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.

In all modesty, however, I believe that I have hit upon a totally awesome solution that will satisfy both groups at once:

Let’s ban women from the workplace.

The leftish will love that all those double-income couples will find their income halved. And the newly-vacated jobs can be filled by unemployed family men, thereby increasing the wealth of those currently poorer. A giant step towards income equality!

The socons will applaud that more women will now devote more energy to their families. And without independent income, the womenfolk will have more incentive to stay married, so divorce rates will plummet. A giant step towards family stability!

Brilliant, or what? Two birds, one stone, and there will be peace in the land. No need to thank me, since that’s just the kind of guy I am — always thinking: How can I arrange other people’s lives to make everybody happy?

Our only obstacle: Those stuck thinking that unbridled economic freedom trumps benevolent social planning.

“With his Fountain (1917), Duchamp made the quintessential statement about the history and future of art. Duchamp of course knew the history of art and, given recent trends, where art was going. He knew what had been achieved — how over the centuries art had been a powerful vehicle that called upon the highest development of the human creative vision and demanded exacting technical skill; and he knew that art had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the minds, and the passions of those who experience it. With his urinal, Duchamp offered presciently a summary statement. The artist is not a great creator — Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object — it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling — it is puzzling and leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. He could have selected a sink or a door-knob. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.”

[Excerpt from Why Art became Ugly (2004).]

Related: Marcel Duchamp and Lillian Rearden.

Plato, 360 BCE: “In that country [Egypt] arithmetical games have been invented for the use of mere children, which they learn as pleasure and amusement. I have late in life heard with amazement of our ignorance in these matters [science in general]; to me we appear to be more like pigs than men, and I am quite ashamed, not only of myself, but of all Greeks.” (Laws, Book VII)

Catullus, c. 60 BCE: “Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is!”

Horace, c. 23-13 BCE: “Our fathers, viler than our grandfathers, begot us who are viler still, and we shall bring forth a progeny more degenerate still.” (Odes 3:6)

Alberti, 1436: Nature is no longer producing great intellects — “or giants which in her youthful and more glorious days she had produced so marvelously and abundantly.” (On Painting)

Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1620: “For what else can our degenerate race do in this age of error. Our lowly disposition keeps us close to the ground, and we have declined from that heroic genius and judgment of the ancients.”

Mary Wollstonecraft, c. 1790: “As from the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.”

William Wordsworth, 1802:
“Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”
(”London”)

John Stuart Mill, in 1859, speaking of his generation: “the present low state of the human mind.” (On Liberty, Chapter 3)

Frederick Taylor, 1911: “We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight.” (Scientific Management)

T. S. Eliot, c. 1925: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.”

So has the world really been in constant decline? Or perhaps, as Gibbon put it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776): “There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.”

Words to keep in mind as we try to assess objectively our own generation’s serious problems.

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.

The copyright agreement allows me to distribute a limited number of copies personally, so if you’d like a PDF of the review, email me at CEE [at] Rockford [dot] edu.

My conclusion: “America’s Economic Moralists is a good historical survey of mostly religious commentaries on economics. Frey’s work is in part a historical survey and in part a polemic against the autonomy individualists. In my judgment, Frey does a good job covering the important distinction between autonomy and relational economic moralities and many of the sub-debates therein. But there are more historically and philosophically significant themes that could also have been developed more fully, and Frey’s eagerness to advance the relational view and to slight the autonomy view sometimes gets the better of his skills as historian and philosopher.”

Cite: Hicks, Stephen R. C. 2012. “Review of Donald Frey’s America’s Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics.” Business Ethics Quarterly 22.1, 186-193.

In The Republic, Plato makes a systematic case for censoring all arts. The task of the Platonic philosopher is to take up the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” [607b] and to assert the State-enforced dominance of philosophy. To that end, The Republic as a whole is a powerful integration of philosophy, religion, education, and politics, and its argument for the political suppression of most art follows from that integrated system.

Rhetorically, Plato uses Socrates’ discussion with Glaucon and Adeimantus to list a series of grievances against poetry, music, and painting:

* A good portrait of the gods and heroes will show them as worthy and exalted beings — but poets such as Homer and Hesiod often tell tales of the gods and heroes fighting and bickering and acting immorally [e.g., 390b-391e].

* A moral citizen’s soul will be composed and dignified — but many musical modes stir us up inside and make us jangled and unsettled [398e-400d.].

* Good people and gods do not deceive — but painters constantly deceive us by trying to make their fake imitations look real [598c, 602d]. (Meanwhile, Plato allows that politicians (and only politicians) ought to be allowed to lie to their citizens [389b-c].)

* A strong and moral man will not grieve the death of a friend by moaning and wailing like a woman — but poets regularly have their characters issue long, pathetic lamentations [387d-388d].

* Courageous men are willing to die in battle — but the poets tell scary stories about the afterlife and make us fear death [386b-d].

