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By Mark, on February 22nd, 2012
 When conservatives beat the drum that the government is ‘controlling them’ many of us look at them the same way we would look at someone that told us the government put a radio in their head that makes them hear voices. When we hear that the secular world is controlled by Satan and evolution, climate change, environmentalism and abortion is a ‘humanistic’ war on God many of us roll our eyes and walk away. When they talk about God and guns we hope that God does not tell them to start shooting until we are out of range. While not all conservatives fit into these categories there are enough out there to make us wonder if there is more going on than meets the eye. -Look no further than neuroscience.
Studies have shown that the brain is different for conservative and liberals. The amygdala is larger in conservatives. The anterior cingulate cortex is larger in liberals. The amygdala evolved 500 million years ago. It is responsible for emotional fear responses.
The amygdala is part of the limbic system, the area of the brain associated with emotions. The amygdala is important for formation of emotional memories and learning, such as fear conditioning, as well as memory consolidation. Emotions significantly impact how we process events; when we encounter something and have a strong emotional reaction—either positive or negative—that memory is strengthened.
Persons with a larger or more active amygdala tend to have stronger emotional reactions to objects and events, and process information initially through that pathway. They would be more likely swayed towards a belief if it touched them on an emotional level.
Those with a larger amygdala are also thought to experience and express more empathy, perhaps explaining why one of the features of psychopathy is a smaller amygdala. This is not to say that someone with a smaller amygdala is a psychopath, just that they are probably less emotionally reactive or receptive.
On the other hand, while emotional sensitivity can be a good thing, too much emotionality can have negative consequences. For example, Borderline Personality Disorder, characterized by poor and uncontrollable emotion regulation, features a hyperactive amygdala. (Link)
The amygdala has many functions, including fear processing [11]. Individuals with a large amygdala are more sensitive to fear [12], which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amygdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief system. Similarly, it is striking that conservatives are more sensitive to disgust [13, 14], and the insula is involved in the feeling of disgust [15]. On the other hand, our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex volume and political attitudes may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty. One of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor uncertainty [16, 17] and conflicts [18]. Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views.(Link)
The anterior cingulate cortex only recently evolved. It is responsible for higher cognitive learning – error correction is a big function of the anterior cingulate cortex.
The ACC has a variety of functions in the brain, including error detection, conflict monitoring1, and evaluating or weighing different competing choices. It’s also very important for both emotion regulation and cognitive control (often referred to as ‘executive functioning’)—controlling the level of emotional arousal or response to an emotional event (keeping it in check), as to allow your cognitive processes to work most effectively.
When there is a flow of ambiguous information, the ACC helps to discern whether the bits of info are relevant or not, and assigns them value. People with some forms of schizophrenia, Paranoid Type, for instance, typically have a poorly functioning ACC, so they have trouble discerning relevant patterns from irrelevant ones, giving equal weight to all of them. Someone can notice lots of bizarre patterns—that alone isn’t pathological—but you need to know which ones are meaningful. The ACC helps to decide which patterns are worth investigating and which ones are just noise. If your brain assigned relevance to every detectable pattern, it would be pretty problematic. We sometimes refer to this as having paranoid delusions. You need that weeding out process to think rationally.
Mental illness aside, being able to sort out relevant patterns from irrelevant patterns logically is difficult to do when heavy emotions are involved. Imagine being under extreme emotional duress (such as having a fight with your significant other) then sitting down to analyze a set of data, or read a story and pick out the main points. It’s ridiculously hard to think logically when you’re all ramped up emotionally. This is why emotion regulation goes hand-in-hand with cognitive control and error detection.
Too much emotion gets in the way of logical thinking, and disrupts cognitive processing. This is why in times of crisis, we learn to set aside our emotions in order to problem-solve our way out of a dangerous situation. Those with the ability to maintain low emotional arousal and have high cognitive control are generally better at handling conflict in the moment, plus tend to be the least permanently affected by trauma in the long term2. They tend to be more adaptable to changing situations (or have a higher tolerance for complexity), and have what we call cognitive flexibility.(Link)
This article states:
What does this boil down to in practical terms?
In order for a person to embrace a cause or idea, it needs to be meaningful for them. Each type of person has a different way that they assign meaning and relevance to ideas. Let’s take liberals and conservatives, since we are theorizing that they are two distinct thinking styles: liberals would be more flexible and reliant on data, proof, and analytic reasoning, and conservatives are more inflexible (prefer stability), emotion-driven, and connect themselves intimately with their ideas, making those beliefs a crucial part of their identity (we see this in more high-empathy-expressing individuals). This fits in with the whole “family values” platform of the conservative party, and also why we see more religious folks that identify as conservatives, and more skeptics, agnostics, and atheists that are liberal. Religious people are more unshakable in their belief of a higher power, and non-religious people are more open to alternate explanations, i.e., don’t rely on faith alone.
So—for liberals to make a case for an idea or cause, they come armed with data, research studies, and experts. They are convinced of an idea if all the data checks out–basically they assign meaning and value to ideas that fit within the scientific method, because that’s their primary thinking style. Emotion doesn’t play as big of a role in validation. Not to say that liberals are unfeeling, but just more likely to set emotion aside when judging an idea initially, and factor it in later. Checks out scientifically = valuable. Liberals can get just as emotionally attached to an idea, but it’s usually not the primary trigger for acceptance of an idea.
Conservatives would be less likely to assign value primarily using the scientific method. Remember, their thinking style leads primarily with emotion. In order for them to find an idea valuable, it has to be meaningful for them personally. It needs to trigger empathy. Meaning, they need some kind of emotional attachment to it, such as family, or a group of individuals they are close to in some way.
