A Case for “Big Government”

“Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

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In a previous post, I alluded to political action being a public act of persuasion. This is so first because the hallmarks of humanity are rationality and spontaneity, and second because only in a public space can rationality be conditioned or spontaneity acknowledged and recorded. I hold with Hannah Arendt that acts taken in a void are essentially meaningless – it is the interaction of one’s creative will with others that gives it substance. Moreover, politics must be uniquely interpersonal in that it takes humans as its primary object, whereas labor and work are concerned with natural resources and physical capital, respectively.

One consequence of viewing politics as persuasion is that only that which can be communicated can be political. Communicability, in turn, is simply the ability of one person to make himself or herself understood to another person, which is dependent upon a shared language through which we exchange ideas. Thus, a shared language defines the outermost bounds of the political realm that can exist within any given society.

This ability of social activity to create space for politics enables human excellence, but can just as readily restrict the potential for action. We can exclude communicable ideas from politics by declaring them private opinions. For example, religion in the United States (at least in the case of Christian denominations, less so with Islam since its re-politicization after 9/11) is now broadly considered a private issue, not fit for public critique and certainly not a matter on which others will publicly attempt to change your mind. Calls in the wake of the Aurora shootings that “Now is not the time to talk about gun control” similarly remove subjects from persuasive (ergo political) discourse and therefore from the potential for excellent human engagement. If one person decides not to buy a gun for the sake of principle, it will have little or no impact on other people and certainly will not garner public remembrance. Were the same person to organize a successful movement to reinstate America’s assault rifle ban, then he would create a permanent and public legal record of political achievement. Thus, while there may exist some moral or even practical case for a particular subject being excluded from political discourse, we must weigh all such cases against the lost capacity for human excellence in the field.

A large number of topics available to political discourse draws people into political activity, courtesy of the well-documented tendency to care more about issues directly relevant to one’s own experiences. When someone feels that the prevailing public discourse excludes the topics most important to him, it stands to reason that he will be less likely to participate in that discourse. For example, if I am an ardent believer in transparent school boards, but nobody else thinks the issue is important, then I cannot easily engage in political activity to attempt to enact my agenda. At best, the opportunity cost of creating a dialogue where none exists could dissuade me from pursuing political excellence in the area of administrative accountability. My beliefs about transparency are, albeit innocently, marginalized and therefore privatized: I can believe that, but I should not attempt to persuade anyone else to join me in acting on it. Thus can social priorities limit political activity even without intent.

The ultimate triumph of the social over the political occurs when there ceases to be a plurality of persuasive voices. Tyranny achieves this singularity via propaganda and centralized control. The most extreme plausible example of this is George Orwell’s Newspeak, which goes beyond simply excluding topics from discussion but actually makes it impossible to discuss complex ideas by removing the vocabulary needed for their communication. However, radical liberty can also eradicate politics by emancipating people from persuasive activity and employing government purely as a mechanism for supporting the private sphere.

It may be argued that market transactions, being based on individual choices, can constitute a form of speech. However, merely economic forums, like markets, or social forums, like the Church of Scientology, cannot replace politics. Money is not speech, and economics is not persuasion, because economics is fundamentally the science of necessities, and it follows necessarily causal laws. Markets do not allow for creativity or persuasion, only accounting. Likewise, purely social forums, those that are self-selected and cannot enforce law, lack the elements that drive political activity, namely, divergent opinions and an incentive to guide the institution’s use of force by influencing its agenda. The lack of heretics within the Church of Scientology is precisely the evidence that it is an apolitical institution.

Deciding what to purchase or what groups to join can, of course, be connected to political action, as in boycotts, but only insofar as it conveys a recognizable and persuasive message. A boycott sends a recognizable message only when publicized alongside the reasons for the boycott; publishing reasons, of course, is political speech. The boycott itself adds no substance to the speech, it merely adds pathos by conveying the actors’ willingness to sacrifice economic benefits for the sake of moral sentiment. This, in turn, presupposes the primacy of economic, apolitical interests in our decision-making process, and so is itself an apolitical, or even anti-political gesture.

