This question seems like it should be relatively straightforward.
In a previous essay in Public Discourse, I noted that immigration does not have any significant net aggregate economic effects. But the absence of an aggregate effect does not mean there are no distributional effects. After all, taking $10,000 from every person who reads this essay and giving it to the author of this essay has no aggregate effect on wealth, yet I still think that is an admirable idea. (You may have a different opinion.) So, maybe the economic effects of immigration are similar redistributions of income or wealth.
“In democracies changes are chiefly due to the wanton license of demagogues.” Aristotle wrote that in Politics.
Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers warns: “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career, by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing Demagogues and ending Tyrants.”
I think it is safe to say that nobody is a big fan of demagogues.
Where does that leave democracy? Can we conclude that in a democratic society,
we really don’t want rulers whose first instinct is to maximize their popularity
with the crowds? Can we conclude that we want sober-minded leaders, who think
about what is best to do and not what ill-informed citizens of the country
might impulsively want to have done? Can we conclude we don’t want people who
run for office on the basis of personal charisma instead of policy ideas? Can
we conclude that a candidate who has handlers managing public appearances in
order to orchestrate popularity is not good for the country?
Enter Coriolanus.
Coriolanus was a war hero in Rome. He single handedly defeated
the city of Corioli, came back to Rome greeted with great praise, and was
slated to be elected to high office. One problem. To do so, he had to go to
into the marketplace and get the crowds to accede to his election.
As Shakespeare relates (in the play cleverly entitled Coriolanus), he wasn’t thrilled at the prospect:
CORIOLANUS: What must I say? ‘I Pray, sir’–Plague upon’t! I cannot bring My tongue to such a pace:–‘Look, sir, my wounds! I got them in my country’s service, when Some certain of your brethren roar’d and ran From the noise of our own drums.’ MENENIUS: O me, the gods! You must not speak of that: you must desire them To think upon you. COR: Think upon me! hang ’em! I would they would forget me, like the virtues Which our divines lose by ’em. MEN: You’ll mar all: I’ll leave you: pray you, speak to ’em, I pray you, In wholesome manner. Exit COR: Bid them wash their faces And keep their teeth clean.
It is safe to conclude that Coriolanus did not have a high opinion
of the Common Man.
But, if you want power in Rome, you have to play the game. What
we can call Coriolanus’ handlers, the others promoting his candidacy (most
notably his mother), earnestly try to persuade him to just do what he needs to
do to get elected. First step he needs to stop insulting everyone.
My nobler friends, I crave their pardons: For the mutable, rank-scented many, let them Regard me as I do not flatter, and Therein behold themselves: I say again, In soothing them, we nourish ‘gainst our senate The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition, Which we ourselves have plough’d for, sow’d, and scatter’d, By mingling them with us, the honour’d number, Who lack not virtue, no, nor power, but that Which they have given to beggars.
Not exactly what his handlers have in mind, It doesn’t end
well. Coriolanus to the crowd:
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with your uncertainty! Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts! Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes, Fan you into despair!
And so, he joins the enemy and proceeds to march on Rome.
Here is the question: Is Coriolanus doing what we want
leaders to do? He stands on principle; he refuses to abase himself before the crowd;
he is aghast at the idea of showing off his war wounds to curry popularity with
people too cowardly to fight. He wants Rome to be great, but is deeply concerned
that in the race for popular opinion, the rulers are doing long-term harm in
order to garner short term praise from the rabble.
In other words, if you don’t want a popular demagogue, if
you don’t want a leader who constantly checks the poll numbers, then is
Coriolanus your type of leader?
In my reading group discussing this play (The Grecian Urn Seminar),
the room was surprisingly split almost exactly in half on the matter of evaluating
Coriolanus. Even on the simple question of whether he was a good guy or a bad
guy in the play, the room was nearly perfectly split. Is he a noble guy who was
sadly forced into a bad situation for betraying his country or is he an ignoble
guy who despised the people and was willing to sell out his country for a personal
vendetta?
