Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Another anti-freedom conservative: David Brooks

[Following up on my "Do conservatives really value economic liberty?", on the conservatisms of Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, and Irving Kristol.]

In The New York Times, moderate conservative David Brooks reflects upon Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Brooks agrees with Murray that Americans have divided into two polarized “tribes.”

“The members of the upper tribe,” says Brooks, “have made themselves phenomenally productive. They may mimic bohemian manners, but they have returned to 1950s traditionalist values and practices. They have low divorce rates, arduous work ethics and strict codes to regulate their kids.”

Meanwhile, “in the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad. People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.”

Brooks praises Murray for the rigor of his data and analysis, and then offers his own solution to the problem.

“I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.”

So: While American liberals want to use force to redistribute wealth and jobs among the rich and poor, Brooksian conservatives want to use force to redistribute values, practices and institutions among rich and poor. Liberals want to use compulsion to move other people’s money around as they see fit. Brooks wants to use compulsion to move the people themselves around as he sees fit.

Once again I am shocked at how easily and automatically so many intellectuals are willing to use compulsion to solve problems.

Movement in-fighting and schisms

Here is an example of a phenomenon that has long puzzled me: Nasty in-group fighting. In The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, Klaus Christian Köhnke asks:

What can “explain one of the most distressing features of the neo-Kantians: the fierceness and bitterness of their polemics, the nastiness of their ad hominem arguments, which destroyed personal friendships and decent collegial relations? Heinrich Rickert (Heidelberg) wrote to Paul Natorp (Marburg): ‘Just because we critical idealists agree on fundamentals, we have to take the knives to each other” (Cambridge University Press 1991, p. x).

It’s easier to understand demonizing the far opposition, i.e., those whose beliefs and values are alien to your own. But it’s harder to understand demonizing those with whom you agree on 99% of key issues. Why does the 1% disagreement drives some to paroxysms of anger, bitter infighting, and denunciation?

The infighting dynamic crops up in a variety of types of movements across history — political movements (e.g., the Marxists), educational movements (e.g., the Montessorians), architectural (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright’s followers), philosophical (e.g., Objectivists), semi-scientific (e.g., Freudians), and of course most religious movements.

Heinrich Rickert above stated it as an imperative: The closer the agreement, the worse the fighting. Why is that so?

* Is it that we expect or hope for more from those close to us, so disagreements are more crushingly disappointing?
* Is it that those close to us have more power to hurt us, so disagreements lead to defensive over-reactions?
* Is it that movements are social, so disagreements are opportunities for in-group status advancement or for signaling one’s status and alliances?

I can understand the phenomenon more easily within systems that have strong faith-and-authority epistemological traditions. Such groups do not make reasoning and healthy argument habitual, so it makes sense that their members would not be able to handle questioning and disagreement well.

But that makes more puzzling the in-fighting among rational belief systems, i.e., those that explicitly identify and urge productive argument and discovery skills. In those groups, is the descent to nastiness simply a failure of character? Or are there strong psychological and social-psychological dispositions that even rational belief systems have a hard time overcoming? Or is the initial impression great amounts of infighting distorted — that actually most of the group’s members handle the disagreements productively and in proportion, while only a few noisy participants drown them out and drag down the discussion?

A related question about leadership: Does a movement’s leader typically contribute to the in-fighting problem, or do the followers do it all by and to themselves?

One datum: In discussing Freud’s fractious movement, Howard Gardner tells this sad anecdote:

“Less happily, their involvements with Freud proved costly for some individuals, particularly those who had broken with him. Freud’s young protege Victor Tausk, despondent over his recent rupture with the unforgiving Freud, committed suicide; of the earlier followers, at least six others ultimately did the same. These facts represent our first evidence of the casualties that tend to befall those within the orbit of highly creative individuals” (Creating Minds, p. 82).

