominant liberal social order. Appreciation of the recently nearly destroyed values of liberal civilization is part of the motivation behind resistance not just to Marxist critiques, but also to any reasoning that draws out the ethical implications of common sense. The latter is likely to lead to the former.
I am agreeing with Hannah Arendt’s view that the crisis of authority is a crisis of common sense, while at the same time acknowledging that common sense by itself is limited and biased and cannot possibly solve humanity’s principal problems. (Lonergan 1957, chapters 6 and 7) Arendt’s point is that we ae losing something essential: that which is common, that which belongs to all of us. (Arendt 1997) We are losing it partly because our liberal common sense is not working. It loses prestige as it fails to solve problems. We are also losing it, I am suggesting, because there is resistance to encouraging the population to take a long, careful, honest look at it.
Pressure to abandon common sense because it leads to uncomfortable questions about such things as, for example, the relation between work and reward, would not exist if the defense of liberal civilization could safely be left to the mainstream liberal philosophers, to Ludwig von Mises, to Ludwig van Hayek, to Robert Nozick and the rational choice theorists, or even to liberal social democrats like Karl Popper who, unlike the pure liberals, combine a passion for freedom with a passion for social engineering. These defenders of civilization accept ordinary reason and ordinary ethics; they accept the consequence that the issues raised by Marx are therefore unavoidable; they read Marx, they consider his arguments, they conclude that he was wrong, and they propose ways other than his to cope with the persistent and pervasive problems inseparable from the basic constitutive rules of the world-system we live in. But there is another possibility. The facts of history and the facts of daily experience might incline most people to believe that while the liberals and the Popperians have told us a part of the truth, they have not told us the whole truth. The great bulk of the common sense of the majorities might shift in the direction of concluding that after taking account of important errors on all sides, after all Marx made some valid points. For example, there really is no good reason for some to live without working while others work without (really) living. Then there would be Gramscian hegemony. It would be a Gramscian hegemony in the weak sense of there being an overwhelming majority convinced that the basic structures of capitalism should be revised, although probably not –or probably only in the imaginations of the most fearful—in the strong sense of a general desire for the rapid transition to a centrally planned economy that Gramsci himself apparently desired. There would be a leftwing majority. There would be a general consensus among educated people that the working class, the middle class, the farmers, the professionals, and progressives of all sorts including those who run private businesses and including those with inherited wealth who hold left wing views, need to work together to change the basic rules of the game, that is to say to change social structures, that is to say to change property law, to distribute wealth more equally, to include the excluded, to foster dynamics that put people and environment ahead of profit, to channel profit-making toward legitimate social functions, to strengthen non-market relationships, and to make markets accountable. In the face of the threat of Gramscian hegemony, Kalecki would suggest that the bulk of opinion among that minority of the population which controls most of society’s discretionary income would shift in another direction. From an intellectual point of view, that is to say, insofar as philosophy has any influence in determining which way history is going to go, there is only one way out for them: social science must renounce ordinary and reasonable approaches to solving problems. It would be necessary to destroy any correspondence theory of truth, and any adequacy theory of truth, and any realist theory of truth. It would be necessary to deconstruct the conscious human subject who deliberately follows rules. It would be necessary decisively to eliminate final causes, so that there would be no way to distinguish functional institutions from dysfunctional institutions. It would be necessary to deconstruct Kant’s concept of human dignity, so that what is and what is not consistent with treating humanity, whether in one’s own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only, could not be distinguished. Since those who control society’s discretionary spending have disproportionate weight in orienting the practices of the academies, one might expect an academic trend toward avoiding common sense in such ways. It would have to be a trend subtle enough to be feasible in a highly sophisticated environment. It need not be identified with any individual, or even with any group. It could be a strong undercurrent, or tide, which would wash universities in the direction of avoiding Marx’s questions by finding other questions to ask instead. One might expect there to be the sort of general broad historical relationship between the great economic trends that bear on how the world’s billions are experiencing daily life, the fine arts, and academic fashions that is described by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity and by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. One might not be able to show a clear causal relationship, which would demonstrate that those who control society’s main means of production generally also control, specifically, its main means of production of ideas, but one might well, nonetheless, be able to point to certain trends, which, when viewed in the light of the need, or perceived need, of the powerful to defend their interests and ideals are less surprising than they otherwise would be. Kalecki’s viewpoint might make one more able to give an answer to Nancy Hartsock’s question, why at the point in history when feminist, third world, and minority voices, authorities, and identities are being established, post-structuralist critiques of personal narratives, authority, and identity suddenly become fashionable. (Hartsock 1987)
An earlier academic trend one might interpret in a similar light would be the rapid eclipse of John Dewey in American universities after World War II. Pragmatism had been the characteristic American philosophy and John Dewey had been its leading light. Rather suddenly, during the same time period when the Cold War heated up and McCarthyism inflamed politics, the prominence of Dewey’s philosophy of social reconstruction in American universities melted away as the snow melts in spring time. First at UCLA, then at Chicago, then at Harvard, then at Minnesota, then at one after another of the leading graduate schools, the key chairs in philosophy came to be occupied with representatives of the new “scientific philosophy.” Scientific philosophy began in Europe. After World War II, Europe exported Rudolf Carnal, Charles Hempel and others among its leading lights to America, establishing a tendency still dominant now called “analytic philosophy.” There were plenty of diatribes against Dewey in the popular rightwing press, but at an academic level nobody refuted Dewey’s program for philosophical social reconstruction. It simply lost during the McCarthy period its former prominence, although it never completely disappeared, and although its tradition has been nurtured in recent years by Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein and others. Young scholars who aspired to an academic career in which philosophy would be their meal ticket rarely found it worth their while to be interested in pragmatism. The “scientific philosophers” did not give different answers to the social questions Marxists and pragmatists had asked. As a general rule, they did not ask them. Karl Popper was an exception. Otto Neurath was another exception. Neither of these two exceptions immigrated to America.
If the analysis given here is correct, there was a social reason why American philosophy in the time of McCarthy largely withdrew from practicing social criticism. If it had continued, it would have criticized society more than society wanted to be criticized. (For a similar analysis of sociology in America see Gouldner 1964.) I am suggesting, moreover, that by backing away from philosophy’s traditional roles of gadfly, comprehensive social critic, and inventor of new cultural structures, philosophers contributed to the festering authority crisis that was already underway. At the level of mass society the growing crisis of authority was due to trends studied by sociologists and psychologists. Those trends were making people wonder more and more whether there was any good reason for being good, quite apart from what philosophers might say. Philosophy at a crucial moment stood aside. As a rule the philosophers either, like P.H. Nowell-Smith (who moved from Oxford to UCSB) maintained that the part of philosophy that was about ethics was strictly about conceptual issues and had no direct bearing on deciding what was the right thing to do (a task left to an unidentified person who held no university chair called a “moralist”) or simply decided to focus their attention elsewhere.