* A proper moral of the story will teach that good people meet good ends and bad men meet bad ends [613d-614a] — but tragic poets have will often have bad men profit and protagonists fail and suffer despite their virtues [392b].

* Decent people respect and strive for worthiness — but comic poets appeal to our basest desires and mock and deride everything [e.g., 395d-e, 606c].

And so on.

The Republic’s overall argument for censorship thus combines a particular conception of morality with religion and authoritarian politics. Formalizing the argument:

1. To have a good society, we must have good citizens.
2. To have good citizens, children must be well educated.
3. To be well educated, children must be exposed to good material and shielded from bad material [386a].
4. So, to have a good society, children must be exposed to good material and shielded from bad material.
5. It is the obligation of the State to educate its citizens.
6. So the State should allow only good material and suppress bad material.
7. The State’s censorship applies also to art.
8. So the State should allow only good art and suppress bad art [401b, 595a].

[Next: Evaluating Plato's argument for censoring the arts. Return to the Intellectual History page.]

In this extended interview, philosopher Douglas B. Rasmussen responds to a series of questions (listed below) about his life and work.

Dr. Rasmussen is a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York. In addition to the books discussed in the interview, he is the author of articles in American Philosophical Quarterly, The Review of Metaphysics, International Philosophical Quarterly, and many scholarly anthologies.

Why did you become a philosopher? [00:18]
Where did you go to college? [1:02]
Why does liberal society need a philosophical basis? [1:17 ]
You present those themes in some detail in your books Liberty and Nature, Liberalism Defended, and Norms of Liberty. What is your argument for liberty? [2:44]
Previous question continued [00:09]
Which historical philosophers have you learned most from? [6:08]
How do those issues of metaphysics connect to liberalism? [8:15]
Which major historical philosophers do you most disagree with? [11:28]
What is the hardest philosophical problem you are working on now? [00:08]
What is the most challenging criticism of your views? [2:43]
What is the state of liberal thought today among philosophers? [4:36]
To bring about a more liberal society, what key practical steps can and should be taken? [6:30]

Coming Soon: Profiles in Liberty interview with economist David R. Henderson.

Related: Stephen Hicks interviews Douglas Rasmussen about Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness.

I am chairing a session and presenting a paper on the theme of “Rights in Mises, Hayek, and Rand” for the annual conference of the Association for Private Enterprise Education, to be held April 1-3, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The rationale for the session: Three giants of twentieth-century thought — but few comparative studies have been done. The following panelists will discuss rights-related issues in the thought of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Ayn Rand.

Richard Ebeling, Department of Economics, Northwood University
Title: Mises on Rights and Principles

Eric Mack, Department of Philosophy, Tulane University
Title: Desert and Entitlement in Atlas Shrugged

Michelle Vachris, Department of Economics, Christopher Newport University
Title: Atlas Shrugged down The Road to Serfdom: Rand and Hayek on Rights

Stephen Hicks, Department of Philosophy, Rockford College
Title: Economic facts and values in Mises, Hayek, and Rand

Chan Luu’s designs have been worn by many celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Kate Hudson, Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock, Janet Jackson, and Jennifer Aniston. Much of the interview was published last month in Kaizen. I met with Luu in Los Angeles to discuss growing up in Vietnam, the relevance of business education to entrepreneurial success, and the complexities of doing business in the fast-changing world of celebrities and fashion.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or CEE’s site.

1840: 64%
1880: 43%
1920: 27%
1960: 10%
2000: 1.5%

What an amazing transformation over 160 years.

Interesting to compare the USA’s numbers with these statistics from the CIA’s World Factbook on percentages of people employed in agriculture around the world, e.g., Afghanistan 78%, Kyrgyzstan 48%, Malaysia 13%, New Zealand 7%, Singapore 0.1%.

More information about this and my other courses at the Courses page.

More information at the Courses page.

See also my 48-hour Philosophy of Education lecture series on video, available free online.

Some related posts on education:

Locke versus Kant on motivation and discipline
Geniuses and their followers
Mathematics education
Adam Smith on accountability in education
Fichte on education as socialization
Dewey on education as socialization
Education and the National Socialists
Video interview with Jerry Kirkpatrick on Montessori and Dewey
How great artists become great
Sidney Hook on public education in New York in the early 1900s
Don’t know much about history — an anecdote
Women’s and men’s college graduation rates
Sir Ken Robinson on factory schools
Immigrant culture, race, and education
A complete listing of my education-related posts.

More information at the Courses page. See also my Business and Economic Ethics page.

The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens.

Rocket Singh takes up negative themes of corrupt in sales, bribery, and conflicts of interest, but the emphasis is on the positive: the sources of self-respect, win-win business relations, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. I responded to the very human challenges of honesty, integrity, necessity as the mother of invention and ingenuity, growing pains, guts, and semi-redemption.