Let’s state the obvious disclaimers. This neurological evidence should not be taken as categorically true of all conservatives or all liberals. This is not in any sense reductionary evidence. It is certainly feasible that some conservatives could have a larger anterior cingulate cortex and some liberals could have a larger amygdale. It is also possible that conservatives and liberals could have both brain areas smaller or larger. Additionally, the brain changes and adapts as it is used or not used. However, my interest in this topic is to try to understand conservatives. I grew up in the Deep South and did not even know a liberal until I started college; although, I was liberal from birth. I have often been disappointed in the explanations (or lack thereof) that conservatives have given me for their ideology. However, there have been some exceptions to this with public figures like David Brooks and William Buckley. I have also come across various philosophers like Nietzsche, Foucault, postmodern philosophers that could lend some ideas to conservatism. In any case, the neuroscience findings may explain certain kinds of behavior that the actual people (i.e., conservatives) cannot explain.
From “The New Unconscious”, here are some interesting studies and results:
More recent research with nonhuman animals has emphasized the amygdala’s role in emotional learning and memory. Work by Davis (1992), Kapp, Pascoe, and Bixler (1984), and LeDoux (1992) has shown that while the amygdala is not critical to express an emotional reaction to stimuli that are inherently aversive, it is critical for learned fear responses.
Ran R. Hassin;James S. Uleman;John A. Bargh. The New Unconscious (Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience) (p. 62). Kindle Edition.
Investigations into the neural systems of fear conditioning have mapped the pathways for learning from stimulus input to response output. One finding that has emerged from this research is that information about the identity of a stimulus can reach the amygdala by more than one pathway. Romanski and LeDoux (1992) have shown that there are separate cortical and subcortical pathways to convey perceptual information to the amygdala. If one pathway is damaged, the other is sufficient to signal the presence of a conditioned stimulus and elicit a conditioned response. It has been suggested that these dual pathways may be adaptive (LeDoux, 1996). The amygdala responds to stimuli in the environment that represent potential threat. The amygdala then sends signals to other brain regions and the autonomic nervous system, preparing the animal to respond quickly. The subcortical pathway to the amygdala can provide only a crude estimation of the perceptual details of the stimulus, but it is very fast. The cortical pathway allows the stimulus to be fully processed, but it is somewhat slower. This crude, fast subcortical pathway may prepare the animal to respond more quickly if, when the stimulus is fully processed and identified by the cortical pathway, the threat turns out to be real.
Ran R. Hassin;James S. Uleman;John A. Bargh. The New Unconscious (Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience) (pp. 62-63). Kindle Edition.
Although the amygdala is critical for fear conditioning, it also plays a broader, noncritical role in other types of learning and memory. The amygdala can modulate the function of other memory systems, particularly the hippocampal memory system necessary for declarative or episodic memory. McGaugh, Introini-Collision, Cahill, Munsoo, and Liang (1992) have shown that when an animal is aroused, the storage of hippocampal-dependent memory is enhanced. This enhanced storage with arousal depends on the amygdala. The amygdala modulates storage by altering consolidation. Consolidation is a process that occurs after initial encoding by which a memory becomes more or less “set”or permanent. McGaugh (2000) has suggested that perhaps one adaptive function of this slow consolidation process is to allow the neurohormonal changes that occur with emotion to alter memory. In this way, events that elicit emotional reactions, and thus may be more important for survival, are remembered better than nonemotional events. This secondary role of modulating the consolidation of hippocampal-dependent memories with mild arousal is another way the amygdala can influence emotional memory.
Ran R. Hassin;James S. Uleman;John A. Bargh. The New Unconscious (Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience) (p. 63). Kindle Edition.
This result tells me that the amygdale is the key and best suited for survival situations. Some of the latter studies in this book show that those with damage to this area of the brain can learn how to adapt to these situations using other parts of the brain. There are also studies that show that the amygdale can be employed for memory of dangerous situations by merely hearing about something dangerous. For example, if someone tells you that a certain dog may bite, your amygdale will help you remember this warning for the next time you encounter the dog. This is called ‘instructed fear’. This tells me that when conservatives hear that President Obama is a dangerous socialist they may physically take this as an emotional memory about a looming danger.
The studies also show that this whole process can be subliminal or unconscious. In fact, many of the findings in this book show that practically everything we think is conscious, including agency and control, actually take place unconsciously. Even more so, the problem that these studies are highlighting is that we really do not know why we need a conscious or what function it serves. I covered some of this material in this essay.
Here are some of my personal conclusions from this data:
Control is about the fear of loss of control. This fear drives preservation and conservatism. Conservatism does not want to relinquish what it believes it has; it wants to maintain. Its instinct is based in the need to survive so it is fundamentally emotional. However, not all threats are equal. Some perceived threats are really simply a need for change, sometimes fundamental change is required. Thus, the amygdale that is hyperactive can be illusional. It can stimulate to the point of imminent threat and paranoia. Only those that have equally overactive amygdales will ‘understand’ the need to act rashly and believe the justification for it.
For me, conservatism, especially the older conservatives, were the keepers of a critical function of society, -the need to maintain stability. Large populations have a certain kind of massive momentum that resists change. It is sort of like a gigantic cruise ship; it does not change directions very quickly. Societies need stability and ‘conservatism’ to some extent to maintain order, prevent social anxiety and prevent anarchy in the worst case. These studies also show that there are functions in the brain that moderate change. They provide damping effects on novel situations and reinforce the ‘tried and true’ for behavior. The down side of this is that sometimes as society meets new challenges a dogged insistence on the ‘tried and true’ may actually exasperate societal functions that are not working. In this case the ‘tried and true’ may no longer be tried or true (if it ever was). In the worst case, this can lead to revolution, violence and mass anarchy. This is why populations need liberals.