Philosophers for centuries had been fabricators of legitimacy. (Richards 1995) By largely declining to play that traditional role in post World War II Cold War America, either to justify the social order as legitimate or to condemn it as illegitimate; or like Dewey to work systematically to improve it; and only gradually taking it up again later through the work of John Rawls, the feminist philosophers, and others; American philosophers tended to leave the principles that structured the social order unexamined, unimproved, and without a coherent rationale. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, philosophers were winning moral authority for themselves and their ideas by engaging the unavoidable Karl Marx.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The connection between ordinary morality and the ethical questions Marx makes unavoidable explains the tremendous moral authority once enjoyed by Jean-Paul Sartre in certain circles. When a person commits to being a decent ordinary human being, and when that person accurately perceives that many other human beings are oppressed by the modern world-system’s basic structures, then her or his decency and ordinariness demand critical solidarity. Sartre’s was a critical solidarity that grew out of ordinary decency, which nonetheless knew how to fight common sense tooth and nail when it came to such issues as the subordination of women and compulsory heterosexuality. Jean-Paul Sartre was in his day critical solidarity’s best known public personality. He was the prototype of the philosopher engagé. Given the unavoidable connection between ordinary morality and Marxism, anybody who did not in their own station in life follow Sartre’s famous example could justly be accused of not being the decent ordinary person she or he pretended to be. Latin American liberation theology laid a similar trip on Christians. Given that a broadly Marxist critique is unavoidable for any intellectually honest person --setting aside Marxism’s numerous absurdities, its empirically false claims, its historical association with monumental bloody atrocities and ruthless suppression of freedom, and its arcane doctrinal controversies—then if you are a real Christian, or for that matter a real Jew, or a real adherent of any religion with a love ethic, you acknowledge that Marx’s critique cannot be ignored. Otherwise, you are not faithful to the Gospel. You are failing the test for dividing sheep from goats in Matthew 25. You are deserting the ranks led by Moses as he leads Israel from captivity in Egypt into freedom in the Promised Land, as recounted in Exodus.
In the mid-20th century philosophers like Sartre and liberation theologians like Gonzalo Gutierrez achieved moral authority by “annunciation and denunciation.” They announced the ideal of liberation and denounced the structures that impeded it. Neither was a dogmatic Marxist. Sartre, for example, in The Search for a Method declared that Marxism was still in its infancy. It remained the horizon of thought as long as capitalism remained the horizon of practice. None of its mistakes could cause it to lose its role as horizon because its best scientific and practical achievements had not happened yet. Surely there would be many more mistakes, as there would be many more achievements, in an intellectual movement that was necessarily the framework within which any project for human emancipation had to be conceived during the present historical period. If I am able to demonstrate that Michel Foucault’s writings can be regarded from beginning to end as a long dialogue with Marx, usually but not always implicitly, then this book will tend to vindicate Sartre. Sartre himself combined existentialism with Marxism. He gave existentialism intellectual and moral legitimacy by situating it as a current within Marxism. He gave Marxism another set of analytic tools.
What options are open to people who profoundly disagree with Marxism as they understand it, when it forges such potent alliances with common sense and with the perennial ideals of the world’s great religions? One option is a transvaluation of values that rejects common decency and despises religion. To reject common decency in our culture means (as I will elaborate a bit in Chapter 12) more than anything else to reject Kant’s ideal of moral autonomy. To despise religion in this context means not to agree with Marx that religion is the soul of a soulless world; but rather to agree with Nietzsche that religion is the opiate of the herd, a conspiracy of the sick and weak against health and strength (as I will elaborate a bit in Chapter 10).
At this juncture, the left often joins the right in undermining the emotional and mental stability of everyday life. For different reasons, neither wants the center to hold. As I have shown in Chapter One, elaborating on Wittgenstein, without authority the natural history of the human species does not even start. As I have discussed in connection with certain ideas of John Dewey, Rom Harré, and Charles Taylor, without authoritative norms there is no social behavior at all. Yet it is not unknown for a radical professor to believe sincerely that that her or his best gift to his or her students is to nurture a general habit of questioning authority, as if the students had not already been brought up in a culture which nurtures a general habit of questioning authority. I am oversimplifying and being unfair, but rather than cross out the preceding sentence I prefer to balance it by saying that on the positive side, such a stance in favor of generally questioning all the authority we see around us here and now can be coupled with envisioning and beginning to practice the non-authoritarian authorities of a desired and desirable future.
From the left and from the right come attacks on the moral authority of everyday common sense. Common sense calls in vain for Plato and for Kant to rise from their tombs to defend it. In today’s context I want to put some roses on their tombs. I am not a partisan of common sense as it is. I am an advocate of using philosophy, natural science, and social science to understand it, to accompany it, and to facilitate its transformation. I favor reconstructive accompaniment over contestation because I perceive a crisis of moral authority that makes ordinary people depressed and dysfunctional. It drives them to join fundamentalist sects; it drives them to blow their minds on drugs, loud music, and any thrill thrilling enough to turn the brain off. Intellectuals of the left contribute to the crisis with our all-too-clear insights into how everyday common sense is part and parcel of patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, militarism, racism, and the rape of the earth. Intellectuals of the right contribute to the crisis in their never-ending search for ways to discredit any premises that imply the conclusion that Marx’s critique of the basic structures of the modern world-system is a valid critique. It could even happen, if the academic and broader social context is as I say it is, that some academic Marxists could themselves deny the premises of human sisterhood and brotherhood, in a misguided attempt to put their doctrine on a less ethical and more scientific foundation, expecting thereby to raise the prestige of Marxism if not in the world as a whole then in any event in that part of the world they live in, the academic milieu. (See Althusser 1965) (See Thompson 1995, pp. 123-38)
I would make bold to suggest, further, that the hypothesis that common sense implies the need for fundamental social change, and the observation that in influential circles fundamental social change is perceived rightly or wrongly as undesirable, goes some distance toward explaining not only the prevalence of deconstruction as an academic fashion, but also toward explaining analogies to deconstruction found in popular culture. For example, they go some distance toward explaining why so many television programs do not consist of storytelling initiating the youth into society’s norms, but rather of jokes mocking adults and norms. One could also say that this happens simply because broadcasters learn from experience what sells. Similarly, one could say that the domination of rock music by negative themes is explained by the requirement that the music companies make money; either leaving the public’s buying preferences unexplained, or else explaining the public’s taste à la Bourdieu as dispositions produced by conditions d’existence (Bourdieu 1985) that make transgression more attractive than obedience. But one could also choose to note that the music buying public is not the only relevant social actor here. (Or if the word “actor” is feared to suggest naïve conspiracy theories, not the only collectively orchestrated conduct with no central conscious conductor). To hit the top of the charts a song must sing not only what the public wants to hear but also what the sponsors want to sponsor and what the investors want to invest in. My point can be illustrated in the case of hip-hop in the contrast between the social content of the spontaneous hip-hop generated by the kids in the ‘hoods, and commercially available hip-hop sponsored by the major recording labels. Although the time may be past when to become mainstream a cultural product must pass not only through a sieve that excludes what the consumers do not enjoy, but also through a sieve that excludes what the clergy will not allow; the time is not past when it must pass through a sieve that excludes what the owners of the means of production perceive (rightly or wrongly) as a threat to their interests. I am suggesting that if the mainstream media were to promote ordinary common sense ethical human values, like solidarity, mutual respect, and cooperation, bringing into focus the ordinary problems of ordinary people and what can be done to solve them, then the common sense they would reinforce would lead to social democracy.