But I was struck by this contrasting datum about Frank Lloyd Wright’s circle, as recalled by Ayn Rand after a visit:

“She long remembered her indignation over the attitude of hero worship and servitude that Wright was famous for instilling in his ‘Fellowship,’ made up of tuition-paying students. They cooked, served meals, and cleaned. They ate at tables set a step or two below the dais on which Wright and his guests and family dined, and they consumed a plainer diet. Their drawings, she noted, were undistinguished and imitative of Wright. ‘What was tragic was that he didn’t want any of that,’ Rand told a friend in 1961. ‘He was trying to get intellectual independence [out of] them during the general discussions, but he didn’t get anything except ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ and recitals of formulas from his writing.’ She compared them to medieval serfs.” (Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, pp. 169-170). And of course some of Rand’s followers have behaved that way too.

Nietzsche said that one must always forgive an intellectual his first generation of followers. It seems a sorry truth of history that those who grow up directly in the shadow of a genius have special difficulties with becoming independent.

So it is still a puzzle in my mind. Great matters demand great thinking and great passion — and great character in the exercise of both.

About justifiable, virtuous anger, Aristotle stated the ideal best — to be able to “feel anger on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time” (Nicomachean Ethics 4.5, 1125b 31). That is indeed the challenge.

Immigrant culture, race, and education

More data showing that culture, not race, is crucial to educational performance: “Africans outperform African-Americans in Seattle schools: Even the children of destitute Somali refugees do better.” From the Seattle Times report: “African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home — typically immigrants or refugees.”

A relevant anecdote: Immigrants and the spirit of entrepreneurship.

Also relevant is the great education work by NFTE, successfully teaching entrepreneurship to low-income students, giving them the knowledge and skill set to overcome their cultural deprivations, and Marva Collins’ classic achievements.

And fundamentally relevant are those individuals of any race or culture who decide to make something of themselves no matter what.

Related data:
Homework, race, and success in life.
Gannibal, “dark star of the Enlightenment.”

[Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.]

Augustine on why babies are evil

One of my professors in graduate school argued that St. Augustine is the most influential philosopher in history. I’m not convinced, though a good case can be made.

I recently re-opened Confessions and came across Augustine’s strong version of original sin. As he exclaims to his God, “no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day” (Book I).

To explain, Augustine tries to reconstruct his own infancy: “What then was my sin at that age? Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts? Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy not for breasts, of course, but for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked. My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke.”

And of course the tantrums. Witness “the actions of a child who begs tearfully for objects that would harm him if given, gets into a tantrum when free persons, older persons and his parents, will not comply with his whims, and tries to hurt many people who know better by hitting out at them as hard as his strength allows, simply because they will not immediately fall in with his wishes or obey his commands, which would damage him if carried out?” The little rotter.

Not to forget what kids do to diapers.

Thus, Augustine concludes, “The only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.”

Supposing that babies are wicked, the next question is: How did they come to be so?

Western religions start the sordid story with Adam and Eve, but original sin is a puzzle. How can later generations be held responsible for the mistakes of the earlier? A cross-generational collectivism is necessary, and it needs a method for the guilt to be transmitted from one generation to the next.

Here’s a possibility. On standard religious accounts, a human being is an immaterial soul conjoined to a physical body.
So sin originates either in the soul or in the body. But if the soul of each person is made afresh by God, then it can’t be corrupt since God is supposed to be a perfect creator. So the source of sin must be in the body. That could make sense, since the original sin was committed by Adam and Eve and we could inherit it from them by being made by their bodies through sexual reproduction. But above Augustine clearly holds babies’ “frames” to be innocent and to locate the sin in their minds.

So we’re back to sin’s source being in the mind. What feature of the mind could be problematic? Free will, Augustine suggests. But other problems arise, since he is also committed elsewhere to God’s omnipotence and omniscience. If God is omnipotent and we are made weak and powerless, how can we be held responsible? Also, free will is a power; but if omnipotent God has all the power, then humans can’t have any. Further: if God is omniscient, then he knows the future, in which case there are no genuine options and so no free will.

But the philosophical puzzles don’t get babies off the hook for Augustine. Their sinful natures develop for the worse until adolescence generates even more sin. “From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust.”