Liberals want to find progressive solutions to new challenges. When conservatism bogs down and gets stuck in a rut that is not working for large sections of society, liberals become the vanguard for change. This actually keeps untenable circumstances from getting out of control and finally resulting in bloody revolutions. Communists actually see this as a negative, bourgeois effect that continues to oppress mass populations; it effectively consorts with the status quo and laissez faire to oppress large populations with the ‘liberal face’ of conservatism. At some point, history has shown that the communist critique of the bourgeoisie is certainly true and both conservatives and liberals prevent needed and meaningful change. If a society adopts a ‘no right is too far right’ approach to government then the legitimate, liberal function is repressed and the tipping point for revolution is brought dangerously closer. The brain has the same pitfalls.
Especially in view of technology and its demands, no or little education is more and more an untenable life choice. Manufacturing is becoming more and more automated in wealthy countries and manual labor for tasks that are not automated make it hard for those types of manufacturers to make the profit they require to stay in wealthy countries. A brain that wants to preserve what it has will have a harder and harder time staying afloat without government assistance in this fast paced environment. This is why the problem solving functions of the brain is required for novel situations or situations that are no longer tenable.
A conservative oriented person that is doing ok is not going to want to make massive changes to help others that are in real need. The tendency in this case is for insular behavior. Folks in this situation will adopt hands off political ideologies and resist change. As long as these folks are in a majority for democratic governments they will fashion a conservative government. However, if a critical mass of adversely effected populations is exceeded the liberals will win out and the government will get more and more liberal. I believe this is where the United States finds itself.
Demographics are more and more against the conservative agenda chiefly because the disaffected minorities are getting larger than the decreasing majority that prefers conservatism. In this setting, the conservative will start to sound more and more anachronistic and irrelevant. If new strategies are not provided in this country to positively address issues like health care, immigration, poverty and discrimination the only alternative is to restrict democratic power either by law or by manipulation (i.e., money is protected by free speech). The manipulation tactic is a time limited tactic, it is temporary. It will only work as long as a mass of people’s physical situation is tolerable and conservatism informs them that conserving works better for them. However, at some point the rhetoric will not provide needed fundamentals for these populations. If conservatives then insist on conserving, the blow back will be more severe. I do not think we will reach this point until all the options for conservation have been deployed and tried and exhausted themselves.
One last point, I do not think that all liberal solutions are solutions and may actually exasperate problems. I view this as similar to the problems the space program encountered in the early days. Many ideas and proposals were tried and failed in the early days of space explorations. It was a messy process that had no guarantee of success but, as a country, the United States resolved that space exploration was not optional. When necessity drives political requirement not succeeding is not an option. The conservatives will find that they will reach a point of diminishing returns if they keep blaming liberals for ‘true’ conservatism not working. It is similar to the tinny sound non-believers hear when Christians keep telling them that the historical violence of Christianity was not ‘true’ Christianity. The ‘trueness’ of appealing to the ‘tried and true’ wears thin no matter what the excuses if it is not working. This is why issues like health care cannot be ignored forever. If conservatives cannot or will not demonstrate a viable solution, necessity will drive a novel solution and liberals will be the force behind it.
By James Sinclair, on February 9th, 2012
 An interesting post on The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog:
DAVID FRUM quotes the following passage of Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010″, in the midst of a long, scathing review (about which I here enter no opinion):
Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded on premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data. Try to think of any new data that would change your position on abortion, the death penalty, legalization of marijuana, same-sex marriage or the inheritance tax. If you cannot, you are not necessarily being unreasonable.
I found this exceedingly odd. I can easily imagine what evidence would cause me to change my position on any of these issues. How about you?
The author, W.W. (The Economist‘s tradition of editorial anonymity extends even to its blogs), goes on to address each above-mentioned issue individually. On marijuana and same-sex marriage, for example:
Legalisation of marijuana. I support legal weed! If it were shown that marijuana is super-addictive, impossible to use responsibly, and that its users predictably harm others and/or egregiously harm themselves, I’d support something in the neighbourhood of status quo prohibition.
Same-sex marriage. I’m so pro, I almost wish I were gay so I could have one. If compelling evidence were unearthed that showed that widespread same-sex marriage really would precipitate the unraveling of the traditional family and subsequently the stability of society and the ruin of us all, I suppose I’d settle for the right of same-sex couples to shack up.
This all leads to the conclusion—not stated outright, but implied—that if you can’t imagine yourself similarly reversing course, you’re probably doing something wrong.
I’m not convinced. I’m not overly interested in taking a utilitarian approach to policy issues to begin with, except to the extent that I’m not sure there can ever be an overall societal benefit to prohibiting a behavior that causes no direct harm to others, and thus libertarianism is utilitarian, but that’s neither here nor there. W.W. tries to circumvent the libertarian argument by describing a hypothetical world where pot is “impossible to use responsibly” and “predictably” leads to others being harmed—a level of dangerousness that makes prohibition seem defensible, if not imperative, but is also absurdly out of line with everything I’ve ever read or observed about marijuana.
And it’s the same with marriage—sure, W.W. would reconsider, given “compelling evidence” of the imminent “unraveling of the traditional family,” leading of course to “the ruin of us all.” And that evidence should be surfacing any day now, right? There’s nothing especially open-minded about saying, “if a thing turned out to be different from what I thought it was in every meaningful way, then perhaps I’d think about it differently.”
Underwhelmed by The Economist, I clicked on David Frum’s “scathing review” of Murray’s book. Here’s what Frum had to say in response to the above-quoted excerpt:
[I]f you announce that there can exist no possible information that might change your mind about abortion, the death penalty, marijuana, same-sex marriage, and the inheritance tax, then yes you are an unreasonable person—or anyway, an unreasoning one. I’ve changed my mind about same-sex marriage as experience has dispelled my fears of the harms from same-sex marriage. If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I’d change my mind about marijuana legalization. And so on through the list.