Martin Heidegger’s Contribution to Reconstructing Culture in What he called a “Durftige Zeit” (A Needy Time)
Almost a century ago, Martin Heidegger published Sein und Zeit, an influential book whose general purpose (on this point I agree with Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1991)) was to justify old-fashioned traditional authority. I disagree with those readings of Heidegger which portray him as a cynical atheist seeking to destroy all values.
I sympathize with Heidegger, agreeing with Bourdieu’s analysis but nuancing his critique, insofar as Heidegger proposes philosophical strategies for restoring authority in a market-oriented and science-oriented world in which authority tends to dissolve. I do not believe that that the tendency toward the dissolution of tradition that Heidegger abhorred and feared is at all likely to lead to the flowering of individuality with full rights for all sexual orientations and beautiful living for everybody sometimes associated with Michel Foucault’s philosophical aims. The decline of legitimate authority is more likely to lead to chaos than to liberty, and as in Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976 to lead to brutal authoritarian authority which prevents chaos by imposing fear, unmitigated exploitation of the masses, and stultifying uniformity.
My general proposal is that authority can be justified, legitimated, and strengthened through democratic institutions that work to meet the needs of 100% of humanity without ecological damage. But that is not enough: we also need things that building on Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment (Entzauberung) can be called reenchantment. To the extent that problems can be solved, people will tend to obey the rules of the communities that solve them, for a reason Socrates gave in the Crito. Friends had urged Socrates to evade the death-by-poison-hemlock penalty imposed on him by the Assembly pursuant to Athenian law by escaping with them to Corinth. Socrates replies that he cannot break the law. “The laws are our fathers and mothers. They have taken care of me since birth. If now because they have imposed a penalty upon me I should turn against them, I would be ungrateful.” Of course not everybody would always sacrifice immediate self-interest to obey the non-authoritarian authority of a generally functional and generally caring community for the reason Socrates gave. But in a good society, a society good not only in its actions but also in its myths, enough people would be grateful enough to make it possible for social life to be reasonably orderly through a mix of means. (See also John Rawls remarks on “the stability of justice.” Rawls 1974) It is important to remember that while authority can only be fraudulent as long as the objective reality is that society does not functions to meet most people’s physical needs, nonetheless people do not live in objective reality. People live in subjective reality.
The early Heidegger saw very clearly that people live in subjective reality, but he had the audacity to claim that what most people call subjective is really objective. As to authority, he did not see, or did not want to see, the possibility of democratic non-authoritarian authority derived from working together to solve common problems. He does not conceive of authority without hierarchy. For him the problem is how to establish hierarchy. There are, of course, many readings of Heidegger, and here I am summarizing my own, which is set out at greater length elsewhere (Richards 1995). I refer almost exclusively to Sein und Zeit, a book which makes clear, from its very first pages, that it is about the restoration of hierarchy, by its peremptory exhortation to attend to a question, that of “being,” which is necessary, has priority (Vorrang), and which is not optional. (Heidegger 1927 p. 2).
Early Heidegger, like Dewey, finds that it will no longer work to play the old philosophical trick of distinguishing the eternal from the temporal, and then associating the first with commanding and the second with obeying. Nevertheless, Heidegger makes authority seem legitimate. He achieves this partly by re-founding the foundations of knowledge in such a way that the existential (some would say social) sources of authority are presupposed by knowledge; and partly by making insightful plays on German words, by doing Begriffsdichtung (conceptual poetry) in the tradition of Friedrich Hölderlin. The insights in Heidegger’s insightful poetry reveal a world where, in the less evocative language of John Dewey authority is already there as part and parcel of life. Heidegger is no democrat. He does not want to talk about “values” as though people could choose which values to have, or about “worldviews” as if the right way to think were relative to the worldview one happens to have. The point about Being is that it is authority. It commands us; we do not command it.
Heidegger refurbishes old ideas in ways that evoke respect. He once described the philosopher’s calling as that of maintaining the vitality of simple words. His own work is famously about simple words like “is,” “time,” and “thing” although it is equally famously the elaboration of a special Heideggerian vocabulary. As a phenomenologist in the tradition of his teacher Edmund Husserl he holds that knowledge starts with phenomena. But for Heidegger the phenomenon is not a subjective experience, like an after image lingering in the mind’s eye after perceiving a patch of red. A phenomenon is being showing itself. This is what I referred to when I said he has the audacity to claim that what most people call subjective is really objective. Further, the person (Dasein) experiencing the phenomena is already thrown into the world as part of it. Knowledge begins not with sense-impressions but with being-in-the-world. (In-der-Welt-sein). If one were to employ the ordinary language that history and contemporary society have given us, instead of employing the vocabulary that Heidegger invents, one would say that phenomena as experienced already have historically constructed meanings. Heidegger points out that in our being-in-the-world we experience the sun as giving light and warmth, as dawn, as the midday sun, and as sunset, regardless of, and logically prior to, whatever science may tell us about where the sun is and where we are. (Heidegger 1927 p. 103) He echoes Wittgenstein. The social constructions of everyday life precede and prepare the way for the periodic table of the elements, the infinitesimal calculus, and generally for what Wittgenstein calls the modern suburbs of language. In Heidegger’s terminology the ontic precedes and grounds the ontological. (Heidegger 1927 p. 13)
But for Heidegger the rising sun and the setting sun are not just everydayness epistemology cannot do without. They are tradition. With such bucolic themes Heidegger leads his readers into a world where the old-fashioned farming community, Ferdinand Tonnies’ Gemeinschaft, seems normal, while the city slicker’s Gesellschaft (these are not terms Heidegger uses, they are terms I and others use to describe the effect he achieves) seems aberrant. The big city is the characteristic home of the notoriously inauthentic das Man (a term Heidegger does use), the “generalized subject” (Heidegger 1927 p. 128), the man lost in the crowd who has lost his being because the generalized other has taken it away. (p. 126) Our only hope of being an authentic somebody and not an inauthentic nobody, Heidegger powerfully suggests without ever coming straight out and saying so, depends on recovering time after all as a source of authority. Time was authority for Plato because the unchanging, the eternal, was the authoritative. Now our hope for authentic being is to acknowledge our in-time-ness (Zeitlichkeit) (e.g. p. 304) and more specifically our story-ness (Geschictlichtkeit) (pp. 382-92) (Geschichte in German can mean both history and story.) “The original ground of the existentiality of Dasein [the person] is Zeitlichkeit.” (Heidegger 1927 p. 234). “…Dasein in the ground of its being is geschichtlich.” (p. 235) The happening (geschehen) of Dasein is story-like (geschichtlich). This line of thought connects with being-in-the-world, and with Heidegger’s embeddedness in contemporary European romantic back-to-the-village conservative literature so thoroughly documented by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1991): the rising and the setting sun, the path in the woods (the title of one of Heidegger’s books), like kings and queens, knights and witches, pigsties and castles, are stuff stories are made of. We, in turn, are made of stories. Heidegger drew on a tradition in biblical interpretation called “hermeneutics” (another word for interpretation), and became a leading figure in a new tradition which applied hermeneutic methods everywhere.
