Modern Society Archives - Page 18 of 21

What About Rome?

The biggest question about some books is why they are not better known.

Montesquieu is an extremely important and well known political philosopher, whose (long) book The Spirit of Laws is a landmark in political theory.

The Roman Empire is a perennially interesting topic to both scholars and general readers.

So, imagine if Montesquieu wrote a book about the Roman Empire. That book would surely be a runaway bestseller, right?

He did write that book. And nobody has heard of it.

Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.

OK, the title is lousy and way too wordy. But that can’t explain why nobody has heard of this book.

So, it must not be a very good book. Boring, uninteresting, tedious, uninsightful, something. Right?

Nope. It is actually an easy to read and interesting book. If you are interested in Rome or Montesquieu or political philosophy, you’ll enjoy it. It is not as deep and detailed as The Spirit of Laws, but it hits on the same themes and it is vastly more readable.

Indeed, one way to think of this book is that it is solving a problem political philosophers surely face all the time. Imagine you are writing a book advancing a new theory on how to think about and organize political society. Somewhere along the way, people are going to start asking you, “How does your theory fit with the history of Rome?”

Why will that question about the history of Rome arise? Because Rome has everything. In its 1000 year run, everything that could happen, happened. If you have a theory about political orders, you don’t want Rome standing there as a giant counter-example. So you better figure out how your theory fits Rome.

That is what Montesquieu’s Rome book reads like. You imagine him hammering away at The Spirit of Laws and people keep asking him about Rome, so he starts a notebook on “Thoughts on Rome,” and eventually that notebook gets to be book-length, so he publishes it as a stand-alone book. I have no idea if that is how this book actually originated, but it sure reads that way.

What does he say in the book? We can divide his argument into three parts: Why did Rome rise? What made it so Great? Why did it Decline?

The rise: “always striving and meeting obstacles, Rome…practiced the virtues which were to be so fatal to the world.” The Romans had courage and valor and a determination to win. And so they built the most impressive army in the word, marched into town after town, and assimilated them. They were the Borg. “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.” (Surprisingly, Montesquieu does not make the comparison to the Borg. Go figure.) “In short no nation ever prepared for war with so much prudence, or waged it with so much audacity.”

It was a slow way of conquering. They vanquished a people and were content to weaken it. They imposed conditions on it which undermined it insensibly. If it revolted, it was reduced still further, and it became a subject people without anyone being able to say when its subjection began…
It is the folly of conquerors to want to give their laws and customs to all peoples. This serves no purpose, for people are capable of obeying in any form of government.
But since Rome imposed no general laws, the various peoples had no dangerous ties among themselves. They constituted a body only by virtue of a common obedience, and, without being compatriots, they were all Romans.

This leads directly to why Rome was so great. “The government of Rome was admirable. From its birth, abuses of power could always be corrected by its constitution, whether by means of the spirit of the people, the strength of the senate, or the authority of certain magistrates.”

As Montesquieu describes the features of the Roman government which enabled it to be great, you can imagine the Founding Fathers reading this book and thinking, “This is what we should do.” Separation of powers, faction against faction moderating both, well-regulated militias, not seeking monsters to destroy, a federalist system allowing different cultures or religions to exist in different parts of the republic…the list goes on and on. Montesquieu was the second most cited authority by the Founding Fathers (after, of course, the Bible). I always assumed that meant they just spent a lot of time with The Spirt of Laws, but it is hard to believe they were not all well versed in this book too.

So, what went wrong? First we should note the oddity of speaking as if the collapse of the Great Roman Republic somehow means that the Roman Republic failed. Suppose you came up with a scheme of government and I came along and said, “Sure, you could do that, and it will work for a bit, but it is going to miserably fail in the year 2520.” Would that make you think the proposal was a failure?

Montesquieu thinks the failure was inevitable; the greatness of Rome caused the collapse of Rome. (Again, after a 500 year rise, the “collapse” took another 500 years to complete…) As the people got wealthier in the Roman Republic, they became comfortable, and as they become comfortable, they were less interested in the hard work of being a good citizen.