I try to be careful about speaking in absolutes, but I’m almost willing to here, because I have a very hard time imagining a set of circumstances that would change my view on same-sex marriage (or, to an only marginally lesser extent, the death penalty or marijuana), which to Frum makes me an “unreasoning” person. And yet, his evidence that he, by contrast, is a reasoning person, is that his view on marriage—to which considerable thought has been devoted, I presume—is in accordance with mine, and has been for almost eight months now. So is it that I need to be more willing to objectively assess the evidence and challenge my assumptions? Or is it that I’m just right, and I happened to get there before David Frum did?
I think everyone agrees that being willing and able to challenge your beliefs is a very good thing, but what’s being lost here is that you still have to be realistic about it. Several of W.W.’s examples only make sense in an alternate reality that in no way resembles our own, both in terms of what the evidence is and the likelihood of that evidence unambiguously supporting a particular conclusion. Frum, meanwhile, turns Murray’s measured language into hyperbole (“if you announce that there can exist no possible information that might change your mind…”), then pats himself on the back for deciding to support same-sex marriage and for being open to supporting marijuana legalization, and good for him on both counts, but those are two positions for which popular support has substantially increased in recent years, and with good reason. A cynic might ask what took him so long.
And I’ll leave it there, because apparently this is merely the latest chapter in an ongoing feud between Frum and Murray, and I have no interest in going down that rabbit hole. But the question—what would cause you to change a strongly held opinion, and when, if ever, is “nothing” an appropriate answer?—remains an interesting one, and undoubtedly there are better answers out there than what I’ve seen so far.
By Jeffrey Ellis, on February 7th, 2012
 Today is Critical Thinking Applied’s one year blogiversary. Here is our first post.
By Mark, on January 30th, 2012
Karl Marx, the founder of communism, thought there was a higher and lower form of communism[10]. Engels and Lenin called the lower form of communism, socialism. Socialism is not egalitarian. Egalitarianism means everything is shared equally. Marx described socialism like this:
“But one man is superior to another physically or mentally, and so supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is therefore a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.”[11]
Karl Marx thought that communism would eventually replace socialism not by force but by natural progression. Communism is egalitarian. Communism thinks that wealth should be distributed equally among equals. Individuals should not be singled out according to class, wealth, natural abilities, etc. but should work cooperatively for the greater good of society. Communism does not believe in private property. Private ownership and competition is thought to favor the rich and; necessarily, put less wealthy individuals at a competitive disadvantage. Private property is what gives rise to a class stratified society. In communism the ideal is one of egalitarianism; that all people are equal and should receive the benefit of their labor equally.
For communism, individual ownership is not allowed but that does not restrain class stratification. The administrators of shared wealth, the government, become the de facto upper class. Wealth gets disproportionately distributed according to this class structure in communism as well. In practice, capitalism, socialism and communism cannot claim a classless society nor can they claim that the individual is the sole beneficiary of the toil of their labor as property owners.
What follows from this is that the group or the individual is not normative for these economies but ideals. Class is inevitable for capitalism, socialism and communism – it is utopic to think otherwise. A class is a group comprised of individuals. Mitt Romney is part of a class, a wealthy class. Most of us will realistically never be in his class. However, humans are aspirational – being human is being towards a future. In this way capitalism offers the promise of a possibility – the possibility for success, the chance to be in the wealthy class. For those that extol the virtues of capitalism, it does not seem to matter as much that the vast majority of these aspirations will never be fulfilled. What matters is the place for the dream, the drama of the ideal. As individuals, we need aspiration just after the need for food and shelter. We need to think we are or will be a part of the wealthy class. The goal of this aspiration is for membership in a group, a communal hope shared in capitalism. We are ready to use our collective language, our economic group arrangements, our families, societies and affiliations to aid us in our goals – the envisioned absolute wealth of our freedom. The dream that imagines itself as self-interested individualism is all the while prefaced, perforated and dependent on the other, the group, the community – our shared language. This is what socialism recognized and tried to articulate in its economics. What communism lost was the aspirational; the value we place on the desire for moving towards a future.
In reality, there never is an isolated individual that can cleanly be separated from a collectivity. Additionally, the dream of accumulating more and more sole property ownership based on the system of self-interested individuals appears to reach practical limits as a result of the third group Adam Smith writes of, the financiers. None of us are hermits and make up private languages as we go through our daily lives. The notion of an Adam Smith styled individualism is what many philosophers think of as metaphysical (meta-phusis as beyond physics or beyond the physical). The aspiration I have referred to is desire for the metaphysical individual. It does not reflect our lived reality but necessarily participates in our sense of meaning and hope as an ideal. Aspiration is essential for meaning. To aspire is to see beyond the hum drum, the daily grind and meaningless repetition – perchance to dream. How does the state, the government, figure into our aspirations?
For Adam Smith the state is the guarantor of our security. It is responsible for the military. It also is responsible for enforcing the law. It holds the promise of reprisal for violations of law. It is also responsible for public works projects and certain public institutions where profit is not possible.
“According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign [government] has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understanding: first the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.”[12]
Contrary to popular belief, Adam Smith was not opposed to government regulation. He spent 100 pages in the “Wealth of Nations” discussing banking regulations. As has already been mentioned he knew the financiers in a society had a corrosive effect on society. They had a tendency for exploitation and government regulation was needed to hold them in check.