Stating the themes abstractly like that could make Rocket sound saccharine and didactic, but it works as a real movie, with engaging characters, tension, and drama.

Related:
My earlier recommendation of Guru: “A villager, Gurukant Desai, arrives in Bombay in 1958, and rises from its streets to become the GURU, the biggest tycoon in Indian history.”
Interview with Nimish Adhia on Bollywood and the new India.
Shikha Dalmia on India and Slumdog Millionaire.
Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound.

The circumnavigation of Africa was a great achievement over many decades. In principle many people — European, African, or Asian — could have accomplished it. So why the Portuguese?

Here is Axelson’s explanation:

“It was no accident that Portugal became the first European country in modern times to explore and colonize beyond the seas. Her medieval wars of independence against Leon and Castile, and her campaigns against the Moors in the Iberian peninsula, had encouraged the growth of a national spirit by the time—in the middle of the twelfth century—Portugal attained what are essentially her present frontiers. Bounded by unfriendly and often actively hostile Spanish kingdoms and Muslim principalities, Portugal was forced to look to the sea not merely for communication with the rest of Christendom, but also for essential trade: the export of salt and oil, of wine and cork, and the import of most of the manufactured goods her people needed. Moreover, her pastures and her cultivated lands were infertile, and the sea provided necessary food. Her fishermen became consummate seamen, and out of their ranks emerged the crews of ships that sailed in the Middle Ages to the farthest parts of northwestern Europe and of the Mediterranean” (p. 19).

Comments?

My thoughts: Axelson’s explanation is a good start but more is necessary. Many medieval peoples fought wars to protect their independence, and many places with poor soil became good at fishing; yet very few generated great exploration cultures. Axelson’s middle point about trade is strong: the map at right (click to enlarge) shows that Portugal is at the fringes when it comes to trade with just about everyone and that the land trade routes were already controlled by others (e.g., the Venetians and Levantines). But it’s still a question in my mind why the Portuguese didn’t simply acquiesce to an isolated, marginal existence; after all, that’s what many peoples throughout history have done. So who were the key deciders who initiated and led and pushed the Portuguese into great activity and accomplishment?

Another question: Axelrod gives one political and two economic motivations — were other factors such as scientific curiosity or religious evangelism significantly operative?

Here’s a list, adapted from this site, of key Portuguese names and dates:
1394: Henry the Navigator born
1419: Madeira Islands discovered by explorers Zarco and Tristao Vaz Teixeira
1427: Azores Islands discovered by Diogo Silves
1434: Exploration of the African coast begins
1444: Discovery of the Cape Verde islands
1484: Diogo Cao discovers the River Congo
1487: Bartholomeu Dias leads an expedition around the Cape of Good Hope
[1492: Christopher Columbus discovers the New World]
1498: Vasco da Gama reaches India via navigation around Africa
1500: Pedro Alvares Cabral discovers Brazil
1519: Ferdinand Magellan leads the first voyage around the World
1542: Portuguese explorers are the first Europeans to land in Japan
1569: Nagasaki, Japan is opened to Portuguese traders

1. What is the US economy? Introduction. Before blaming the economic crisis on either government regulation or free enterprise, we need to know what kind of economic system the U.S. had before the crisis. A survey of the relevant factors in identifying the degree of capitalism or socialism then in place.

2. Deregulation? The Federal Register’s size: Data on one measure of government regulation — page counts of its publication of new rules each year.

3. When was the financial sector deregulated? Data on two measures of regulation: The size of the federal government’s annual budget for regulating the financial and banking sector, and the total number of government employees regulating that sector.

4. The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A simplified flowchart of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis. Presidents, congressmen, Fannie Mae, and lenders’ changing incentives.

5. Pathologies of the mixed economy (or, How we got into this frackin’ mess): A big-picture overview of the development of our mixed economy. Integrating developments in ethics, economics and political history, and public choice. A video-lecture version.

6. Money and monetary systems: An introductory contrast of private/competing money systems to our government/monopoly money system. Includes an analogy of books to money: Books are to the intellectual realm what money is to the economic realm.

7. Has the Federal Reserve been a failure? A report on a conference paper given by economic historians George Selgin and Lawrence White comparing the Fed’s original mission with its track record over the twentieth century.

8. What is the OWS complaint? A question for those venting their frustration at Wall Street rather than Pennsylvania Avenue.

9. Warren Buffett and the power of corporations: On the crucial distinction between political power and economic power.

10. John Allison on the financial crisis: I can’t take any credit for this excellent talk, but the former CEO of BB&T had a front-row view of the events leading up to and during the crisis. I also can’t take any credit for economist George Reisman’s depressingly clear overview explanation.

[Return to the Financial Crisis page. Return to the Business and Economics page. Return to the StephenHicks.org main page.]