The people of Rome, who were called plebs, did not hate the worst emperors. After they had lost their power, and were no longer occupied with war, they had become the vilest of all peoples. They regarded commerce and the arts as things fit for slaves, and the distributions of grain that they received made them neglect the land. They had become accustomed to games and spectacles. When they no longer had tribunes to listen to or magistrates to elect, these useless things became necessities, and idleness increased their taste for them. Thus Caligula, Nero, Commodus, and Caracalla were lamented by the people because of their very madness, for they wildly loved what the people loved, and contributed with all their power and even their persons to the people’s pleasures. For them these rulers were prodigal of all the riches of the empire, and when these were exhausted, the people—looking on untroubled while all the great families were being despoiled—enjoyed the fruits of the tyranny. And their joy was pure, for they found security in their own baseness. Such princes naturally hated good men: they knew they were not approved of by them. Indignant at meeting contradiction or silence from an austere citizen, intoxicated by the plaudits of the populace, they succeeded in imagining that their government produced public felicity, and that only ill-intentioned men could censure it.

Go ahead and admit it: when you read that you thought about contemporary American society.

At the end of the constitutional convention in 1787, James McHenry related the following: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic,’ replied the Doctor, ‘if you can keep it.’”

If you can keep it. That is why Montesquieu’s book should be vastly better known than it is. Not only is it a work of a giant in political philosophy, not only is it a work about the endlessly fascinating Roman Empire, it wrestles with the question that should occupy the mind of every citizen. Can we keep it?

Immigration: Can We Talk About This?

An article published in Public Discourse:

The debate on immigration in America has hit a wall.

“Debate” is the wrong word, though, with its implication that the two sides are actually speaking to one another and addressing the arguments of the other.

It is more accurate to say that the posturing on immigration has hit a wall.

Read the rest of the article here at Public Discourse.

The Follies of John Kenneth Galbraith

Consider John Kenneth Galbraith’s (he of three names—so as not be confused with John Galbraith, you know, the one without the Kenneth) book, The Affluent Society.

Here is the funny thing about Galbraith. To non-economists of a certain age (read: old), Galbraith was one of the leading lights of economics, the guy who popularized Keynes, the guy who understood economics and could explain it to the masses.

But, within the economics guild, Galbraith barely exists. Sure his name floats around in the waters here and there, but I have never met an economist who actually took him seriously. Occasionally, I would see a reference to Galbraith’s claim that the function of advertising was to manufacture desires. Said reference was usually provided as a launching point to show that advertising does nothing of the kind.

So, Galbraith was the non-economist’s economist and the economist’s non-economist. I was never tempted to read him.

But, then the Library of America (Arbiter of Taste) published a volume of Galbraith. Clearly the Universe was whispering in my ear, “Time to Read Galbraith.” Who am I to argue with the Whisperings of the Universe?

In one way, Galbraith was exactly what I assumed he was—a rather sloppy and lousy economist. My goodness, there it is, that Sasquatch of economics: an actual sighting of someone arguing post-Friedman that inflation is caused by wage demands, not that silly money stuff about which you may have heard.

But, it turns out that Galbraith’s rather dated economics is a minor part of the argument as a whole; indeed, strip out the sloppy macroeconomic model, and The Affluent Society would be a vastly better book.

One way to read The Affluent Society is that it is merely Walden, Part 2.

By the mid-20^th century, it was obvious: America was a very affluent society. Indeed, the level of wealth in mid-20^th century America was staggeringly high by historical standards. And, we are even more affluent now than we were when Galbraith was writing.

As we have gained all this new wealth, we have all this new stuff. Getting wealth and new stuff makes us happier, right? So, surely we must all be in some sort of perpetual ecstasy these days.

But, we aren’t. Why? “Among the many models of the good society, no one has urged the squirrel wheel.” Yes, we want more wealth and better stuff, but there is always even newer and even better stuff on the horizon, so we are left with a perpetual feeling that we aren’t quite at the Stuff Frontier. This breeds dissatisfaction. Sure, I have a new iPhone, but that new iWatch sure seems even more Awesome.