Unlike markets or social clubs, democratic government is an institution based entirely on persuading others to act together towards some common purpose. Such persuasive activity is the paramount human behavior. Therefore it is through democratic institutions that we express our humanity. The hastened emancipation of personal choices from public debate limits the accessibility and relevance of this forum and therefore marginalizes truly human activity. To best enable human excellence, we must expand, not contract, the scope of topics assailable in the public sphere.

We can start by recognizing that nearly all of our choices impact other people, therefore nearly all of our choices are worth considering in an unselfish manner. This does not mean that we must abandon our principles to the whims of the majority; indeed, defending one’s convictions politically is itself an excellent act. Nor do I believe that “big government” means lots of red tape, high taxes, and expansive welfare, but rather that any given regulation, tax law, and welfare program be subject to reasoned and public discourse that shapes the prerogative of the relevant authority.

Finally, recall that politics depends not upon the government, but upon persuasive speech. If one acts through persuasive speech to limit or remove government involvement in one area or another, that is itself a political act. One must merely be prepared to defend that limitation ad infinitum in further political discourse. The problem of small government arises from the categorical rejection of discussing government action in one area or another, in the deliberate exclusion of whole subjects from public debate. Insofar as broad governmental prerogative brings these questions back into the fold, we might consider a potentially expansive state as a worthwhile opportunity to fulfill our unique human potential.

Maybe government is really just about the same size as its citizens.

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(Photo courtesy of political-humor.org)

Why Americans Hate Politicians (And Why We Can’t Live Without Them)

“We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.” – Frank Hubbard

“Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.” – Saul Bellow

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

“Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.” – W.C. Fields

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“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” – Plato

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Plato seeded the Western political tradition that treats political action as a necessary evil. After seeing his mentor, Socrates, sentenced to death for revealing his fellow citizens’ ignorance, Plato founded the Academy as a refuge from the hostile, anti-philosophical public. To Socrates and to those before him, political engagement was the highest human activity, enabled by the material surplus that granted freedom from striving for sustenance. From Plato onwards, politics became a subordinate realm to academia, itself a way of organizing society such that philosophers could escape the necessity of politics, experience truth, and find intellectual fulfillment.

In modern America, we have instead subordinated the political to the economic, with the consequence that many of our brightest minds find more attraction in investment banking than in politics. Our accepted measure of success is no longer areté, Greek “prowess,” by which one became worthy of public remembrance, but accumulated wealth, the monetary value assigned to your actions by market forces. Indeed, though we may each consider ourselves as beholden to non-economic values, we consider other people’s finances as distinctly separate from and superior to public considerations. So-called “social issues,” like same-sex marriage, religion in schools, medical marijuana, and physician assisted suicide are considered valid political questions, because supposedly who one loves, which god (if any) one worships, which pain relievers one uses, and one’s very continued existence are matters on which society ought have a say. How one disposes of an amassed fortune, on the other hand, is a largely secretive affair, even among otherwise public figures, as Romney’s ongoing tax return saga attests. At the same time, we view government as essentially a steward of the economy, with personal real income growth the best predictor of presidential vote tallies and highly correlated with presidential approval ratings.

The nexus of the cult of wealth and its emancipation from political action forces politicians to adopt a strange double life. They are private, economic individuals, judged largely on their professional success. We tend to elect disproportionately wealthy politicians not only because they have more time and resources for campaigning than other candidates, but also because we attach implicit respect to the accumulation of wealth over the course of a professional career. We relate to, partially envy, and understand the private, quiet figure cut by the economic side of the politician. At the same time, however, we elect our representatives into institutions that are designed with Athenian-style prowess in mind, to speak and persuade and act in a public. What it takes to govern is different than what it takes to earn money: government is a luxury, money-making is essential for survival. Governance is noisy, messy, and unpredictable. In contrast to the economic laws of animal necessity, the political laws of spontaneity embody and lay bare the very essence of humanity.

