By Tom Kando
We have 10% unemployment. Therefore 90% are NOT unemployed. Of course, there is a lot more than 10% hidden unemployment. Still, no-one could argue that an absolute majority of the labor force is unemployed. So by this measure, a majority of the people are more or less “okay,” even though, there is more and more inequality.
Same with having a roof over your head, be it owned or rented. Most Americans are not homeless. By this criterion, too, a vast majority of Americans are “okay.”
By “being okay,” then, I mean: You have a job of some sort, a roof over your head, you eat three decent meals a day, you send your kids to school, you drive a car, you are not being preyed upon by criminals, and you are better off than those who are below the poverty line and those who have lost their job.
In this sense, those who speak on behalf of the folks who are “not okay,” - the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, progressives, President Obama - do not speak for a majority.
Here is how the majority thinks: “I have to look out for Number One. Now more than ever. Life is a zero-sum game. I can’t afford to pay more taxes. Things are already hard enough for me and for my family.”
If life is a zero-sum game - the stupid but prevailing attitude - then what’s good for the 10% to 15% who are NOT okay, is not good for the 90% who ARE. Sharing is not part of the majority’s thinking.
What if 20% of the people were not okay? Or even 30%? That would still leave a large majority who would feel that sharing is not in their interest.
And what are the chances of even 30% of the population becoming “not okay?” This has never happened in our history, and it is absolutely unlikely to happen in our future. It has hardly ever happened in the history of the world. It is almost an impossibility.
Think of some disastrous cases: Mexico looks pretty bad right now. But a majority of the Mexican people still lead relatively normal lives. Today, I can only think of one failed state where most people probably no longer "have a life" - Somalia.
In the past, who knows. Maybe the depth of the Dark Ages, the Merovingian era, the collapse of the West Roman Empire, the Black Death. I suppose there have been periods when human life was “short nasty and brutish, ” - jungle like. But by and large, most of the time, most people do “have a life.” They are okay. And that is certainly so today.
So when we say that “things are terrible,” there is now a “Great Recession,” and in the thirties there was a “Great Depression,” what we mean is that the number of people who are “not okay” has grown to an unacceptable 13% of the population, or at worst 25%. In civilized society, we are prepared to accept a 2%-to-5% level of misery, but not 15% to 25%. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployment was “only” 25%. Never in the history of the US has a majority of the labor force been unemployed, or lost its home, or lost everything it had.
...and neither will it happen now. We’ll keep hobbling along.
So why would people rally around Occupy Wall Street, or President Obama, or any progressive cause? This would require sharing. But since most people see life as a zero-sum game, and since it is now more important than ever to “look out for number one,” sharing is not what the large majority of the people is about to do. That’s too bad.leave comment here
12 comments:
I do not think that your idea that "those who are not OK" are the ones who will vote for Obama and everyone else will vote Republican is the best indicator. I think it would be more accurate to look at "who receives a government check." This number is about 51% of Americans. I think most of them are likely to vote for Obama, because they fear Republicans would cut spending and it might include them. There will be many exceptions to both of these rules, but generally people financially dependent on the welfare state will vote Democrat. Thus the election should be very close, I would think.
Gordon,
as often, you say some irrefutable things.
I'll accept your 51% figure. It includes everyone who receives a social security check, as I do, everyone on medicare, as I am, plus millions who are compensated for unemployment, disability, foodstamps, veterans benefits, etc. Yes, we are still a welfare state.
But, however the numbers pan out at the next election, the cleavage to which I allude is also real.
My purpose was to point out the role of selfishness in politics. You add another aspect of selfishness. One does not negate the other. People's vote is largely determined by the "cui bono" principle.
Tom, Politics inevitably degenerates into selfishness without religion or education for virtue. This is why for Roman society education primarily emphasized learning virtue. While they listed dozens of virtues, almost every one of them emphasized, in one way or another, that the individual live for the sake of society. Before the empire turned hopelessly corrupt, people were often judged by whether they lived virtuously.
The US founders new this country wouldn't survive without it. Here is a quote from John Adams: "We have no government capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Gordon,
"Our constitution was made only for a moral people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Brilliant!
I am currently reading Z. Bauman's "Modernity and the Holocaust" (a sociology of the Holocaust). He rejects the idea that humans are inherently amoral creatures whose basest instincts are curbed by coercive social institutions--religious, governmental and legal for example. In point of fact he notes, the German people were among the most civilized, legalized and institutionalized people on earth. How could such endemic evil have prevailed among so modern and reasonable a people?
He suggests that the evil of the Holocaust was not a product of dysfunctional sociopaths. It was a product of our modernity in which the instrumentalities of reason, science, and technology, have come to be regarded as objective externalities. Our reductive science has led us to believe that our morality is nothing more than a social construct that can only be understood in a cultural context. Therefore, the evil of the Holocaust simply reflected the moral precepts of its time and place in history. By this modern reasoning, he says, had the Germans won the war we would be viewing the Holocaust today as a case study in scientific management. (In many ways that is actually happening today even though the Germans lost.)
In his chapter "Toward a Sociological Theory of Morality" Bauman rejects moral relativism and proposes that we humans are by our very nature, moral creatures, born into this world in both an evolutionary and procreative sense, in relations of responsible mutuality. Our very nature is to be responsible (responsive) to others who likewise enable the production of our selves. (The Golden Rule?)