At this point in the argument, Galbraith starts running into problems. He doesn’t like the fact that we always want more. He thinks we should be content with the basic necessities of life. But along comes The Corporation (insert shudder) which through Advertising (insert screams of terror) manufactures in us false desires for the things which they are producing. Left to ourselves, we would have a different set of desires.

And, what, pray tell, would that look like? How exactly are our desires being corrupted? “Houses; automobiles; the uncomplicated forms of alcohol, food and sexual enjoyment; sports; and movies require little prior preparation of the subject for the highest enjoyment. A mass appeal is thus successful, and hence it is on these things that we find concentrated the main weight of modern want creation.” Hmmm. Something seems amiss in that there list of manufactured enjoyments.

Ah, yes, he clears it up in the next sentence: “By contrast, more esoteric desires—music and fine arts, literary and scientific interests, and to some extent even travel—can normally be synthesized, if at all, only on the basis of a good deal of prior education.”

If only we were all as enlightened as John Kenneth Galbraith to like the proper things, the things requiring a fine (preferably Ivy League) education, you know things like fine art and sophisticated forms of alcohol and sophisticated food, and, yes, even sophisticated sexual enjoyment (oh, JKG, how it would have been nice for you to have explained that one), if only we all had these educated tastes, then those corporations (shudder) and their advertising (terror) would not be so effective.

And, suddenly, the game is up. Clearly that Advertising doesn’t seem to be working on dear old J. Kenneth Galbraith. He sees right through it and enjoys his sophisticated pleasures. That is because his desires are natural and not manufactured. He likes Cognac and Mozart because it is natural to like Cognac and Mozart—all you need is a fine education. You, unenlightened Reader, like Beer and Football because corporations convinced you to like them. And I, Your Humble Narrator, like cognac, beer, Mozart and football because…hmmm. I am stuck there.

One way of looking at it: all our desires are manufactured. Nobody is born liking Led Zeppelin or Drake. Some people develop good taste and like the former; some don’t and like the latter. Why? Taste formation is a complicated thing. But, it is not clear that our desires are any more manufactured in an age of television advertising than they were in the Dark Ages. People liked decorative clothing long before corporations came along to tell them they should like them.

Another way to look at it: we have necessities: food and shelter. But, once you have shelter from the rain, it is wrong to want insulation to keep you warm in winter? Is it wrong to want air conditioning to keep you cool in the summer? Is it wrong to want a man cave so you can put in a large screen TV and an epic audio system so you can watch football in a state of total immersion? Nobody wanted any of those things before they were invented. But, it sure is nice now that they are invented, even though I only have two of the three. Is it bad that in idle moments I think I would be really nice to have the third?

Galbraith would surely say it is wrong, but that is because his preference set is quite different than mine. You see, dear old JK Galbraith has a sophisticated set of preferences based on objective reality. I am not exaggerating. JKG knows that because of all those false wants, we spend too much on private goods (you know, things you buy for yourself) and not enough on public goods (you know, things the government buys for you).

You aren’t allowed to disagree with JKG on that point, by the way: “This disparity between our flow of private and public goods and services is no matter of subjective judgement.” If you think we aren’t underfunding public goods, you are a flat-earther. It is objectively true.

Now that line of argument would be intriguing if John Kenneth Galbraith could actually stick to his argument. But, he can’t. You see: only some public goods are underfunded. Military expenditures are overfunded. Uh… So, public goods that Galbraith wants more of are underfunded and public goods Galbraith wants less of are overfunded. And Galbraith knows this because…well, because, he, unlike the rest of us who disagree with objective truth, sees through the attempt to manufacture false desires.

What genuinely puzzles me about Galbraith is how he is so certain that his own desires haven’t been manufactured. How does he know he isn’t the deluded one and the people he thinks are deluded aren’t seeing clearly?

In the end, The Affluent Society is a flawed book. But flawed in a way that makes it eminently worth reading. It makes you think. That is high praise.