For Adam Smith, self-interest is good for those that live by ‘rent’ and ‘wages’ but not for those that live by ‘profit’ as previously mentioned. Smith thought those that live by profit had a destructive influence on society. This is why Smith favored regulations for those who live by profit. The government certainly plays an essential role for ensuring a fair market. Of course, he recognized the issues with capricious regulations and the way they interfered with the normal market operation of efficient competition. However, he would have never given financiers carte blanch, deregulated access to the market. Adam Smith would have said, “I told you so” when the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, deregulated financial services. It repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that prohibited a single institution like a bank from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company. Basically, the repeal allowed banks to use customer deposits for risky financial ventures. It also allowed banks to have conflicts of interest by ‘advising’ its customers to use its financial services and products without regard to more competitive and valuable investments. Additionally, the government was implicated in these risky investments as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) backed up customer deposits. The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act tried to restore financial oversight of banks and financial institutions and consumer protections. One thing it did was to allow the government to liquidate these institutions that are covered by the FDIC in order to keep these institutions from having large scale failures that would jeopardize the ability of the U.S. government to bail them out. Regulations not only provide a fair market but also protect the government from bankrupting itself from market excesses. Adam Smith would have understood the need for this and would not be calling for deregulation as modern Republicans have been doing.
The issue here is that when individual self-interest promotes the healthy working of the market place then the government should stay of the way. However, the government exists to make sure it protects “every member of society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it”. While it may be in the interest of oil companies to “drill baby drill” it may not be in the interest of the environment and therefore, other members of society to let them do it merely to increase their profits. The government’s job is to make sure the market protects other members of society whose self-interest may be damaged by one group’s profit incentive in the market.
Adam Smith even recognized that the ‘free market’ was not a panacea that could solve all social ills. He stated that a primary function of government was to take care of public works and public institutions where the “profit could never repay the expense” of doing the project. It is certainly arguable that health care insurance providers and education could come under this rubric. It is not the profit interest of health care insurance providers to cover certain risky population groups or chronic illnesses. In order to maximize their profits it is in their interest to ‘cherry pick’ their clientele and drop clients that are a drain on the system. It would be hard to believe that anyone could seriously argue that health care insurance providers have not had quite a long history that illustrates this point. Additionally, while a very good private education is certainly feasible, the cost would prohibit many classes of society from being able to obtain an education. Education for a profit certainly works for those that can pay but simply ignoring the others that cannot pay is not in the long term interest of a society. Adam Smith argued that education is a public work when he we wrote:
“The same thing may be said of the gross ignorance and stupidity which, in a civilized society, seem so frequently to benumb the understandings of all the inferior ranks of people. A man without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, if possible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seems to be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the character of human nature. Though the state was to derive no advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether uninstructed. The state, however, derives no inconsiderable advantage from their instruction. The more they are instructed the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and superstition, which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the most dreadful disorders. An instructed and intelligent people, besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more respectable and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors, and they are therefore more disposed to respect those superiors. They are more disposed to examine, and more capable of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedition, and they are, upon that account, less apt to be misled into any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of government. In free countries, where the safety of government depends very much upon the favorable judgment which the people may form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously concerning it.”[13]
While this may seem to promote a certain kind of equality, it is really “the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain”.
The government is not a cancerous growth of society but just as essential as referees and rules are to games of sport. Getting rid of government is cutting off your nose to spite your face. It ignores the need for a market framework where fairness and protections are ensured. It should restrain monopolies and market bubbles that would cause cost to be “the highest which can be squeezed out of the buyers”. It is also responsible for filling in gaps that self-interest and profit cannot address. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both addressed the inherent exploitation built into an economy. Protecting individuals from economic exploitation is vital for an economy as socialism and Adam Smith understood. Karl Marx went further with trying to embody elements of protections for ‘self-interested’ individuals into an economy. Adam Smith understood the human need for aspiration, the need to dream, and tried to embody this in the economy of capitalism.
What is dreamed must pertain to me and not to an abstraction about the state or egalitarianism. An ‘aspiration of the state’ is too abstract from the self-interested point of view. However, the abstract notion of an ‘aspiration for the state’ is not inconsequential – it is the aim of morality or what Adam Smith termed sympathy[14] (more like what we think of as empathy). Morality aims at egalitarianism in that it places oneself in the place of the other for Adam Smith.
“However selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though they derive nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”[15]
When I refer to morality, I am speaking specifically about the natural empathy that many people have for the suffering of others. There are very few people that proclaim outright that if you do not work just go ahead and starve to death. For most of us, we may think that those who do not work will not eat but few are willing to let children, elderly, handicapped or even lazy people die before our eyes. The same holds true for health care. We do not want to pay for others health care but the idea of just letting people die without it is abhorrent. This is why we are willing to pay more for emergency room health care than to address the issues systemically and at a lower cost. Most of us will not overtly proclaim that if you do not have health insurance go off somewhere and die. Few will proudly state that if you do not have shelter go live on the street (just not my street). While there is a certain chest beating, cathartic youthfulness about these proclamations it offends most people’s sense of responsiveness to these situations. It may help some to think that suffering is the fault of the person suffering (as certainly may be the case for some) but pushing this very far starts to look like ‘protesting too much’ and really serves only to show that the pull of morality is felt only reacted to negatively and defensively.
This feeling of responsibility for the suffering for others is what I mean by morality. From the point of view of ‘my aspirations’, the suffering of the other is irrelevant. From the ideal of pure self-interestedness there is no place for this feeling. If the self is thought as the absolute metaphysic of individualism, the sole property owner, it does not serve the absolute interest of the self to care about the suffering of others; much less do anything about it that will not directly benefit the self. While morality is an abstraction from the point of view of self-interestedness, it is nevertheless a notion that most are not willing to depart with. Our self-interestedness tells us not to pay for anyone other than ourselves but the pull of morality will not let us ignore the suffering of the other. Morality is the ghost of our group involvement. It is the basis for the inevitability and indispensability of the state.