Greed, anger, lust, and the full panoply of sins thus become the lot of weakling mankind. And we know what awaits the wicked.

(Augustine always reminds me of a line from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals: “The truly great haters in world history have always been priests.”)

Related:
Why C.S. Lewis gives me the creeps
Who is the most loathsome philosopher in history?
Self-esteem in Walt Whitman and C. S. Lewis
Freud and original sin

Image source:
The image of Augustine forking heretic Donatists into the flames was taken from “St. Augustine pt. 2: Hammer of the Donatists, Advocate of Torture, Inquisitor.”

Who is the most loathsome philosopher in history?

More precisely: Who is the most loathsome philosopher in his or her personal life?

Let me set the bar high by naming my top two candidates.

1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fathered several children and had them abandoned to orphanages, and of whom David Hume wrote in a letter to Adam Smith: “Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness. … The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.” (David Hume, letter to Adam Smith, October 8, 1767 [Correspondence, 135])

2. Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi and who, his lover Hannah Arendt said, “lies notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can.”

I am open to other suggestions.

Some follow up questions. When one disagrees profoundly with an intellectual’s philosophy, as I do with Rousseau’s and Heidegger’s, is it legitimate to look for a connection between the philosophical and the personal? Or can deep philosophy vary completely independently of personal behavior? Is ad hominem ever a legitimate argument strategy? One should expect integrity, especially from philosophers — i.e., that they will live what they teach and teach what they live — but we also know that hypocrisy is widespread. Should it matter now that influential philosophers were personally immoral, or do only their ideas and arguments matter now?

Related posts on Heidegger:

Nazism and education [Section 14 of Nietzsche and the Nazis].
Heidegger, anti-humanism, and the Left.
Heidegger and postmodernism [Excerpt from Chapter 3 of Explaining Postmodernism].
Interview with director Jeffrey van Davis on Heidegger and Nazism.

Related posts on Rousseau:
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment [Excerpt from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism].
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism.
Rousseau and the French Revolution.

The “Monsanto is evil” puzzle

Natural News surveyed its readers asking which corporations they believed to be the most evil: Monsanto topped the list, followed by B.P., Halliburton, McDonald’s, Pfizer, Merck, Wal-Mart, and Nestlé. Natural News writer Mike Adams reported on the survey results, chiming in to agree and add his opinion that Monsanto is not only evil but psychotic and a number of other bad things.

I had heard such things in passing from some of my colleagues who are crunchy-granola-eating-nostalgic-for-the-1960s types, so I read the article to learn more. Why is Monsanto so evil? Adams offered four reasons.

1. Monsanto produces and markets genetically-modified seeds, and so, according to Adams, it is an “opponent of open-pollinated seeds.” My questions: What kind of opponent is Monsanto — scientific? economic? political? And why is it evil to be that kind of opponent? No answers in the article.

2. Monsanto, Adams says further, has acted against politicians who try to ban its products: “politicians in France and across Europe who found themselves being added to a ‘retaliatory target list’ that was assembled by the United States ambassador to France, working in conspiracy with the leaders of the GMO industry.” Is that obviously bad? Food production is unfortunately highly politicized, and politics is often rough and tumble. In this case, some European politicians, like some of their African colleagues, are against GMOs and have attempted to ban them. Why shouldn’t Monsanto and other GMO advocates fight back? And why is this a “conspiracy”? No answer.

3. “Monsanto’s GMO crops are now linked to roughly 200,000 suicides of farmers and farm workers in India.” The link in this case seems to be that India’s traditional, low-producing agriculture sector is being modernized, but the transition is slow-going and often ugly. New methods, including GMOs, are increasing crop yields, but some farmers are not making the transition well — for many reasons, including lack of credit markets, nasty politics and guerrilla warfare. So why exactly are the deaths being laid at Monsanto’s door? Unexplained.

4. Adams makes a passing reference of Monsanto as a threat to “planetary health.” But he offers no argument.*

So what exactly is bad about GMOs and Monsanto? And why the strong language?