Higher praise: I was faced with the choice on where to keep Galbraith’s book. Does it belong in the economics section or the non-economics, nonfiction section of my library? He now lives in the latter—this is very high praise. Before reading him, I assumed he would be filed under economics and relegated to being a bad economics book. But, the parts that are good in this book, the non-economics parts, are worthy enough of respect, that he got filed outside of economics. I am not sure he would see that as praise, but it is.

C.S. Lewis and Progress

C. S. Lewis’ The Seeing Eye is a posthumous collection of otherwise not collected essays.

As always with such things, it is hard to review. If you step back and ask, “What unifies these essays?,” the honest answer is “Well, Lewis never put them in a collection of essays he made during his lifetime.” Not much of a hook there.

So, who buys a book like this? Presumably people who just can’t enough of Lewis. Should you read it? Yep—if you have read everything else he wrote and just can’t get enough of Lewis.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a bad book at all. There are some interesting essays in here; indeed, I didn’t detest any of the essays.

Lewis writes well; he is an easy person to read, which is presumably a part of his appeal. It is conversational writing, and not simply because many of his essays were originally talks he gave. It is one of those depressing facts of life that far too many people giving talks cannot manage a conversational style even when giving a talk. So, I found the book easy and thoughtful reading. Perfect for while having that second and third cup of coffee in the morning.

But, and here is the problem with the book, the best of this book is already embedded in The Abolition of Man. Indeed, parts of the book could have been labeled, “First drafts of material which will later be included in another book.” There are other essays which read like precursors to Lewis’ book on the Psalms. So, if you have read the other Lewis books and come to this one, do you learn anything new? Sort of. It is interesting to see familiar material presented in a new way.

Every now and then there is an interesting turn of phrase that stands out. (“Some people make allowances for local and temporary conditions in the speeches of Our Lord on a scale which really implies that God chose the time and place of the Incarnation very injudiciously.” “It may even be the duty of some Christians to be culture-sellers.”)

The good thing about reading a book like this is not really the book itself, but the idle speculation to which a book like this leads you. Halfway through that third cup of coffee, you finish an essay, stare out the window and start mulling.

For Example: What Exactly is Progress?

Lewis is hard on the Apostles of Progress, the charlatans who talk about Societal Evolution as if evolution always improves matters. But set aside Lewis’ specific target for a second, and wonder: suppose we wanted society to progress. What change would constitute progress?

The first instinct is to say that progress would be fixing things I don’t like about the society. But, that is a rather amusing answer. Does Society progress when it becomes more to my liking? That is rather egocentric of me. I am confusing “I like these things” with “A Society progresses when it has more of the things I like and it regresses when it has fewer of the things I like.” When did I become the standard for progress?

So, if we become a little less egocentric and say society progresses when it has more of the things people like me like, then it doesn’t sound quite so silly, but it still sounds weird. So, we modify it to say society progresses when it has more of the things Enlightened People like, which is a circular argument saying the same thing.

So, to get progress, we have to have something more abstract. Society progresses when it has more Liberty or Equality or Fraternity? Take the second one. As society becomes more equal, it makes progress on being more equal. Tautologically true. But “society progresses when it becomes more equal” just begs the question. Why is more equality progress? What enthroned equality as the progressive endpoint? Or Liberty? Or Fraternity? And again, we are back to the idea that society progresses when people like me like the society more.

In the absence of something outside myself establishing the goal, I am not sure what Progress means.

Does theism get around the problem? Does Society progress when God likes it more? That gets us into all sorts of theological problems. Is God’s goal for this society to improve until it hits an eschatological end? Does Society progress when it gets more like Heaven and regress when it gets less like Heaven?

If the world ends in fire and condemnation, which the New Testament seems to suggest it does, is it progress to get closer or further away from condemnation? There seem to be a slide here from the idea of progress as found in Pilgrim’s Progress and the idea of a society progressing by…what? What are the rules to measure the progress of a society?