As I have discussed while our metaphysics of individualism compels us towards an aspirational future, our realistic, daily involvements are fundamentally based on language, community and group. The capitalistic goal for moving into the upper class is itself a self-interested aspiration that embodies the notion of class, the group. All this shows us that individualism is perforated with group involvement and community. We are indebted to the other whether we acknowledge it or not. While chest beating individualism may be fun for some, individualism, the sole property owner, is essentially a dream, a drama that gives us meaning in our ‘me-only’ self-centeredness. However, individualism ignores the real ways in which we participate with others and are always already indebted to the other.
Karl Marx went further than leaving the option of morality up to every self-interested individual. Adam Smith as well understood the role of government in achieving the affluence and security of individuals in an economy, protecting them from exploitation and providing public works projects. The communist notion of equalitarianism failed to make everything equal in terms of labor and preventing exploitation. However, socialism attempts legal protections of groups and individuals that aim at fairness, equal opportunity, an equal playing field and protections in an economy. It is important to note that ‘equal’ here is not some absolute ideal of equalitarianism as in communism but should be thought under the rubric of fairness. Marx fleshed out possibilities for how this could work more than Adam Smith but Adam Smith would probably have more in common with the objectives of Karl Marx’ than many of the modern Republican, the neo-conservative, advocates of capitalism.
In any case, we are neither socialists nor capitalist; we are both. The ideal of either is not where we live. This is why there never has been a pure capitalism or a pure socialism. All great economies have essential elements of both. Beating others over the head with these labels may make some feel good but it is only a silly drama that fuels an inflated ego. These kinds of accusations can also be used to manipulate less aware people but it is really only empty rhetoric. The outcome of such practices is a chronic condition called hate and only hurts the hater in the long run. I believe it is better to ‘see’ how we live and try to ‘understand’ our drives and aspirations as they show themselves without metaphysical hermeneutics, pre-cognitive dispositions and assumptions, working below the surface. There is value in letting ourselves see and understand ourselves as we are and not in the service of some head game we play on ourselves. In all great economies, socialism and capitalism are really only two different historical ways of thinking about the same thing – an economy that works.
[10] http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm
[11] Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 1, Section 4 (p. 78); Also see http://www.lrp-cofi.org/book/chapter3_transitiontosocialism.pdf
[12] Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations, ([1776] 1976, 687–88)
[13] Ibid, (WN V.i.f.61: 788)
[14] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Adam Smith, http://www.iep.utm.edu/smith/
[15] The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith (TMS I.i.1.1)
By Mark, on January 27th, 2012
Adam Smith, an Enlightenment thinker, thought of humans as fundamentally self-interested as contrasted to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes thought that selfishness worked as a kind of glue for society. His idea was that people are selfish; fundamentally concerned only with themselves. This meant that each person wanted to thrive based on their personal wants and needs without regard to ideals like the greater good or the plight of others. However, as selfish people, they want security at any cost. In order to obtain security, people subject themselves to the state, to laws. While individuals would freely rape, murder and plunder without concerns of conscience they do not because they do not want to be on the receiving end of their brutish desires. The free subjugation of themselves to the state is called ‘social contract’ theory.
Adam Smith lived hundreds of years after Hobbes. He was also a social contract theorist. He was concerned with how self-interested individuals create commerce. In “The Wealth of Nations”, Smith writes:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”[1]
He thought that when self-interested individuals compete, the process of competition resulted in the most optimum allocation of resources because competition resulted in the lowest average cost of goods or services. In this way, he thought that self-interest served the greater good. He thought that any time the government or monopolies intervened in this process it prevented the process from working as it should and kept costs artificially higher thus interrupting the normative operation of a free market. It is important to note that Adam Smith’s ideals of the free market only work on the basis of competing individuals not market monopolizing corporations or governments. Market monopolies interfere with competition and defy the ideal of a free market.
“The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest that can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion indeed, but for any considerable time together. The one is…the highest which can be squeezed out of the buyers…The other is the lowest which the sellers can commonly afford to take…. The monopoly price is most often sustained by “the exclusive privileges of corporations (65)”[2]
“Smith uses the terms “self-interest” and “private interests” always in opposite ways. For former, his most famous statements are “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest (20),” and, “by directing [his] industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention (351)”. Concerning “private interests,” Smith is not so sanguine; these private interests constitute the “spirit of monopoly (371)” which Smith so much detests. It should be clear by now, from what has been said before, that Smith is well aware of the dangers of avarice and especially so since the interests of capitalists diverge, in Smith’s view, so much from the interests of the general public.”[3]
Capitalism (a term he never uses), as Adam Smith thought, is depended on private property and private ownership. The self-interested individual had complete legal and sole rights to their property. Without private property there would be no motivation for individuals to compete and increase their property ownership, their wealth.
Socialism believes that individual interests are served better when they cooperate with each other and not compete. Socialism believes in social ownership. In effect, this means workers own production (also called the means of production). Production is not owned privately but by a group. There are many forms of socialism. Some forms of socialism believe that the workers in a factory own the factory, but everything else in the economy is ‘free market’ and private property. There is no government ownership is this type of socialism. Some forms of socialism simply pay a social dividend based on factory profitability. Some forms of socialism nationalize factories but still maintain private ownership. Social democrats use a progressive tax system and government regulation within a private market economy. There are also anarchist and libertarian forms of socialism. Socialists tend to believe that when the individual is elevated above the group, normal human interaction and group identities tend to get ignored. Language[4] is a perfect example of how humans are fundamentally collective. People do not have ‘private languages’. Communication is only possible by sharing a language that we individually did not make up. People are not hermits. We form governments, churches and social communities.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the laborer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the license to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labor either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part.