Granted: Coriolanus is not exactly the best or worst type of
leader imaginable. That isn’t the real question. The real question is whether his
impulses with regards to being popular are the right ones. In the midst of
being persuaded to play the popularity game, Coriolanus exclaims:
Well, I must do’t: Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot’s spirit!
Consider that line. Do we want leaders possessed of some
harlot’s spirit? All things to all people? Policies promised in order to get a
few more votes in crucial places?
Whether you want it or not, of course, doesn’t really
matter. That’s what we have.
Imagine someone wanted to be elected leader of the most powerful
country in the modern world. What is the best path to power? Become a Rock
Star. Have a Reality TV Show. Perfect the art of delivering exactly what people
want to hear and see.
I know you are thinking of the current President of the
United States right now. But it goes back further than that. Much further. When
was the last US Presidential election where the more telegenic, charismatic
personality did not win? Go election by election and ask, “Which Candidate is
more like a Rock Star? Which candidate is more likely to light up the room by walking
into it?” (Note, this is not the same question as which candidate do you
personally like better. Imagine a crowd of normal people, the type of people who
never read blog posts about Coriolanus.) You have to go all the way back to
1964, when the candidate with more of that Rock Star quality lost. That year,
by the way is not only before I was born, it is also when TV was in its infancy.
So, ask yourself again: would you rather have Coriolanus as
leader? Would you rather have a leader who despised the people? Would you
rather have a leader who asked what was best for the country instead of what is
most popular?
Or put it this way: if the election was between Coriolanus
and Kanye West, for whom do you vote? Who wins?
“Are We Not Men?” (Altogether now: “We are Devo.”) (Yeah, if you are too young, you don’t get the joke. Google it.) According to my quick scan of Wikipedia, there is no link between that refrain and Algis Budrys’ novel Who?
But, there is certainly a common theme.
Who?, published in 1958, is included in the Library of America’s American Science Fiction, Five Classic Novels 1956-1958. (Curiously, this is the only edition in print. Add this to the seemingly endless set of kudos for the Library of America.)
The note at the back of the volume has the origin story. Budrys saw a painting of a man with a metal head and arm. A story was born. (I guess this makes the character in this novel the original Iron Man.)
The tale: Lucas Martino, a brilliant American scientist
working on a mysterious substance K-88 is captured by the Russian after an
explosion in the plant. Eventually the Russians agree to send Martino back
home. Across the border comes a man with a metal head and a mechanical arm. Is
this creature really Lucas Martino?
The novel follows the attempt of the American officials to
figure this out. The Reader follows along in this journey as the evidence
slides back and forth on the matter.
At one level, you can read this novel as simply a question
of identity. Who are you? Could you prove that you are you? As one of the investigators
screams in frustration, “Nobody—nobody in this whole world—can prove who he is,
but we’re expecting this one man to do it.”
Imagine you came out of a hospital with a metal head. Could
you prove your identity? That is what this novel seems to want you to ponder. How
can you prove that you are you?
But, at this level, the novel is an absolute failure. Yep. You
had no trouble figuring out how to prove that you are you. No matter how much
you were interrogated by some enemy agents, you could not possibly reveal all
the secrets of your life. So, it would be a trivial matter to have conversations
with people whom you knew for a long time and talk about the past. No imposter
could get through those conversations with everyone who knows you and your
past.
How does the novel make this a challenge? It cheats. You
see, Lucas Martino was a loner as a kid. His parents are dead. He worked for a
year with his uncle, but his uncle, alas, also died. He only talked to one
person throughout his entire college years, and, surprise, surprise, he is dead
too. Apparently everyone else with whom he worked died in the explosion. (There
are two people who knew Lucas when he was young who are still alive. Two.
Sadly, neither is reliable.)
Even though the novel cheats, at this level the story is a
pleasant enough read. It is interesting to try to figure out if the guy with
the metal head is Martino or a Soviet agent pretending to be Martino so that
the Soviets can discover the secrets of K-88. But, what seems like the philosophical
problem is a dud.
But, Budrys turns out to be a clever writer after all. This
isn’t really a story about proving that you are you.
The novel is asking a deeper question. What is the
difference between man and machine?