The very term “progress” implies a goal which society is either moving toward or not. Without a stated goal, it is a meaningless term. Calling someone “progressive” sure sounds like a compliment, but surely it matters to what end they are progressing. When you frame it that way, you realize that every act of progress toward one goal is simultaneously an act of regress from the opposite goal. There is no such thing as progress in the abstract. We spend too much time talking about progress and not enough time establishing what the goal is to which the progress is occurring.

And that is where I get stuck. As soon as you try to articulate the goal toward which a society is progressing when people talk about “societal progress” it gets rather messy. I suspect if the goals were stated more clearly, it would be less attractive to talk about progress. I suspect that the very idea of “progress” is just a mask for some very muddled thinking.

I’ve been puzzling over this for a while now, which is of course the sign of a good book. At best, Lewis only hints at any of this. I have no idea if he would even recognize these ruminations as related to the essays he wrote. Then again, I am certain Lewis would not really mind about the topic as long as he knew his essays set my mind wandering.

Our Socialist Moment

Is what divides us greater than what unites us? If you pay attention to the popular narrative of the day, then the answer sure seems to be an unqualified “Yes.”

If that is your answer, then Elizabeth Gaskell wrote a book just for you.

North and South. Originally published in the 1850s.

Some things really don’t ever change

The 1850s were, to put it mildly, a tempestuous time in Europe. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. The complaints were loud: the rich capitalists were appropriating more and more wealth for themselves while the poor working class was getting less and less, living in misery. Democracy was a sham, as the government was simply a tool for the rich to impose their will on the majority.

Sound familiar?

The next time someone tells you how bad things are in modern society, ask if they were better or worse in 1850. And, remember: the rhetoric of the 1850s frequently tipped into bloodshed.

Gaskell walked into the middle of that battlefield, held her head erect, and tried to stare down the warring sides. She did this by writing a novel. A Victorian novel.

It has the frame of a love story. (Obviously—this is a Victorian novel, after all.) Woman from the rural South meets man from industrial North. You instantly know they will get married in the end. They, of course, do not know this until the end.

You have read that plot a million times, so the joy in a novel like this is not the shock of the ending, but the artistry of the story telling.

How does Gaskell’s artistry rate? Well, this isn’t Pride and Prejudice. But then nothing else is Pride and Prejudice. Setting that comparison aside, North and South is really good. If you want to slip into the cozy world of a Victorian novel, and you aren’t in the mood for the charming nature of Dickens, then this novel is perfect.

But, it is not the romance that sets this novel so far apart from its obvious relations. It is the statement on the relationship between the capitalists and the proletariat.

Margaret Hale, our heroine, moves with her parents from a pleasant little rural town in the south to the burgeoning industrial town of Milton in the North. There she meets two people who will frame the story.

Thornton (our hero) is the factory owner, who rose up from humble origins to wealth and position. Higgins, the poor working man, is a widower struggling to earn enough to keep body and soul together. He has an incredibly charming but very sick daughter who, of course you know this instantly, is destined to die in the middle of the novel.

If you imagine reading this novel in 1850, the question the novel must solve is obvious. Will Margaret side with the capitalists or the proletariat? Obviously, she has to pick a side.

The novel was originally published in serial form in Dickens’ own journal, Household Words, so there really was no doubt which side would win out. After all, Dickens is always on Team Proletariat.

The moment of crisis comes. A strike. The union flexes its muscle to protest the capitalists cutting the wages of the working men. Behind closed doors, the capitalists are being hurt by a fall in the prices of the goods they sell, so they no longer can afford the wages they had been paying. (The economic details on all this are a bit, shall we say, sketchy, but we are left with no doubt that the owners really do have to cut the wages.) Of course the capitalists don’t feel any need to explain these market forces to the workers, so they just come across as cold-hearted.

The strike turns violent. Well, a little bit violent. A few rocks are thrown. The capitalists hold out. Irish scabs are brought in. The union breaks. Higgins’ neighbor, who was quite active in the strike, ends up killing himself in despair. Higgins’ neighbor’s wife soon follows. The orphaned kids are farmed out to neighbors. Strike over. Workers beg to get their jobs back.

Victory for the capitalists? Nope. The strike amplified Thornton’s financial problems and so he goes broke.