Also odd are the article’s omissions. Adams does not raise any health concerns about GMO. Yet if GMO producers are evil, wouldn’t data showing their product to be a threat to health be important here? One suspects that the studies showing the safety of GMOs are being ignored by an ideologist.

Nor does he mention the increased yields or other benefits of GMOs. Intellectual honesty requires looking at the arguments on the other side, and this omission is also suspicious.

My Ph.D. is not in bio-tech, and I have not researched Monsanto and have no opinion about whether any of its actions are moral or immoral. But if GMOs really are dangerous and extreme language like evil is warranted, the evidence and arguments should be obvious and strong.

Feeding billions of people is important. Good science and engineering are important. Overcoming ignorant and power-hungry politicians is important. The stakes are high and quality journalism is essential to helping us all become informed.

On that score, I find Adams’ article to be irresponsibly badly argued and an excuse for ideological venting and name-calling.

[* And he missed a perfect chance here to mention Bolivian president Evo Morales's relevant claim that GMOs cause baldness and homosexuality.]

[Disclaimer: I own no Monsanto stock but wish I had bought some a few years ago.]

Chipotle Mexican Grill versus egalitarianism

Egalitarianism wins.

Chipotle restaurant lost an appeal opportunity when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Chipotle had been sued by a wheelchair-bound customer who complained that while other customers could see their food being prepared a four-foot high counter blocked his view from his wheelchair perspective. The plaintiff argued that his rights were violated according to the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The justices in the Ninth Circuit Court agreed, writing in their decision that Chipotle’s counter “subjects disabled customers to a disadvantage that non-disabled customers do not suffer.”

Let’s set aside some secondary matters to get to the key issues. So set aside the large majority of restaurants at which no customers can see their food being prepared. Set aside the children under four feet tall who can’t see their burritos being assembled at Chipotle. Set aside Chipotle’s offer to bring sample spoonfuls to their wheelchair customers. And set aside the absence of any food-safety concerns or customers-going-hungry concerns.

Here are the key issues decided by the case, one ethical and one political:
Ethical: Customers should have equal food-ordering experiences as a matter of moral principle.
Political: We must use the law, i.e., physical compulsion, to enforce such an important moral principle.

If one were snarky, one might point out that libraries offer their readers an experience that the blind cannot have; that symphonies offer listeners an experience the deaf cannot have; and that dance halls also offer their patrons an experience the paralyzed cannot have. However, one shouldn’t be snarky and in those cases there is a brute physical fact that cannot be equalized*, so the ADA bureaucrats and lawyers have not (yet) called for the closing of libraries, symphonies, and dance halls.

But of course Chipotle’s counter-height choices are not brute physical facts and they can be changed. So how should we decide proper counter height?

Those against the ruling may appeal to the political principle of liberty. In any transaction, both parties should participate voluntarily according to their own cost/benefit judgments. In this case, Chipotle is free to offer whatever it wants however it wants, and the wheelchair-bound customer is free to accept or reject Chipotle’s offering.

But egalitarians argue that the political principle of liberty should be overridden by the moral principle of equality. And this turns on their peculiar interpretation of the principle of equality.

Here is the proper, non-egalitarian interpretation of the moral principle of equality: One should evaluate all individuals, oneself included, by the same general evaluative standards of honesty, justice, beauty, courage, charm, and so on.

It does not follow from that general standard that all individuals will be treated the same in particular. The use of the principle will also take into account the particulars of the individuals involved on both sides of the interaction. For example, I will apply to all people to the same standard of honesty, but I may be more or less indulgent of my friends when they fudge the truth. Or if I am a parent: I will believe that all children should be educated, but I will spend more time and energy on my own children than my neighbors’. Or if I am dating: I will evaluate all women by the same standard of attractiveness, but I will behave differently with particular women depending on how much or little they push my attractiveness buttons, so to speak. Or if I am a business owner: I will open my doors equally to all potential customers, but the deals I strike with them will not all be the same — customers vary in terms of what they have to offer me and what it costs me to deal with them.