We, whoever we are, do not have the option of getting out of our story-ness. Heidegger writes, “Eigentlich zukünftig ist das Dasein eigentlich gewesen.” (Heidegger 1927 p. 326) Freely translated: “Being authentically oriented toward the future is the only way to have an authentic past.” As we cannot see without interpreting and we cannot think without imagining, we cannot be without being part of a story that has a past, a present, and a future. “Zeitlichkeit enthüllt sich als ser Sinn der eigentlichen Sorge.” (Id.) Freely translated: “In-time-ness surrounds us as the meaning of authentic caring.” We cannot speak without using verbs with tenses, and the tenses are rooted in the in-time-ness of original concern (Besorgen). (Heidegger 1927 p. 349). Heidegger had previously come to the conclusion that caring (Sorge) was the being of Dasein (chapter 6); indeed some such conclusion was inherent in his point of departure since if there were not something like care in us (namely seeking) there would be no questions about being or about anything, since every question is a seeking (suchen) (p. 5). “Seeking,” “caring,” and “concern” are all words that find more in primary everyday experience than acknowledging facts; hence they are words that help to move us across David Hume’s famous is/ought divide; they suggest that the divide should never have been dug; that it reflects a peculiar and inferior interpretation of being.
An upshot of thus making all of us caring actors in stories is to establish authority. Heidegger’s thought echoes Wittgenstein in the sense that when we think of ourselves in terms of everyday language-games (or in terms of In-der-Welt sein) we think in terms of rules, and therefore in terms of authority. Being in a story together is like playing a game together. Story/history (Geschichte) is “im Miteinandersein ’vergangene.’” It “happens” in being-with-others. (Heidegger 1927 p. 379) It implies participation with one’s generation in world history. (pp. 382-391)
All of this is supposed to be philosophically, pre-scientifically valid. “Such research must run ahead of the positive sciences; and it can.” (Heidegger 1927 p. 10). Heidegger turns the tables on the positivists and neo-Kantians and empiricists who, like John Locke, had converted philosophers into mere underlaborers useful for clearing the path for science. Heidegger conducts an existential analysis which is logically prior to doing science. Science presupposes it. There are no hypotheses to test, no logically possible empirical data which, if found to exist in fact, would show Heidegger’s theories to be false. As ontologies (categorizing being) cannot get off the ground without ontics (being) so science cannot get off the ground without being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is not simple clear and distinct ideas or items of data, or simple qualities of sense impressions or physical objects. All simple seeing is seeing as. It is interpretation. (verstehend-auslegend, understanding –reading out) (Heidegger 1927 p. 149)
Heidegger discusses paintings by Vincent van Gogh in ways that show how he differs from neo-Kantians, positivists, and empiricists. In the painting of the peasants’ shoes, the life of the peasants is immediately presented. We do not first see gobs of paint on the canvas, and then realize that they represent shoes, and then remind ourselves that these are the shoes of peasants who work long hours in the hot summer sun and in the cold spring mud. Similarly in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” we feel the stars. We do not perceive first that they are stars and then subsequently attach feelings to our perceptions. More generally, whatever the scientific analysis of feeling the stars may be, what is given in being-in-the-world is not that analysis or its product.
In another example, Heidegger says that when we walk along the border of a farmer’s field we already feel the presence of the farmer. (Heidegger 1927 pp. 117-18). It is his field. Its ownership status is part of its immediate phenomenal reality. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, Heidegger also conducts an elaborate series of plays on words with eigen, which means “own.” Property (Eigentum) is linked to authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), characteristic qualities (Eigenschaften) and much more. In these ways property ownership is woven into the fabric of an everyday ordinary being-in-the-world that science can build on, but cannot take down. Heidegger builds social authority into the foundations of his ontology, “…making existential temporality the foundation of pure, but sensory Reason,” (Bourdieu 1991 p. 59). Reason with a capital R and Being with a capital B (or in some of Heidegger’s work Being with a big X crossing it out) are authoritative deities of a godless theology. (But only godless temporarily, for theologians drawing on Heidegger quickly used Sein und Zeit and also his later works to write theologies with God in them.) Heidegger’s work is not ethically foundational in the sense of building on logos or other ancient philosophical categories traditionally associated with social hierarchy, patriarchy, and authority. Concerning them Heidegger proposes a deconstruction (Destruktion) of the history of ontology. (pp. 19-26). But it is nonetheless a treasure trove of social authority’s traditional supporting paraphernalia. If there were any doubt as to Heidegger’s intentions in Sein und Zeit in this regard, it should be dispelled by the second part of the book. There Heidegger uses the conceptual structure he has invented in the first part of the book as a platform for revitalizing Kierkegaardian themes which are at the same time devices social orders have used to establish their authority: guilt, anxiety (Angst), fall from grace (Absturz), the idea of temptation, awareness of death, conscience and its voice (Ruf), a critique of worldliness (Innerweltlichkeit), and others.
Some Comments on Hannah Arendt’s “Phenomenological” Reading of our Condition
Now I will sketch an additional argument that perhaps indirectly supports my thesis (which is similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis) that Martin Heidegger’s mission in life was to strengthen old-fashioned authority. Apart from supporting my thesis about Heidegger, Hannah Arendt’s views also support my more general claims about the need for and lack of legitimate authority. (“Legitimate authority” is a redundant expression in Arendt’s vocabulary, since for her the very idea of authority connotes the sorts of meanings political scientists –many of them using methodologies Arendt disagrees with—grope for with the word “legitimate.” In her vocabulary it is incorrect to describe as “authoritarian” military regimes that compel obedience by using violence to instill fear.) The notion that Arendt’s ideas tend generically to confirm my reading of Heidegger depends on the idea that she and he had an intellectual affinity that drew them together, even though she came to disagree on important points with her former teacher and lover. (Hinchman 1984)
Arendt sees in the modern world a general crisis of authority, which became more acute in the most recent of the modern centuries, the twentieth. (Arendt 1977) I will offer an interpretation of what she means, and in the process elucidate what I mean by echoing from a somewhat different point of view. One thing Arendt clearly means is that the modern world is unstable.