As we discover in the flashback sections, Lucas Martino is
rather clinical in his thought processes. He wanders through life like it is
all one big technical problem to solve and he solves it and he moves on. His
first crisis: “It was the first time in his life that he found himself unable
to do what he ought to do, and it bothered him deeply. It made him angry.”
He had thought he understood himself, and had shaped himself
to live most efficiently in his world. He had made plans on that basis, and
seen no flaws in them…For one more moment before he had to get to work, he
tried to decide how he could puzzle it all out and still learn not to waste his
time analyzing things that couldn’t be changed.
So, when a guy with a mechanical head shows up and acts more
like a robot than a human, is this a human or a machine? Is Lucas Martino
himself a human or a machine? As the being with the mechanical head ruminates
late in the novel:
“A man has no business buying machinery if he won’t treat it right. That’s a damned good design, that transmission. No reason in the world for anybody to have trouble with it.” His voice was almost querulous. “A machine won’t ever let you down, if you only take the trouble to use it right—use it the way you’re supposed to, for the jobs it’s built to do. That’s all. All you have to do is understand it. And no machine’s that complicated an average man can’t understand it. But nobody tries. Nobody thinks a machine’s worth understanding. What’s a machine, after all? Just a few pieces of metal. One’s exactly like another, and you can always get another one just like it.”
Reading that, it became apparent what Budrys is doing in
this novel. The portrait of Lucas Martino is the portrait of a machine. The
question: are all humans just machines?
An interesting question 60 years later. This idea that we
are nothing more than mechanical machines made of meat is all the rage right
now. As we peer deeper into the brain, you can hear the breathless excitement
that one day we will crack humanity and show that there is no soul, no independent
you, that you really are just a hunk of meat responding to external stimuli.
And if we hit that point, what happens to humanity. If
humans are just machines, then…
Reread the mechanical head guy’s speech above and substitute
“human” for “machine.”
Now explain why anyone gets excited about the possibility of
destroying the notion of a soul. Do you really want to live in a world where everyone
thinks of humans as just complicated machines?
Unfortunately, even if (well, technically even though) the
soul exists, we may still enter this nightmarish world. If people come to
believe that there is no soul, nothing that make humans uniquely important,
then it is hard to see how we avoid the problem Budrys sketches out in this
philosophical tract masquerading as a science fiction novel.
“At times I doubt, Excellency. But years ago I reached this conclusion. There is no alternative. It is necessary to believe. It is not possible to be an atheist. Not in a world like ours. Not if one has a vocation for public service and engages in politics.”
I have long been fascinated by Mario Vargas Llosa novels, and at long last I have read one I can recommend as a starting place. The Feast of the Goat. A brilliant novel. (But, I hasten to add, not for the squeamish. Llosa is all too masterful at convincing the Reader that some of the characters in the novel are truly evil.) (See here for a discussion of his other novels.)
It is the tale of Trujillo, the longtime strongman dictator
of the Dominican Republic. The novel has
shifting perspectives, Trujillo himself, the set of people who assassinate
Trujillo (don’t worry, that is not a spoiler), the daughter of one of Trujillo’s
cronies returning to the country decades after leaving it, and the people who
managed the government in the aftermath of Trujillo’s death. Expertly done.
The quotation at the outset is a government official responding
to Trujillo’s question. Why is it not
possible to be an atheist in a world like theirs?
Trujillo was, like many another Latin American dictator, a
hard, vicious ruler, maintaining order in the country with the fear arising
from an extensive police network and well-used torture chambers. In the chapters examining Trujillo’s interior
world, we find a man who seriously believes that what is good for him is good
for the country, that his own enemies are enemies of the state, and that his
own pleasures are benefits to the state.
We get glimpses of a past when he had not confused matters to this
extent, hints that maybe once upon a time, Trujillo really did care more about
the actual country than himself, but those days are long gone.
Everyone else in the novel lives in the shadow of Trujillo,
for good or ill. Therein lies the moral quandary.
If you are in a state dominated by a vicious ruler, how do
you craft a good life? Obviously being
complicit at the highest level of an evil regime is evil. But, what about being a soldier in the
army? What about working in one of the dictator’s
personal businesses? If your only
choices are work in some way to support the dictator or watch your family be
murdered, what do you do? Obviously not
the sort of thing you ever want to have to figure out. So, set that question aside.