The real value of all the different component parts of price, it must be observed, is measured by the quantity of labor which they can, each of them, purchase or command. Labor measures the value not only of that part of price which resolves itself into labor, but of that which resolves itself into rent, and of that which resolves itself into profit.”[5] -Adam Smith
It is important to note that a ‘pure’ socialism or capitalism has never existed on any large scale. Every world historical economy has always been a mixture. For example, consider the notion of rent in capitalism.
“For the purposes of economics, Smith divides society into three economic classes: the landlords, the laborers, and the merchants and manufacturers (448), or those who live by rent, those who live by wages, and those who live by profit (217). Now the interests of the first two classes are tied to the prosperity of the nation; economic expansion raises the value of land and increases the demand for labor and hence its wages. But exactly the opposite is the case with the third class, those who live by profit:
But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with prosperity, and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two (219).
Thus the interests of the third class run contrary to the interests of the other two; expansion actually raises the cost of labor and rent and increases competition, thereby lowering profits, so much so that the ruination of a country is actually in the best interests of the third class”[6]
It is interesting to note here that economic expansion “raises the value of land” but it is uncertain how long the values of land can go higher and how exactly the profits increase unless the property owner is the sole owner, i.e., already paid for and not obtained by a loan. It would seem that profit is “high in poor countries”. Adam Smith takes this an indicator of “ruination of a country”.
A property owner allows a tenant to live in their property for a fee. The renter does not own the property and if the renter quits paying rent they are not allowed to live in the house. Likewise, a mortgage is ‘ownership’ on paper but the bank allows a mortgagee to live in the house as long as the mortgage is paid. In both cases, ownership is not sole or absolute – it is contingent on paying a periodic fee. So, the landlord or the bank cooperates with the individual in the interest of capitalizing on the financial arrangement. It should also be noted that the bank and the landlord are likely to be indebted themselves to the third class, “those who live by profit”; the financiers, that Adam Smith writes of above.
We can see that the renter or the mortgagee is not a property owner in Adam Smith’s notion of property ownership. However, the aspiration of the renter or mortgagee is for property ownership. Since the aspiration of sole ownership is not reality, a group arrangement is made that allows an individual to have shelter until their aspirations can be obtained. However, it is certainly true that most individuals today will never own their house outright. Therefore, in reality they will live their whole lives working and cooperating in group economic, arrangements.
In finance, leverage is the ability of an investor to increase their ‘paper’ holdings based on loans. Again, a group economic arrangement allows investors to obtain securities that they would normally not be able to afford. As such, the investor is obligated to a group, cooperative arrangement to leverage their holdings. The question of fees and profit is actually an ancient issue. The Bible explicitly forbids interest or profit on loans (Exodus 22:25–27, Leviticus 25:36–37 and Deuteronomy 23:20–21). These passages state that interest is exploitative. In this sense, those that base their faith on these books would be in perfect agreement with the writings of Karl Marx (at least on this specific topic) and Adam Smith. Exploitation with higher and higher fees for loans on rental and mortgaged property are examples of how the wealthy class, the real property owners, has increased their wealth at the expense of those that are not wealthy. This exploitation has been going on from the beginning. Even Adam Smith recognized the exploitation of labor. This excerpt is from an essay on The Wealth of Nations:
“However, in the negotiation of wages, the worker is at a distinct disadvantage. In the first place, the law prevented him from joining with his follows to bargain (71, 151). Further, the law always favors the masters over the workers (151). Workers are prevented from joining in unions to raise wages, but the masters are not forbidden to unite to lower them; indeed, the law encourages them to do so. This legal inequality particularly angered Smith, who noted that, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices (137).” But when the workers attempt to meet, it “generally end[s] in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders (71).” The inequality is so great that:
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counselors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters (151).”[7] –Adam Smith
Socialism also recognizes the tendency for exploitation of the worker and tries to address it.
In both socialism and capitalism dues must be paid to benefit. For Christianity[8], capitalism and socialism[9] a main tenant is “He who does not work shall not eat”. Paying your dues is not an option in socialism or in capitalism. Fees are required to participate in the group. The main difference is that in capitalism, according to the ‘theory’ of Adam Smith, individualism as self-interest reigns supreme. The ideal is that the individual worker benefits with private property ownership not the financier. In socialism, the individual worker benefits as well but socialists want to formally recognize ownership of production in a group context – the laborer not the financier. Depending on the type of socialism, the group could mean anything from share holders in a factory to nationalism of a factory. In theory, the individual should benefit in both systems. However, socialism wants to take precautions to ensure that the group of laborers benefit and capitalism viz. Adam Smith acknowledges that in some cases the financiers will benefit at the cost of the laborers. Both systems distribute wealth in one way or another. The fundamental problem that Marx wanted to address with socialism was how the wealthy, the financiers, ended up with all the real private property ownership while the workers, in effect, ended up as indentured slaves barely able to pay their bills. Additionally, in both systems classes are set up in practice.