That our world is unstable is an empirical historical observation. Since the dawn of modernity (which, like Braudel and Wallerstein, I identify with the dawn of capitalism), change has been a constant. The acceleration of change has been a trend. “All that is solid melts into air,” said Marx and Engels in the latter part of the nineteenth century. “The development of the forces of production had shattered the old relations of production; every static order had crumbled to nothing.” said Guy Debord toward the end of the twentieth. (Debord 1994, p. 148)
Another part of the freight that “crisis” carries in Arendt’s vocabulary is that a crisis is an opportunity to rethink fundamental ideas. The prevailing ideas are not working; if they were working, there would not be a crisis.
Arendt clearly means too that there is a crisis in the sense that things cannot go on as they are. Major change is a necessary element of any possible future, because continuity is impossible. I can think of several reasons that make such a claim true. The present relationship of humans to the earth cannot possibly continue. The increase in the sheer numbers of humans on the planet cannot continue. The accumulation of debt –governmental, private, and corporate—cannot continue. The enormous gap between huge sums of speculative capital and the value of real physical assets cannot continue. I could go on. Many of the “problems” listed at the beginning of Chapter One could be raised to the status of a “crisis” in the sense that they name trends which cannot continue indefinitely into the future.
Arendt is aware of ecological and economic crises such as those I just mentioned, but what she puts front and center is the crisis of authority. Our world –our society—cannot continue without more leadership, more respect for institutions, and more obedience. Her focus on authority is reasonably understood as expressing a common denominator of all crises and problems. To cope successfully with any of them will require concerted action. Concerted action will require more social cohesion than presently exists.
Arendt identifies the current form of modernity’s crisis of authority as a crisis of common sense. She writes, “In our times the disappearance of common sense is the clearest sign of today’s crisis. In each crisis what is destroyed is part of our world, something that belongs to everyone. A failure of common sense, like a magic wand, points to a place where a part of our common world has disintegrated.” (Arendt 1990, p. 190)
In terms of Wittgenstein’s image of language as an old city, in which common old words are at the center, and in which the new sciences are in the suburbs, what Arendt calls “the decline of elemental norms” can be thought of as producing a world in which “the center will not hold.” In terms of Georg Lukacs concept of the relationship between ideology and science, ideology is not playing its necessary role in organizing everyday life. The terms Arendt herself uses are often drawn from ancient Greek and Roman concepts that identify the public sphere and distinguish it from the private. She writes, “There is, of course, a connection between the loss of authority in public and political life, on one hand, and what happens in the private and pre-political spheres of the family and the school, on the other hand. The more radical the loss of confidence in authority in the public sphere, the less likely it is that the private sphere will remain intact.” (Arendt 1990, p. 202)
Although the details of the crisis, or the crises, of authority in modern times vary from period to period and place to place, a tendency to dissolve authority, and thus to precipitate such a crisis, is inherent in modernity itself (as her teacher Heidegger suggests more than once, and as his teacher Husserl suggested in The Crisis of the European Sciences). In Arendt’s terms, the general aim of modernity is to overcome poverty and oppression. When its institutions fail to achieve its aims, then of course people lose confidence in them. But people may also lose confidence even when poverty and impression are being overcome.
Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, Arendt found that the United States and Western Europe were in the process of achieving the aims of eliminating poverty and oppression. The result (she says) was a deep discontent. Everything she writes suggests a conclusion that to my knowledge she never states explicitly: that liberation from oppression does not bring happiness because humans need authority to be happy. Her views parallel those of Emile Durkheim, who found in his study of suicide and elsewhere that misery is produced not just by loneliness, but also by anomie, normlessness (which often comes and goes together with loneliness). Arendt echoes a question that Heidegger poses: What is to be the positive content of freedom, once the negative work of achieving liberation from oppression has been accomplished?
Arendt’s perception of a deep discontent among increasingly liberated and prosperous populations may be flat wrong. A series of empirical studies tends to show that when people are free and have money in their pockets they say they are happy. (See www. worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl) It would take a brave philosopher to argue that the self-reports of people who say they are happy are systematically false. But even if she is wrong to suggest (as I read her) that subjectively people do not like living in a world where there is too much freedom and too little authority, she may still be right in saying there is a crisis of authority because objectively it will not be possible to solve fundamental problems without greater social cohesion. And because (if it is true that authority is disintegrating) if authority continues to disintegrate, there will come a point when social life will not be possible at all.
Arendt holds that the exaggeration of the modern ideal of liberation from oppression is shattering common sense. Her case is strongest with respect to children. The basic fact, she says, is birth. Children are what the Greeks sometimes called them, “the new ones.” They have to be welcomed to the world and instructed concerning what the world they have been born into is. The common sense view that children should obey adults is justified by the nature of things. She frames her argument in a way that makes a misguided effort to liberate children from the tyranny of adult authority a failure even from the point of view of one who holds that freedom ought always to be maximized. Dissolving the authority of parents and teachers makes children less free, not more free.
Arendt writes, “…emancipation from the authority of adults does not liberate the child, but instead makes the child subject to a truly more terrifying and tyrannical authority: that of the majority. In any case, the result is that the children are exiled, so to speak, from the world of adults; that is to say they are left to themselves and at the mercy of the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel; and with which, since they are children, they cannot reason; and from which they cannot escape to go to another world, because the world of the adults is closed to them. In the face of these pressures, the children react taking refuge in conformity or in juvenile delinquency, and often in a mixture of both.” (Arendt 1990, p. 193)
Arendt does not believe that the world has to be the way it is. She does believe that before it can be improved it must first be passed on. Educators assume the responsibility of saying to the new ones: Welcome. This is our world. This is the world you have been born into. It has certain rules. These are what they are. We hope you leave it better than you found it.
She offers an interpretation of how authority in ancient Rome related to a vision of the past and to how that vision related to bringing up children. Romans, she says, believed that they should act in a way that would make them worthy of their ancestors. Age was respected because the more people advanced in age the closer they were to the status of ancestor. It is not entirely clear, at least to me, what the reader is to make of her account of education in Rome. She says she does not mean that every society is or should be like Rome was. She appears to mean that in every society education is necessarily historical. It is necessarily the passing on in the present of a world that was constructed in the past. Her thought is apparently influenced by Heidegger’s concept that the very being of human being is inseparable from Geschichtlichkeit. Rome serves as a particularly striking example of a necessary general principle, even though it is not a model showing the only way to apply it. The general principle is that teaching the stories and principles that constitute identity, establish the authority of society’s norms, and shape the individual’s sense of self, is something that must be done. The human condition requires it. We are failing to do what must be done and therefore there is a crisis of authority.
At a philosophical level, that is to say, at the level of the ideas that guide and justify practices, Arendt finds that modernity itself is generally to blame insofar as it was born and defined as a revolt against oppressive traditions. It draws its strength more from what it is against than from what it is for. More specifically, pragmatism is to blame.