Returning to the question at the outset, the official who
makes the remark above is onto something which generalizes. The reason he has to have a religion is that
it is the only thing that can possibly check the descent into evil while
working in Trujillo’s government. “Without
the Catholic faith, the country would fall into chaos and barbarism.”
How? Without the
Catholic faith, then everyone would end up like Trujillo, there would be no
check to the evil impulses within.
Catholicism is “the social restraint of the human animal’s irrational
passions and appetites.”
Whenever the question of human nature arises in
conversations with my students, I am always struck by their genuine belief in
the fundamental goodness of humans.
Sure, bad people exist, but in their view of the world, everyone is
basically good. Indeed, if explicitly
asked to name someone who is evil, there is invariably just one name
mentioned. (Zero points for guessing
which name.)
All of this makes me wonder: how do people who believe in
the inherent goodness of humans explain Trujillo or the head of Trujillo’s
secret police or the soldiers who derive great pleasure from torturing
others? Good people gone bad? But why did they go so bad? Why was their no check on their descent into
evil?
Another way of wondering the same thing: given these two
options, which would be harder to explain?
1) People are basically good, but sometimes people do very evil
things.
2) People are basically evil, but sometimes people do very
good things.
The second seems easy to explain: a benevolent God extends
his grace to allow evil people to refrain from evil. The first?
It isn’t obvious to me how that would make sense.
In the realm of catchy titles and subtitles, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have hit pay dirt.
The Coddling of the American Mind. Immediately memorable with its riff on Allan Bloom’s book. “Coddling” is a word which is just unusual enough, just vivid enough, to be memorable.
Then the subtitle: How
Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. You
read that and are instantly agreeing or outraged. Home run.
Their thesis? Well, you just read it in the subtitle.
Their argument? Beginning with the set of students arriving
at college in 2013, there has been a generational shift. These new students are
crippled by three things.
First, they are fragile. The have grown up in a world in which
the adults around them constantly tried to remove all obstacles. They are used
to getting their way. If you say “No” to them, they crumble. They avoid risky
endeavors. They want everything to be safe and certain.
Second, the new generation of students firmly believes that their emotional reaction is a sure guide to truth. “This makes me angry or sad or uncomfortable” means the same thing as “This is wrong.” There are no unpleasant truths in their world. “I feel this should be so, therefore it must be so.”
Third, they divide the world into good (people who agree with
me) and evil (people who disagree with me). Since Nazis are in the second
category, everyone else who disagrees with me is equivalent to a Nazi. Thus,
“You disagree with me” is quite literally the same things as “You deny my right
to exist.”
Combine those three things and what do you get when the
students enter college? You get the constant stream of stories of campus
protest we have seen in the past few years. From Yale exploding about Halloween
costumes to a mob at Middlebury sending a professor to the hospital to Oberlin
losing a $44 million lawsuit, colleges are full of outraged students protesting
nonstop. “Crybullies,” as Roger Kimball memorably labeled the protesters.
Lukianoff and Haidt argue that the characteristics of the students,
coupled with the nature of school administrators has led straight to his mess. There
are lots of people to blame for the fact that students have become this way: parents,
lower levels of schools, the political climate, and the colleges themselves.
While reading the book, it was very hard not to immediately
realize the authors were describing the type of college at which I work and the
type of students at this college.
In other
words, this is the best book I have read describing the current generation of
college students.
Or so I thought.
I read this book with one of my reading groups this semester. (If you want to know more about the assorted reading groups, subscribe to the Newsletter!) The discussion with the students was fascinating and rather encouraging.
Students split on whether they liked the book. The
difference was illuminating. None of the students in this reading group fits
the description above of “coddled.” The difference in their reactions to the
book turned out to be who the student thought the book was describing. The
students who thought the book was describing the other students in the college
liked it; it struck them as an accurate portrayal. The students who did not
like it read it as a personal attack, and since it was not an accurate portrayal,
they disliked the book…intensely.