A person can stand in one of three relations to a democratic system: an agent of action, a voter for action, and an observer of action. The entire voting population falls into the second category, and does not often engage in politics in the proper sense of persuasion in a public forum. Instead, this second category elects from amongst its own willing members agents of government who act as the sole actors the political system, debating, issuing, enforcing, revising, and repealing laws. We simultaneously respect and detest these individuals’ uncommon tenacity. We hold them to the standards of economic behaviors in which we ourselves engage while demanding that they handle the distinctly non-economic affairs of politics. Faced with this impossible double-standard, politicians can do nothing but attempt to please their constituents as best they can by reinforcing the image of government as a primarily economic agent, by bragging about their achievements bringing money to their districts, creating local jobs, and supporting local businesses. By removing government from politics, they further the dissolution of human spontaneity and the broader acceptance of economic standards of behavior.

Thus, without government, our economic system suffers, but against government our economic impulses rebel. Perhaps the best man is never a candidate, and the dumb engage in politics, only because we prejudge political worth and acumen by definitively apolitical expectations.

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(Photo courtesy of house.gov)

Human Needs, pt. 3 – Morality

In Part 2: Outputs, I dissected the Understanding according to Kantian epistemology and briefly discussed the moral significance of Values in determining our subjective understanding of the world. In this Part 3: Morality, I conclude the mini-series on human needs by analyzing the relevance of this subjective understanding to human agency and ethical decisions.

Values fall into two (and sometimes both) categories: intrinsic values, which we pursue for their own sake, and extrinsic values, which we pursue for the sake of obtaining some intrinsic value. It follows that extrinsic values depend upon our objectives. Consider, to use a well-worn example, a carpenter in the home renovation business. His trusty handsaw has never let him down, and now, as he cuts joists for a new wall, is no exception. Now, there could be any number of intrinsic values at play, but let us say that the carpenter takes great satisfaction in finishing a high-quality project. The saw has extrinsic value in that it helps him to complete the renovation. Now consider the same carpenter with the same trusty saw finishes the wall, gets a slab of granite and prepares to install it as countertops. Unfortunately, the slab doesn’t have the hole cut in it for the sink. Suddenly that saw seems pretty useless for helping achieve the intrinsic good of finishing the job, and, as such, it now lacks extrinsic value. The saw’s relevance to the carpenter is entirely contingent upon its usefulness towards some intrinsic value.

Ethics is the study of human decisions – it categorizes actions as right or wrong. As the relevance or irrelevance of facts to our understanding is determined wholly by our underlying value systems, ethics can therefore be conceived as the study of our guiding values. Determining right from wrong categorizes conceptions where human behaviors serve as the object of cognition; therefore ethical judgment is the intrinsic valuation of so-called “right” behavior and the imbuing of decisions with extrinsic values pursuant to their accordance with and promotion of intrinsically valuable “right behaviors.”

The essential questions of moral philosophy are “What has intrinsic value?” and, closely related, “What should be the relationship between intrinsic goods and one’s choices?” To answer these questions cohesively and consistently, we create general moral theories that we hope can be applied to any situation we encounter. We obviously do not always implement our moral theories (from which arise ethical codes) particularly well in practice, but they nonetheless lend some logical structure to our otherwise erratic behavior. This is precisely the process of second-order reflection that allows for our concepts of moral culpability and responsibility, and which distinguishes us morally from amoral objects and beings.

Moral theorizing is an essential characteristic of the Understanding – a moral theory is itself a filter that creates conceptions of right and wrong against which experience is compared in our cognitive processes. A theory takes as its objects merely the categories of “do” and “do not” that are themselves conceptions; a moral theory takes as its objects the categories “do” and “do not,” which disjunctively describe human decisions. Theories can therefore be constructed a priori, without regard to sensory information, which allows for a priori moralities such as Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance.