Pragmatism is to blame because it identifies acting and knowing. It denies the Aristotelian hierarchy in which the intellectual virtues are superior to the practical virtues. It denies the basis of the teacher’s authority in the classroom, i.e. knowing a subject the student does not know. Arendt gives two quite specific examples: (1) The contemporary practice of learning a foreign language by immersion, as if one were an infant in a country where the language is spoken; instead of sitting down and learning the rules of grammar and syntax; (2) Teachers who are trained as experts in pedagogy, but who are only one step ahead of the students in learning the subjects they are supposed to be teaching. Arendt sees the latter phenomenon as a specification of the identification of doing and knowing, according to which what is important is to learn how to learn, not to pass on “dead knowledge.” The specious conclusion follows that a teacher who is herself or himself just learning the subject is a good role model for the students.
Pragmatism, perhaps together with other intellectual tendencies with affinities to pragmatism, is also to blame because it identifies work with play. Learning should be fun. Life should be fun. The decline of authority is associated with the decline of the work/play distinction.
Thirdly, pragmatism is to blame because it takes life itself, this terrestrial life, as the objective. No higher value is postulated as superior to the enjoyment of personal and family life.
Arendt reminds her readers that since time immemorial in the traditions of political thought, the authority of parents over children, and of teachers over students, has been the model for understanding political authority. It is already found in Plato and Aristotle. The tradition is profoundly ambiguous, since from the point of view of human dignity there should be no authority of adult over adult similar to the authority of adult over child. But for all its ambiguity it reflects a certain mutual support of authority in the state and authority in the family, which is reflected in a parallel disintegration when both are disintegrating. The modern man (presumably she means woman too) gives no clearer expression of his disenchantment with the public world than his refusal to accept responsibility for it before his children. In Durkheimian terms, since he is not himself well integrated into the larger society, he does not socialize his children according to its norms.
Hannah Arendt wrote a great deal about the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (some of which have lasted into the twenty first). Their lack of authority was somewhat different from the general crisis of authority that assailed, and continues to assail, the western democracies. They lacked authority, first, because they relied on violence. Resort to violence to establish social order is both a confession of lack of authority and a destruction of the symbolic processes through which authority is generated. They lacked authority, second, because authority is inseparable from and grows out of a broader moral matrix that governs social life, which they transgressed and violated, not least by shredding individual dignity and by collapsing the boundaries that separate the public and private spheres. (What I am calling the “broader moral matrix” Arendt appears to derive partly from western traditions and partly from the human condition generally, and she appears to believe that the former achieved insight into the latter.)
If it be granted that there is continuity linking my earlier discussion of Wittgenstein, which demonstrated that meaning and knowledge depend on social authority; and my current discussion of what Arendt calls a crisis of authority in education and in public life; so that the earlier and the current discussion are not simply about two unrelated topics that happen to have the same name; then it must also be granted that even in the most repressive despotism there must be respect for some elemental rules that govern daily life. A culture with no respect for its own norms could not possibly exist. People could not even talk. Arendt does not deny this, but neither does she emphasize it. She does emphasize that a lack of authority at the macro level, of which violence is both a symptom and a source, corrodes and undermines daily life. She also emphasizes that violence is not power. It instills fear but not consent. For this reason a repressive despotism is always weaker than it appears to be. Arendt’s analysis of power as depending on micro-level cultural resources that terror weakens more than it strengthens (she called it a “phenomenological” analysis)) enabled her to predict and to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites better than many of her colleagues in political science. It enabled her to understand better than her colleagues why in the twentieth century time and time again history was changed by social movements that mainly relied not on violence, and not on self-interest, but on conscience.
Jürgen Habermas on the Legitimation Crisis
I have already suggested that Arendt is empirically mistaken in supposing that people who live in prosperous democracies are unhappy. I believe she is also philosophically mistaken in her anti-pragmatism and empirically mistaken in her skepticism about a pragmatic approach to education. How children can best learn a foreign language, and how children can learn ethics, are to a large extent empirical questions.
A great deal can be learned about how to cope successfully with the crisis of authority by studying the findings of psychologists and sociologists. Working in the field called “the psychology of moral development,” researchers have shed great light on how to understand and facilitate processes that produce responsible and caring human beings. Some of their findings have been shown to have a fair degree of cross-cultural validity. In Lawrence Kohlberg’s terms, normal child and adolescent development, which can be enhanced by favorable factors (e.g. a school where moral issues are discussed) and impaired by unfavorable factors (e.g. violence on television) leads to forming a population in which the majority of adults are “conventional.” They want to be regarded as good persons. They identify with and respect the rules that constitute the society they live in. Some portion of them will become “post-conventional.” The latter adopt critical philosophical principles oriented toward the conscientious improvement of society. Kohlberg has remarked that the findings of developmental psychology now make it possible to implement Dewey’s educational philosophy better than it could be implemented in Dewey’s own day. (Kohlberg and Mayer 1974)
Somewhat similarly, sociologists have studied “social integration.” People who are marginally or precariously employed, inclined to drop out of school, socially isolated, inclined to substance abuse, delinquent, or inclined to interpersonal violence, are not “integrated” into the dominant’s society’s norms (although they may be integrated into some subculture). They are “at risk.” More than psychologists, sociologists are (in my experience) divided among themselves . Some devote themselves to studying how better to integrate deviants into society as it is; others focus on studying how to change the social structures that produce and exclude deviants in the first place; many do both; some do neither.
Psychology and sociology, combined with practical experience in dealing with difficult people, can, I submit, contribute to coping successfully with what Arendt calls the crisis of authority. It also helps to read Arendt and other conservatively-inclined writers who make fun of the silly exaggerations of liberal pop culture. I suggest the following heroic simplification: What developmental psychology, that part of sociology devoted to the study of social integration, and conservative philosophy teach is how to promote respect for social norms. There remains a fundamental difficulty conservative philosophy can ignore but cannot resolve: the basic constitutive rules of modern society are inherently self-contradictory and dysfunctional.
The relationship between the authority crisis and the contradictions in modern society’s basic norms can be introduced by considering a text that runs parallel to several of the writings of Hannah Arendt, The Legitimation Crisis by Jürgen Habermas. The book is about how hard it is for governments to keep the support of their publics, not just in the narrow sense of getting enough votes to be reelected, but in the broader sense of preserving faith in the validity of institutions. The author seems to have in mind particularly the Federal Republic of Germany in the period following World War II.
Four of the main features of the world context after World War II when The Legitimation Crisis was written –and when the main works of Hannah Arendt were also written—were the following:
1. It was the Age of Keynes. The parliaments of all of the western democracies had approved legislation requiring their governments to maintain full employment, understanding that Keynesian policy instruments could and would be utilized to attain that end.
2. It was the age when “development” was invented. (Escobar 1995). The space of the planet was divided into “developed” and “underdeveloped” regions. The direction of the arrow of time was that the “underdeveloped” (later called “developing”) regions would in the future attain to the status of “developed” regions.
3. Although some writers tended to identify “development” with capital accumulation, industrialization, or modernization, the prevailing view in the United Nations was that “development” meant attaining social democracy of a North West European type. (Myrdal 1956) It was the social democratic (and hence Keynesian) view of development that appealed to the intellectual elites of the developing regions, and through them to the masses of Asia and Africa who were and are the majority of the world’s peoples.