If Bauman is correct (and I think he is), then our modernity--reductive reasoning, science and technology--has not only enabled us to efficiently produce more of everything--food, housing, people, climate change and death machinery---it has also led us down a de-civilizing path toward increasingly amoral relations among our selves and we should ask ourselves how this has come to pass and how might we begin to restore our essentially moral being.
John Adams was right. Our moral nature--our responsible mutuality with others--is an indispensable component of the irreducible whole of humanness that was "selected for" several hundred thousand years ago. Subtract our moral nature from the human equation, and the "selected for" becomes "selected against". That dog don't hunt.
In Europe where they pay higher taxes people seem more generous than Americans. This may be deceptive though, in return for higher taxes they get 1) social services so homeless don't overrun major parts of the cities ( like in San Francisco & L.A) 2) Easy, cheap & convenient public transportation that takes money out of Japan & Saudi Arabia and puts it in local economys. Instead we borrowed huge sums from China we spent on things like new reststops along the freeways instead of a rail system connecting L.A and San Francisco. Not wise and is the cause of distrust of the federal government.
Good points, Gordon, Marc and Unknown.
Instead of trying to react meaningfully to some of the wise things you say, just this passing observation:
I have just been digesting the news of the day. The 2 most promient topics today are the Greek debt crisis and Occupy Wall Street.
People around the world are doing disparate things in response to their lives' long-term deterioration, at least in the West.
As to diagnosis and cure...?
It can be argued that when regarded as a whole, OWS is not about absolute economic well being. In a global sense, the protestors live better than most, but they have been moved to action by generalized and pervasive feelings of moral outrage over systemic inequities and the lack of mutual responsibility demonstrated by economic elites, (Bauman's idea of innate responsibility).
The authors of The Spirit Level suggest that the problems of economic inequality in Western society are not about absolute economic well being, but problems of a sense of well being RELATIVE to others.
I suggest that humans are not accountants, tallying debits a credits in order to cast their votes in life. They are social creatures who tally their life's meaning in terms of their relations with others. Equitable relations based in mutual responsibility and respect is the cornerstone of human dignity. Undermine that cornerstone and the social edifice begins to crumble.
Marc, Good points you raise about Modernity and the Holocaust.
There is a shift when you move from individual behavior to institutional or group behavior. Individuals can be taught to behave virtuously. So far, in human history, we have not learned to do this with social institutions.
Social institutions are rational bureaucracies, designed for specific purposes. They only serve these purposes, and do not "care" for others. Reinhold Niebuhr spoke about this distinction in "Moral Man and Immoral Society" before the holocaust ever took place.
Let's use the example of a family, which is personal. People tend to understand what other family members require. A simple welfare bureaucracy is impersonal and gives everyone, or everyone in a certain class, the same thing--rational justice. Niebuhr argued that such justice could only be "proximate justice" and that justice could never be completed without love.
Furthermore, if rational justice become the social goal, one is only aiming at proximate justice, and even that will never be met because many people will be selfish. You need moral people exercising "supereogatory" behavior to even bring society to the level of proximate justice.
Gordon, thanks so much for your very perceptive reply. You say...
"There is a shift when you move from individual behavior to institutional or group behavior. Individuals can be taught to behave virtuously. So far, in human history, we have not learned to do this with social institutions."
Although I agree with you that the reductive rationalism of institutionalized modernity fails to recognize and even undermines, what you call virtue and I would call moral selves, I do believe that there are examples of non-bureaucratic institutions that foster virtuous behavior which I see as basically altruism based in empathy. This universal quality of our humanity, is aptly expressed in a minimalist sense, by Rabbi Hillel's version of the Golden Rule:
"That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn."
This doctrine of empathic relation -- of responsibility --- is, according to Bauman, inbuilt, being the foundation of our social nature that gave rise our conception of independent minded selves.
A history can be written that explains how we have come to bury our virtuous and moral selves. Jeremy Rifkin takes a VERY ENTERTAINING stab at such a narrative in this video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g
But the salient point is that today, our socializing institutional reality systematically thwarts the moral-virtuous self as if by design. We have structured our systems for educating, enterprising, playing and worshiping in a manner that pits person against person, community against community and nation against nation. It should come as no surprise to us that we reap what we have sown so earnestly.
I agree with almost everything that Gordon and Marc are saying. I also believe that America is experiencing a profound ethical crisis.However, I don't think that science or reductive rationalism is the primary cause. I believe that many Americans have been conned into accepting an ethical system which promotes the acquisition of wealth as the primary objective of our society. I call this an "exclusionary ethics," because it simply doesn't include the needs and principles which would support our whole society. Hitler tried this in 1939, by excluding large groups like the Jews, the gays, and most scientists from his ethical system. It did not work,and it will never work--it can only cause social disruption. Ethics must be based on the common needs of humanity, rather than the desires of one sub-group of people relative to another.
Gene, et al,
Dr. James Hillman, who just passed away, gives an interesting and moving discussion of reductive rationalism vs. our mythical selves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFkkQ9eq8qw
It may be of interest to the commenters here.
Note: The lecture is in 3 short parts. Follow the Youtube links at the end of each segment.
Marc:
Thank you for your reference to Dr. Hillman. I couldn't find his video on youtube, but I did learn that he was a renowned Jungian therapist. As I recall, Jung suggested that the analysis of dreams using classical mythology and the language of alchemy might prove more useful than behavioral science in explaining human behavior. As to rationality, logic certainly has its limitations, as Russell and Goedel found out. Being both a physicist and a sometime student of Jungian psychology, I regard this issue to have remained an open one. As a mathematician might say, human behavior is non-trivial.
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