In the discussion, however, both the students who did and
did not like the book agreed very strongly on one thing: their generation is no
different than any previous generation. When I say they were adamant on this
point, it is an understatement. I tried very hard for a long time to make the
argument that their generation was indeed different, that they were more
fragile, more inclined to say “I feel therefore it is true,” more likely to divide
the world into good and evil. I did not even make a dent in their absolute
assurance that their generation was not different.
How did they deflect all the counter-arguments? They simply accepted that, yes, in fact, a set of students in their generation is, for example, incredibly fragile. They all have stories of classes in which other students used “I am uncomfortable with what you are saying” as a counterargument. The have all seen, and many have actually been victims of, the “If you don’t agree with me, you are evil like the Nazis” argument. But, they do not think it is accurate to impute those behaviors to the entire generation.
Which leads to the hopeful note. It is obviously true that any
characterization of a generation does not mean that every single member of that
generation fits the description. So, while some students do match Lukianoff and
Haidt’s definition of coddled, some students do not. What percentage of students
fit into which camp?
When you see what is happening on colleges, and even more so
when you work in one of these colleges, there is no doubt that there are almost
daily examples of the sort of behavior described in this book. It is everywhere.
But, and this is the fascinating thing, what percent of the student body is responsible
for all this activity?
What if, for example, only 30% of the student body fit
Lukianoff and Haidt’s characterization? What would happen? Well that would be
more than enough students to generate all the endless stories. That means, however
that 70% of the students are not like that at all.
Then when we look at college students in previous generations,
there was always a set of students who fit the “coddled” description. I was in
college in the 1980s, and I knew students who were fragile, I knew students who
were certain that their emotions were a good guide to truth, and I knew
students who hurled the label of Nazi at anyone with whom they disagreed.
Consider, for example, these song lyrics:
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don’t criticize What you can’t understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin’ Please get out of the new one If you can’t lend your hand For the times they are a-changin’
Isn’t it obvious that this in the anthem of the modern college student? That song was written, by the way, before I was born.
So what has changed? What if it isn’t really a change in the
students at all? What if the change is
simply in the College Bureaucrats?
As I have thought about this idea, it does not seem all that far-fetched. Take a college-bound kid from any era. What is constant? The desire to grow-up and become an independent person. College is the first time in life when a child becomes an adult and gets to decide how to spend the day.
So, college students are naturally trying to create the adult world the way they want it to be. Once upon a time, a college set rules. Lots of rules. There were not just graduation requirements, but professors set their own rules on how classes would be structured and students would be evaluated. Dormitories had all sorts of rules on what you could or could not do. Colleges held out the threat of expulsion if you crossed too many lines.
Now, a new set of bureaucrats is in town. And these bureaucrats enable the worst student behaviors. A student complains about something, it doesn’t matter what. The initial bureaucratic response is now: how do we eliminate whatever it is the student is complaining about? There is not an evaluation of whether the complaint is justified or whether the complaint is about something inherent to the structure of college or even whether there are other students who share the complaint. Instead, the problem must be fixed. Instantly.
Students figured this out. The also realized that some complaints jump to the top of the priority lists of school bureaucrats.
An example: microaggressions. How did this become a thing? It was not the students who invented the idea of microaggressions and introduced them to college campuses. It was the administrative apparatus, abetted by sympathetic faculty, who introduced the idea of microaggressions. Students figured out that if they complain about a microaggression, there are large numbers of college bureaucrats who leap into action.
Microaggressions are a fantastic means of making sure there is always something to protest. There are virtually no macroaggressions on college campuses anymore. So, can we declare victory? Can we be proud of that fact? Of course not. You see, there are endless microaggressions. What constitutes a microaggression? Well, for example, asking what constitutes a microaggression is itself a microaggression because someone could construe the question in a negative manner.
If this argument is right, then Lukianoff and Haidt are casting their net too widely; the solution here is not at all about changing the way children are raised. (It is desirable to change the way children are currently being raised for other reasons, just not this one.) The solution is simply to get a better set of college bureaucrats. Indeed, as the authors note, the problem has crept downward, so we will need a better set of high school bureaucrats too.