Egalitarians, by contrast, reify equality into a one-size-fits-all straightjacket. Or, to put it in concept-formation terms: they forget that while we omit particular measurements along dimensions in forming abstractions we have to put the particular measurements back in when using the abstraction in individual cases. Or to put it in metaphorical terms: they treat equality as a Procrustean Bed.

Egalitarians also believe it is not proper for individuals to calculate the costs to them in determining the application of the general principle. Properly, in pursuing our goals we should judge others in terms of their particularized worth, and general evaluative standards help us do so. But egalitarians reverse this and use individuals as vehicles of conformity to general evaluative standards. That is to say, there is a deontological-altruist thrust to egalitarianism, in contrast to a consequentialist-egoist thrust.

Here the Chipotle case is also illustrative, showing how egalitarianism is often tied to the classical altruism that holds that the stronger/richer should sacrifice or be sacrificed for the weaker/poorer. Such altruism takes our normal healthy desire to help the poor when we can and turns helping into an absolutist duty that overrides all other considerations. In this case, Chipotle is the stronger, profit-making party and the wheelchair-bound are the weaker party with a need. So the egalitarian-altruist feels justified in imposing a sacrifice on Chipotle to benefit the wheelchair-bound.

Fascinating how much of the history of philosophy is packed into one court case:
Politics: liberty or compulsion.
Normative ethics: egoistic benefits or altruistic sacrifice.
Meta-ethics: consequentialism or deontology.
Epistemology: concepts as abstractions-to-be-particularized or as reified absolutes.

[* Harrison Bergeron counter-examples excepted.]

APEE update — Deirdre McCloskey

Why did the modern economic revolution in production and trade first happen in north-western Europe?

At the APEE conference, Deirdre McCloskey delivered a plenary address based on her new book, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Her argument is that neither material resources nor technology nor capital accumulation nor geographical factors drove the transformation. Rather, it was a change in ideas and attitudes: the producers, merchants, and traders who make up the bourgeoisie came to be respected. They got dignity, in marked contrast to the traditional disparaging in cultures dominated by the otherworldly, ascetic values of religion and the predatory martial values of tribal warriors and feudal aristocrats.

Respect for the bourgeoisie meant that they went on to develop the institutions of modern capitalism, they became a political force that undermined traditional feudalism and paved the way for modern democratic-republicanism, and the resulting more free political economy became wealthy, generating the science, the technology, and the educational institutions that we are now familiar with. A virtuous cycle was created.

Note that McCloskey’s explanation is in terms of ideas rather than reductive material forces, and in terms of ethical ideas in particular. That is to say, she is arguing that philosophical ideas are the key causal power.

Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand had earlier argued for ideational over materialist causes of history. Here is Mises in Planned Chaos (1947):

“The history of mankind is the history of ideas. For it is ideas, theories, and doctrines that guide human action, determine the ultimate ends men aim and the choice of the means employed for the attainment of these ends. The sensational events which stir the emotions and catch the interest of superficial observers are merely the consummation of ideological changes. There are no such things as abrupt, sweeping transformations of human affairs. What is called, in rather misleading terms, a ‘turning point in history’ is the coming on the scene of forces which were already for a long time at work behind the scene. New ideologies, which had already long since superseded the old ones, throw off their last veil, and even the dullest people become aware of the changes they did not notice before” (p. 62).

Here is Rand in For the New Intellectual (1961), focusing more narrowly on philosophical ideas as decisive: “Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job it is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period” (p. 27).

McCloskey has been influenced by Israel Kirzner, who was one of Mises’s students. McCloskey’s importance is her is singling out of ethical ideas as fundamental. (Though see also Roark’s courtroom speech in Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) for the mid-career Rand’s focus on a culture’s moral evaluation of innovators and creators as a key determinant of the course of history.)

I wrote earlier about McCloskey’s wonderfully ambitious Bourgeois Virtues:
* Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800.
* Capitalism versus the good old days.

Also relevant here is the work of Nimish Adhia on India’s recent transformation as a case study in the power of a culture’s moral ideals. Adhia was one of McCloskey’s doctoral students.