4. It was the age of the Cold War. The capitalist democracies, the social democracies, and the right wing dictatorships were allied against the Soviet Union, China, their allies, and their satellites.
In a world with the four characteristics just mentioned, Habermas proposed (among many other ideas) a way to understand the economic role of the government in a modern social democracy. The role of the government is “to steer.” The world had learned (i.e. at that time the world thought it had learned) that managed economies work better than unmanaged economies. Keynes had regarded total production as a function of total employment, so that the full employment policies that had been mandated by parliaments (and in some cases, such as Italy, by the Constitution) were tantamount to policies for maximizing production. A steered economy was better because it led to higher levels of economic activity. It augmented aggregate demand, and therefore the profitability of businesses; it planned and supported long term investments; it funded technological progress; it facilitated and often targeted credit; it promoted exports and it often but not always restricted imports. The result of the government’s intervention in the economy was that there was more profit, more work, and more goods and services provided to consumers than there otherwise would have been. There was also more distributive justice than there otherwise would have been.
Social democratic governments legitimated themselves economically and socially. Due to their success in steering the economy, they were able to skim off tax revenues sufficient to pay public officials and to finance social programs.
I have been suggesting that authority is respected and respectable when the social norms people are asked to obey work for everybody’s benefit, while acknowledging too that the traditional mystifications celebrated by Heidegger also persuade people to respect authority. Habermas says the same thing in slightly different words. The reason Habermas saw a legitimation crisis was that although under favorable circumstances Keynesian social democratic steering of the economy worked for a certain length of time and up to a certain point, it did not work in general, and it could not work in the long run. (Offe 1985; Richards and Swanger 2006) The western democracies were making promises they could not keep.
The General Theory of John Maynard Keynes
Lest the reader get lost in the details of the following exposition of Keynes, unable to see the forest for the trees, let me offer as an advance organizer a brief indication of its overall direction and drift. The general thesis of the following exposition of Keynes is that the main and crucial obstacles to the success of social democracy lie in modernity’s constitutive rules. (This thesis is elaborated in detail in Richards and Swanger 2006) For example: rules concerning property rights. For example: the rules that constitute markets. The inherently self-contradictory and dysfunctional basic norms of modernity frame Keynes’ diagnosis of the problems of unemployment, inflation and economic instability. They limit the effectiveness of the remedies he prescribes for them. I will not here discuss his remedies, which have not survived the passage of time, but rather his diagnosis, which has survived (King, 2002). Habermas was right to say a legitimation crisis was coming because the Keynesian foundations of postwar prosperity in the first world were unstable. Arendt was right to observe that the authority crisis had deeper sources over a longer time horizon in modernity’s one-sided ideals that emphasize rights more than duties. I am saying that the restoration of the authority of common sense that Habermas implicitly and Arendt explicitly call for requires a pragmatic revision of basic rules. In this respect the conservatism of Heidegger and Arendt may be counterproductive, for in emphasizing respect for traditional institutions they may close off the possibility of modifying them in ways that would make them more respectable.
Keynes made some basic points that undermine liberal optimism. I will subsequently label those points “The Keynesian problem.” He showed that unemployment is normal and chronic. It will not go away when market equilibrium or a higher level of development is reached. On the contrary, more development tends to make unemployment worse, not better. Overproduction is also normal, in the respect that more is produced than can be sold. Although since the mid 1970s the policy instruments of macroeconomic management called “Keynesian” have been discredited, Keynes’ diagnosis remains unrefuted. (King 2002) So much less reason for optimism: Keynes understood the problems very well, but his solutions worked only temporarily.
In his General Theory Keynes wrote: “The outline of our theory can be expressed as follows. When employment increases, aggregate real income is increased. The psychology of the community is such that when aggregate real income is increased aggregate consumption is increased, but not by so much as income.” (Keynes 1936, p. 27)
Keynes erred when he chose to speak of the psychology of the community. The fundamental reason why people do not spend all their money is not psychological but legal. It is a juridical norm inherent in the practice of using money as we do. The constitutive rules tell me I am a juridical subject who may either spend money or not as I please. Given that this is a fundamental feature of the game we are playing, it would be an accident if it just happened that I and everyone else chose to spend all our money, thus keeping it circulating.
Keynes emphasizes that the same juridical transaction is a purchase from the point of view of the buyer, and a sale from the point of view of the seller. Hence total purchases must equal total sales. Reluctance to buy translates into inability to sell. In Chapters Eight and Nine of the General Theory Keynes makes lists of motives that move people to keep cash instead of spending it. In the aggregate they are equivalent to a generalized inability to sell, i.e. to a tendency toward overproduction. From an ethical point of view, all of these motives have as their background and condition of possibility the autonomous moral subject who freely chooses what to do or not do with her or his property. (See Richards 2000, Richards y Swanger 2006)
Keynes continues: “Hence employers would make a loss if the whole of the increased employment were to be devoted to satisfying the increased demand for immediate consumption.” (Keynes 1936)
In other words, summing up all the expenses and all the incomes of all the entrepreneurs in a given society, the incomes coming from sales to consumers will not be sufficient to pay their expenses.
Keynes continues: “Thus, to justify any given amount of employment there must be an amount of current investment sufficient to absorb the excess of total output over what the community chooses to consume when employment is at the given level. For unless there is this amount of investment, the receipts of the entrepreneurs will be less than is required to induce them to offer the given amount of employment.” (Keynes 1936)
It is understood that the entrepreneur hires workers because he expects to make a profit doing so. Keynes emphasizes that employment does not depend on whether the entrepreneur will make a profit, but on whether the entrepreneur believes he will make a profit. The entrepreneur believes that when the future time comes when the product is sold, the revenue to be then received will justify the purchase of labor power in the present time.
Keynes continues: “It follows, therefore, that, given what we shall call the community’s propensity to consume, the equilibrium level of employment, i.e. the level at which there is no inducement to employers as a whole either to expand or to contract employment, will depend on the amount of current investment. The amount of current investment will depend, in turn, on what we shall call the inducement to invest; and the inducement to invest will be found to depend on the relation between the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital and the complex of rates of interests on loans of various maturities and risks.” (Keynes 1936, pp. 27-28)
In other words, the kind of investment that increases employment is a function of two factors: first the marginal efficiency of capital and second rates of interest.
It is not hard to understand the second factor. Investors are not motivated to hire workers to produce goods, with all the risks that entails, when they can earn more leaving the same money in the bank accumulating interest. More generally, there will not be productive investment to the extent that financial speculation is more lucrative.
The first factor, the marginal efficiency of capital is one of the technical phrases that make economic science appear to be a white magic that ordinary mortals will never understand. Keynes devotes Chapter Eleven of his General Theory to explaining what he means by it.