As Kant pointed out in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, investigation a priori can discover only the form, and not the substance, of moral considerations. To make moral choices, we need empirical knowledge of the world which provides the context and impetus for our actions. If, for example, I wish to deny access to alcohol to individuals under the age of 21 years, I resort to empirical intuitions both to define the maxim and to justify it. “Deny,” “access,” “alcohol,” “individuals,” and “years” all reference a posteriori observations necessary to formulate the prohibition. If I justify denying alcohol to minors by reference to the physiological effects of alcohol, the development of the body and mind,  etc., then I am again referencing empirical observations. For the argument to be sound, I must empirically verify that allowing minors to access alcohol actually does violate some ethical principle, e.g., that it actually does have harmful physiological effects on juveniles. If I just assume these effects and do not consider evidence to the contrary, then I have not actually applied moral my moral theory at all, but have rather appended to it a categorical ban on an empirical phenomenon. Declining to reference empirical evidence is therefore an abdication of moral choice altogether, in other words, an abdication of that which makes one distinctly human.

Morality  ceases to be a morality when it fails to admit the empirical evidence necessary to inform judgment. Racism is one such amorality. Racism can be formulated as the qualification of “I will treat humans with respect” with racial characteristics, most (in)famously, as “I will treat only caucasian humans with respect.” Racism must then introduce reasons for racial discrimination that are relevant within a generally accepted moral theory. Racism is immoral insofar as its justifications are not morally relevant, but it is amoral insofar as it fails to consider empirical evidence contradicting its justifications. We might hold a moral theory in which people are wrong to so disengage from their moral faculties, but we can declare without reference to morality that such disengagement is inhuman. My point is not that racists are not people, or that they are not worthy of respect as such, but rather that, when one makes a decision not to act respectfully towards a person on the basis of his or her race, engaging in an act of doublethink by selectively ignoring evidence the objective falsehood of one’s justifications – in that moment – one is not acting as a moral agent, but merely as a human animal.

The debate over determinism notwithstanding, people have autonomous wills. They can take control of their understanding by deconstructing the origins of their prejudice and considering whether those prejudices are acceptable under a moral theory. I contend that people ought to so engage because it is moral action as such. The first command of any moral theory is to behave in accordance with it; therefore, it can never be morally right to abdicate willful action. Intellectual honesty is thus not itself a moral virtue, but the virtue by which morality functions. Critical thinking is not so much a tool to determine right choices as it is the mechanism by which choice is possible.

For the moral creature, for people fully embracing their humanity, it is always a blessing to be proven wrong.

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(Photo courtesy of mazag.tumblr.com)

Human Needs Pt. 2 – Outputs

In Human Needs, Part 1, I tried to illustrate the manner in which needs are converted into prejudices – or, to choose a more neutral term, filters – that tell us which information is important to us, and which we can safely ignore. I argued that we need such filters because we are unable to process wholly the deluge of sensory information that we continuously receive. In Part 2, I will add some formal structure by analyzing how human needs, often subconsciously, output the basic structure of the understanding, as well as how this output can have some harmful moral implications. In a future post, I will conclude this mini-series by more fully developing an adjunct moral theory.

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First, I’m going to do about 200 pages of Kant in a nutshell, because I ❤ Kant. He was a smart dude. Kant says that everybody has senses and the ability to think (genius!), but what makes Kant really cool is how precisely he tells us what that means.

First of all, our senses don’t paint a perfect picture of the world around us. There are some biases built into the way the human mind functions – Kant identifies them as time and space. To prove that time and space are a component of thought, not objects that we observe via sense, he proposes a simple thought experiment: Imagine only a dodgeball. Now imagine that the ball is gone. You get empty space. Now imagine that the space is gone. Kant says that this is impossible, because we don’t observe space; rather, space is a way that our minds impose order on the objects of our senses. Similarly with time: Kant says that to imagine phenomena without time is impossible, or, worse, nonsensical. A dodgeball flying at you is something that occupies space (it sure does) and time (i.e., the space that the ball occupies changes). Eventually, it occupies the same space as your face (OW!), and you’re probably done observing it for now. But time and space are constituent elements of observation, so to think of them like a dodgeball, as something that we observe, would be completely circular.