Who wins? Nobody.

But, along the way, Thornton and Higgins discover something really important. They detest each other, but they both admire our Heroine. And they both realize that if Margaret likes the other one, then maybe, they can, you know, talk with each other. And when they start talking to one another, they realize that they actually have a lot in common. Maybe they should, you know, work together instead of being constantly opposed to one another.

Next thing you know, Thornton has built a dining hall for his workers and occasionally has lunch with them. His business fails anyway.

But, Thornton has a new plan; why not try out new ways of organizing a factory in which the employees and the employers work together? We never learn the details of these possible future “experiments,” but we are left with every expectation that the trial and error of this new way of manufacturing will prove every bit as blissful as the marriage of Margaret and Thornton.

Elizabeth Gaskell thus did something amazing. In Dickens’ very own publication, she argued that in the great class conflict of the day, in the face of the division between the rich employer and the poor workers, conflict hurts everybody.

Just like the conflict between Thornton and Margaret masked the fact that they really did belong together, the conflict between the factory owners and the workers masked the fact that they too need each other. What unites them is vastly bigger than what divides them.

I almost closed by saying: We need a new North and South for today.

But, then I realized, we already have it. Elizabeth Gaskell already wrote the North and South for today. So, the next time you start thinking there are unrepairable divisions and conflicts in society, read it.

Related Posts
Galbraith, John Kenneth The Affluent Society “The Follies of John Kenneth Galbraith”
Lewis, C. S. The Seeing Eye “C. S. Lewis and Progress”

The Wishing Game

Let’s play the “You get three wishes” game.

(And, yes, “ixnay on the wishing for more wishes.”)

Here is the challenge: Can you craft a wish which cannot be subverted?

Terry Pratchett’s novel, Eric, is, like all Discworld novels, a mash-up parody of innumerable other things. In this case, the primary objects of mockery are Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Homer, the Aztecs, and Dante. As with all Discworld novels, it is marvelous fun.

In the novel Eric tries to summon a demon so he can get his three wishes. He makes his wishes and in every case, while he technically gets his wish, it isn’t what he really meant. That idea has been done many times in other stories.

Here is the twist. It turns out there is a demon who has the job of figuring out how to subvert wishes. You make a wish, and this demon then thinks about your wish and figures out how to simultaneously grant you your wish in the technical sense that you have to admit your wish was granted, but making sure it is not what you really wanted.

I hereby invent a new parlor game. (Wait. Does anyone else call these things parlor games anymore?)

I hereby invent a new Card game which for $24.99 you will be able to buy on Amazon. Each card comes with a wish on it. Players then compete to come up with ways to grant the wish, but do so in a way that it is very unappealing to have the wish fulfilled. Something like Apples to Apples or, even more accurately, that Dictionary game where you come up with fake definitions.

Good times for all.

Anyone who wants to actually develop and sell this game, let me know.

Here is the first challenge: I wish someone would come along, take this idea, sign a contract with me, causing me to get fabulously rich off of the royalties from this game.

Your job: figure out how to both technically grant that wish, but make sure that I will not be happy that my wish was granted. You can use the comments section below for your ideas.

Reversing the question, though, is where this gets philosophically interesting. Can you think of a wish which could not be subverted? When I try to do that, I realize that the wish starts sounding like a legal document. Does the genie who grants wishes accept 50 page legal documents for each wish?

Why is it so hard to simply state a wish? Why are our wishes so complicated?

Eliot wrote (in East Coker):

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing

Is that the same idea? Is the problem that when I think about wishes for the future, I actually do not know what I want?

I wish to be happy. So, like Job, I am happy right before my world crashes down.

I wish to be permanently happy. So I spend my life consuming lotus plants or some other narcotic.

I wish to be happy because I have cultivated virtue. Does that work?

The problem with wishes of that last type is that they are wishes for a state of internal thought. To the best of my understanding of the three wishes game, you only get to wish for external things, things of the sort a genie can create. Wishing for happiness is cheating.

So, if I am limited to external things, do I have any idea what it is I actually want? Do you?