That chapter begins: “When a man buys an investment, or capital-asset, he purchases a right to the series of prospective returns, which he expects to obtain from selling its output, after deducting the running expenses of obtaining that output, during the life of the asset. This series of annuities Q1, Q2, …. Qn it is convenient to call the prospective yield of the investment. (Keynes 1936, p. 135)
In other words, the background of the “marginal efficiency of capital” is the act-in-the-law of making a contract granting to the buyer the right to accrue certain future streams of income. In brief, Keynes teaches in Chapter Eleven that the marginal efficiency of capital represents the expectation that those future streams of income will be large enough to justify buying in the present the right to accrue them. If so, then the investment is worth making. Capital is efficient. (We are not dealing here with the microeconomic question of selecting among various investments according to their varying degrees of risk and profitability. We are dealing with the macroeconomic question of what determines the total amount of employment in a society.) (I do not explain Keynes’ use of the word “marginal” because I do not think it necessary to grasp the pertinent point; because it would be tedious; and because mathematically inclined readers will grasp its meaning immediately without any explanation.)
Keynes, Schumpeter, and others have pointed out that that the expectation that capital will be efficient, that is to say, the expectation that it will produce sufficient profit, does not have to be a rational expectation. It is sufficient that it be operative. That is to say, it is sufficient that it in fact move the investor to invest. Further, as Keynes recognizes in other writings, investors are not always motivated by a desire to maximize profits. They may invest from patriotic motives, from love of the adventure of building great works of engineering, from a desire to become famous, for whatever reason or for no reason. It should perhaps also be mentioned that great corporations generally have grown by investing in themselves their own retained earnings.
Keynes points out that the efficiency of capital is not an objective quality that capital has considered as a thing or things. It is a subjective belief held by the owners of capital as persons and as institutions.
Keynes writes: “The most important confusion concerning the meaning and significance of the marginal efficiency of capital has ensued on the failure to see that it depends on the prospective yield of capital, and not merely on its current yield.” (Keynes 1936, p 141)
“The state of long-term expectations, upon which our decisions are based, does not solely depend, therefore, on the most probable forecast we can make. It also depends on the confidence with which we make this forecast –on how likely we rate the likelihood of our best forecast turning out quite wrong. If we expect large changes but are very uncertain as to what precise form these changes will take, then our confidence will be weak. The state of confidence, as they term it, is a matter to which practical men always pay the closest and most anxious attention.” (Keynes 1936, p. 148)
“Thus the professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere, of the kind by which experience shows that the mass psychology of the market is most influenced.” (Keynes 1936, p. 155)
Thus the ingredients of the “marginal efficiency of capital” factor which determines investment and consequently employment are varied and unstable. Let us now end this detour for the sake of explaining a little that key concept, and return to reading the summary that Keynes gives of his theory:
“Thus, given the propensity to consume and the rate of new investment, there will be only one level of employment consistent with equilibrium; since any other level will lead to inequality between the aggregate supply price of output as a whole and its aggregate demand price. This aggregate cannot be greater than full employment, i.e. the real wage cannot be less than the marginal disutility of labor. But there is no reason in general for expecting it to be equal to full employment. The effective demand associated with full employment is a special case, only realised when the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest stand in a particular relationship to one another. This particular relationship, which corresponds to the assumptions of the classical theory, is in a sense the optimum relationship. But it can only exist when, by accident or design, current investment provides an amount of demand just equal to the excess of the aggregate supply price of the output resulting from full employment over what the community will choose to spend on consumption when it is fully employed.” (Keynes 1936, p. 28)
From these theoretical considerations a practical consequence follows. Unemployment is normal. Markets tend toward an equilibrium that rejects a part of the population. Keynes sometimes calls this a low level equilibrium. This practical consequence deduced from theory (and in the last analysis, I would add, from constitutive rules) is moreover confirmed by historical experience. It is confirmed by the daily life of working people at most places at most times.
Keynes writes: “Moreover, the evidence indicates that full, or even approximately full, employment is of rare and short-lived occurrence.” (Keynes 1936, pp. 249-50)
In another place (in an article in Yale Review for June of 1933) Keynes wrote that a policy of greater national autonomy should be regarded, not as an ideal in itself, but as a desirable way to create an environment in which other ideals can be safely and conveniently cultivated. (Keynes, 1933)
My view is that in order to solve the problem of the crisis of authority it is necessary although not sufficient to solve the Keynesian problem, and that to do that, as well as to do other things that need to be done, it is necessary to adopt a pragmatic and realist approach to the revision of basic constitutive rules. It is necessary to find a more lasting solution to problems Keynes solved temporarily; namely generating full employment and financing a welfare state; or else to take a different approach, or a series of different approaches, which accomplish the same ends and perhaps accomplish them better. As Keynes suggests in the last of the passages quoted, it is desirable that the several nations and peoples of the earth enjoy a degree if autonomy making them somewhat independent of the imperatives of the global system, in order to experiment with various possible ways of solving such fundamental problems.
Let me now summarize briefly my argument up to this point, and then indicate where it is going next. Culture is the ecological niche of the human species. It is the main way the guidance of behavior is accomplished in our species, as distinct from species more completely guided by instinct (like birds) or by instinct and simple forms of learning (like dogs). Adjusting culture to physical function is for the most part equivalent to solving our main problems. But there is a prior difficulty: before cultural norms can be adjusted to be more in synch with reality, there must at least be some culture, some accepted and respected authority. Hannah Arendt points out that we are in an authority crisis. Pace Arendt, Heidegger, and others who have worked to restore authority, for what might be called ecological reasons or bread and butter reasons, as well as for reasons of principle, on the whole philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century were less inclined than they otherwise would have been to play their traditional role as manufacturers of rationales for ordinary people’s everyday ethics. Jűrgen Habermas points out that the authority crisis is a legitimation crisis because contemporary governments are increasingly unable to steer economies to deliver the goods the citizens expect. John Maynard Keynes points out basic structural difficulties, manifested as a chronic weakness in effective demand, which make it unlikely that modern economies (“developed” or not) will ever be able to deliver consistently the full employment and prosperity that the masses want and expect. I see the Keynesian analysis as a demonstration of the consequences of a defective basic structure: one that obliges most people to sell something in order to live.
Hence the road to effective problem-solving must pass over at least two connected mountains that can be thought of as parts of the same range: the mountain of the authority crisis; and the mountain of satisfying the public’s demand for sustainable prosperity. But before I say more than I have already said about how to create non-authoritarian authority and how to create an economics of solidarity, I want to acknowledge and respond to the objection that today’s most widely read philosopher might disagree –or others might take him to disagree—not only with my proposals but even with the way I have gone about articulating how the world works, and even with my perception of what is and what is not a problem that ought to be solved.
For many reasons the views expressed above, my own and those of others, should be cross-checked in the light of considerations put forward in the works of Michel Foucault. He wrote mainly during a time period when Keynesian policies (the prescriptions associated with Keynes’ name, as distinct from his diagnosis outlin | |