Here, your sensory experience of the dodgeball (hearing it whistle through the air, watching it in seeming slow-motion as it approaches your face) is the matter of the observation (Kant calls them “intuitions”), and space and time provide its form. Together, the matter and form create a representation, which is what you actually cognize when you live out the scenario. Representations, though, aren’t the be all, end all of the understanding – they have to be sorted. When you run this thought experiment, you don’t actually see a dodgeball coming towards you, so you’re not actually experiencing the event and no representation is formed. Instead, you have to fall back on a conception of a dodgeball, an idea of what a dodgeball is. Conceptions are really just sorting a bunch of different representations into one broader, more inclusive representation, so that all instances of spherical, rubbery, bouncy objects can be understood collectively as instances of the category “dodgeball.” With the conception in hand, we don’t have to take each event in total isolation; we can now group all of these different experiences, regardless of the ball’s size, weight, color, or texture, into one big idea. It is the conception that makes basic speech possible because, while I can’t experience your unfortunate gym class for you, I can hear the word “dodgeball,” sort it into the appropriate conception in my understanding, and relate it back to my own experiences.

There is one more piece to the understanding: judgment. Judging is to conceiving what conceptions are to representations. Judgments take conceptions and sort them into groups. This is a kind of hierarchical relationship that can be exemplified thus: my conception of a “dodgeball” is one instance of an even broader conception of “sports balls” generally, a category that includes baseballs, soccer balls, basketballs, bowling balls, etc. You can think of judgments as enabling higher-order language and communication, because they let us relate thoughts in hierarchical taxonomies, just like I’ve done here.

That’s it! Kant goes into excruciating detail about how all of these pieces work together (there are twelve alleged relationships between representations or conceptions, the derivation of which comprises arguably the 30 most convoluted pages in the history of philosophy), but we have essentially all the pieces of the understanding. For Kant, the understanding is nothing more or less than the ability to spontaneously judge. Thinking is that uniquely human ability to abstract only the relevant information and sort it into conceptual categories. It is the judgment that sorts information into the categories “relevant” and “irrelevant” that carries moral weight.

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Kant’s goal with his Critique of Pure Reason was to explain how and within what limits reason functions. In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals he hints at the importance of inclinations – passions, needs, desires – in guiding human action. As far as I’m aware, he did not engage in a systematic study of how inclinations help to shape subjective reality. I contend that this influence derives from values, which determine the conceptions and judgments that we make.

“Values” is often used these days to connote a specific set of Judeo-Christian virtues – help the poor, be humble before the Lord, always vote to criminalize abortion and same-sex marriage, and so on. Other times, it is employed more generically to substitute for “good morals.” I mean the term even more broadly: literally, on what do we place importance? These can be actions, objects, artifacts, stories – anything! – so long as we consider them to be important or worthwhile.

We ascribe two different kinds of value, intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic valuables are important in and of themselves, while extrinsic valuables have worth because they help us to attain intrinsic goods. An intrinsic good might be one’s life, and a farmer might find extrinsic value in a plough through its ability to improve the harvest and sustain life. Even subconsciously, we are always comparing information to our values to determine its relevance to us. The farmer may care, for example, if his plow works best when held a certain way, as remembering and applying this knowledge helps him to better sustain his own life. The farmer might care less whether the handle is made from oak or mahogany. The aesthetics of the woods may have intrinsic value to him, but neither type of wood has any more extrinsic value than the other as regards its ability to plow the soil. The farmer might then forget, or at least not concern himself with, the type of wood in his plow-handle.

Just like the farmer, we regularly include and exclude details from our considerations all the time. If you meet me and value beauty, my looks may be worth forgetting. If you meet Stephen Hawking and value intellect, you will likely notice and remember many more details of Dr. Hawking’s conversation then you would features of my face. This type of innate inclusion and exclusion of facts bears great moral weight because it means that we can be socialized into morally unacceptable biases – most of the ‘isms, for instance – in some cases without even noticing it. Discrimination and systematic oppression might not always be conscious decisions, or even the aggregate of many less malicious conscious decisions, but rather a subtle consequence of the inconsistent determination of relevance. This imposes a moral duty to deconstruct our own biases and ascertain their particular morality, a theme I will explore further in the concluding Part 3.

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Part 3: Morality coming soon

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(Photo courtesy of yourbest100.com)