But, is their subtitle right that this is a generation doomed to failure? Well, I am absolutely certain that none of the students with whom I discussed this book are doomed to failure. Indeed, if you are looking to hire someone, you really want to hire one of these students. (Convincing them to work for you, however, may be tough—they will all have many options.) And while this subset of students is unusual (after all, they are willing to spend a couple of hours multiple times a semester reading and arguing about books with me), maybe the majority of college students today are also not doomed to failure.
Then, after I had written all this, one of the students in this reading group forwarded an announcement about an activity which the College organized for the college students yesterday:
What does $70,000 a year buy? A blow-up T-rex sprinkler meeting a blow-up unicorn sprinkler!
“She had the American national quality—she had ‘faculty’ in a supreme degree.”
The “she” is the titular character in Henry James’ short story “Mrs. Temperly” (included in the Library of America’s Complete Stories 1884-1891).
Like every work by James, the story is calculated to
describe with exquisite precision how life works. Our protagonist, Raymond, is
in love with Mrs. Temperly’s daughter, Dora, and wants to marry her. Without
ever saying to either Raymond or Dora that the marriage should not happen, Mrs.
Temperly ensures it will not. That is the story.
Mrs. Temperly does indeed have faculty in a supreme degree.
What does that mean? “Faculty” is not a word used much these
days to describe a person. Do I know anyone with faculty in a supreme degree? I
don’t think so. I have certainly never described anyone that way. I have never
even herd someone described that was before. I suspect neither have you.
More than that, I was not even sure what exactly it would
mean to say someone had faculty in a supreme degree.
The Oxford English Dictionary comes to the rescue, which
begins by pointing to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which defines the term most
succinctly as “The power of doing any thing.”
Ah. Mrs. Temperly certainly has faculty in a supreme degree. It is, without a doubt her defining characteristic. She sets forth what she wants to do, and then arranges for it to happen, seemingly without effort, not just inhibiting a marriage, but every other thing she wants to do.
Chance for her is a lighthearted joke: “Oh, a chance! what
do you call by that fine name?”
Is Mrs. Temperly realistic? Since she is in a Henry James
short story, she certainly meant to be realistic. But is it possible to have
such a high degree of faculty? Is it possible to arrange one’s world so
perfectly, so neatly, that nothing is left to chance, and things will work out
exactly as you would have them work?
Even more interestingly, if you were to meet someone with a
supreme degree of faculty, would you like that person? Would you want to be
friends with someone like that? Would you hire someone like that?
Probably not. You, being a person with a lower degree of
faculty, will become merely another set piece in that other person‘s perfectly
arranged life.
Raymond does not make out too well in his interactions with
the woman of supreme faculty. He has ideas of his own, he is unhappy with
the status quo, but he ends up living out his life in exactly
the way Mrs. Temperly would choose without her ever needing to cajole or force
him to do anything at all.
Having faculty seems like a good thing. I would like to have
faculty.
But, others having faculty may not be such a good thing for
you. What if your plans are not the same as the plans of the person with
faculty? “I am sorry you have ideas that make you unhappy,” Mrs. Temperly tells
Raymond. “I guess you are the only person here who hasn’t enjoyed himself
to-night.”
Part of me wants to just dismiss the whole idea of a supreme
degree of faculty as an oddity in a Henry James story. Surely not every
character in Henry James is someone I can actually imagine meeting. But, James
won’t let us dismiss the term so easily. It is, he said, “the American national
quality.” That is intriguing.
James is setting up Mrs. Temperly as the personification of
America in the drawing rooms of France in the late 1800s.
She “was an optimist for others as well as for herself,
which doubtless had a great deal to do…with the headway she made in a society
tired of its own pessimism.”
Not a bad description of America in the late 1800s compared
to European continent in the midst of centuries of perpetual struggle.
Over a century later, is it still true? Curiously, James’ story may provide insight
into the divisions currently deepening in American society. One the one side, we have those who see
America as the land of Faculty, that optimism that the good old USA can do any
thing. On the other side, there is a
society tired of its own pessimism. When
the former enters into the land of the latter, what happens?