[1] Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations, [WN I.ii.2)
[2] The Forgotten Agrarian: Re-Reading Adam Smith, John C. Médaille, http://www.medaille.com/newadamsmith.htm, parenthetical numbers refer to section numbers in the cited Adam Smith work
[3] ibid
[4] Alas, you too young, free-market libertines who rail against the socialists in your rabid individualism – you too are a product of ‘group-think’ – it is called language – you just don’t know your indebtedness yet…
[5] Adam Smith, Wealth Of Nations, [WN I.vi.7-8: p 67]
[6] The Forgotten Agrarian: Re-Reading Adam Smith, John C. Médaille
[7] ibid
[8] II Thessalonians 3:10
[9] In accordance with Lenin’s understanding of the socialist state, article twelve of the 1936 Soviet Constitution states:
In the USSR work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”
In Lenin’s writing, this was not so much directed at lazy or unproductive workers, but rather the bourgeoisie. (Marxist theory defines the bourgeoisie as the group of those who buy the labor-power of workers and engage it in the process of production, deriving profits from the surplus value thus expropriated. Once communism was realized, that is, after the abolition of property and the law of value, no-one would live off the labor of others.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_shall_he_eat
By Jeffrey Ellis, on January 23rd, 2012
This post is in response to Mark’s recent post titled The Question of Conservatism.
Mark says that conservatives want to conserve, and in particular that they want to conserve an idealized interpretation of a conservative past that never really existed. I think a more accurate definition of conservative is someone who wants to conserve tried-and-true traditional institutions and who supports only gradual change, believing that such things are the way they are for good reasons.
I do not think that Mark is wrong in characterizing conservatives as having an idealized view of the past. But I don’t believe this characteristic is necessarily unique to conservatives. Many liberals, for example, have whitewashed the Hoover-Roosevelt period of history to put the New Deal and activist government in a positive light, and free markets and government austerity in a negative light (see here and here, for example, for just one scholarly take-down of this understanding of the Great Depression period). And many libertarians have praised our founding fathers’ libertarian wisdom and pine for the libertarian utopia that existed earlier in our country’s history, conveniently forgetting about slavery and lack of women’s rights.
We all have a tendency to accept uncritically any reports, news, analysis, or “facts” that confirm our political beliefs, and to downplay, suspect, or seek fault with those that counter our beliefs. That tendency leads us to interpret history in a manner favorable towards our own ideology.
Mark’s addendum includes some things I take issue with.
He notes that employment is currently at 8.5%. This figure ignores the Americans who have given up finding a job and stopped looking; the source Mark provides puts this number at 2.5 million. Thus the true percentage of people who would like to work but are unemployed is much higher than 8.5%.
Mark also notes the following:
Bush administration increase in debt: 85%
Obama administration increase in debt: 43%
Bush administration increase in unemployment: 86%
Obama administration increase in unemployment: 9%
These, and numbers similar to these, have been going around the net lately. For instance, this image has been flying across Facebook the past couple of days:
The problem is that these numbers are very misleading. For example, 86% of the Bush-era debt is a smaller number than 35% of the Obama-era debt. If you were to re-cast this as a percentage of GDP, the numbers would be as follows:
Reagan: plus 14.9 percentage points
GHW Bush: plus 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: down 13.4 percentage points
GW Bush: plus 11.6 percentage points
Obama: plus 19.7 percentage points
So Obama has increased the debt, as a percentage of GDP, more than any president in recent history — and he has not even finished his first term. Mind you, I am not defending Bush here; he left Obama with a wrecked economy. But rather than fixing it, Obama made it worse.
By Mark, on January 20th, 2012
Conservatives want to conserve. Certainly this is ostensively true. The question of conservatism comes when the object of conservatism is explicitly posed. For example, conservatives are fond of talking about the past. They believe that their notion of the past is ‘real’. However, an objection could be made that their interpretation is ideal and therefore, as an example, a return to the conservative past is not only impossible as it never really existed but could be used for voter manipulation (please see the addendum below to illustrate this point).
In philosophy we would say that history is hermeneutical; that is, it lends itself to interpretation. Are there historical facts that are more certain than others? –Absolutely. Hitler existed. However, there are mainstream Republicans that believe Hitler was a liberal, socialist since Jonah Goldberg (see this). While the vast majority of historical scholars disagree with Goldberg’s conclusions, it does demonstrate the susceptibility of history to interpretation. The Bible is another clear example of how history can interpreted differently viz. all the different Christian denominations. Of course, there are multiple attempts to define the ‘true’ history but that is beyond the scope of this discussion. The point is that history has empirically demonstrated a propensity for radically different interpretations.
Since there is an interpretive variability to history, it makes conservatism more problematic. The argument gets turned into a struggle for defining or perpetually having to redefine what we need to conserve. A more skeptical view of conservatism is that it lends itself to propaganda – in this case, a re-creation of the past that is repeated enough times to manipulate public opinion into believing it is true – marketing is proof that propaganda works. Nietzsche would be in perfect agreement with the notion that the past is a story told by the victors. I would in no way imply that liberals are immune from the criticism of propaganda. However, the criticism of liberals and propaganda is not from ‘conserving’ the past but generally from different directions.
The obsession with the past that needs conserving is what many philosophers call reactionary. That is, it sustains itself by trying to establish a ‘true’ understanding of the past. It must therefore react to every challenge to the ‘true’ understanding. If conservatism could establish a ‘true’ history, it would justify its existence, its essence or in philosophy, its origin (arche in Greek). This task is a bit like the myth of Sisyphus who had to eternally roll a stone up a hill only to have it roll down again. Conservatism, not unlike Christianity, depends in part on the monumental task of preserving or trying to establish an interpretation of the past. The struggle then in conservatism is a struggle for the ‘true’ and the proper.
In current philosophy there is much discussion about the ‘proper’ and its essential reciprocity to the ‘improper’. The proper is indentified with essence, origin, history, sacred, eternal and true. The improper is identified with accidental, contingent, insignificant, profane, finite and false. The truth claim as what is proper is not so much in question as how the dynamics of proper and improper depend on each other to be, to exist as what they are. Many philosophers, Hegel not the least, have exhaustively shown that the true could not even be thought without the errant, the not-true. In philosophy there is something called a tautology; something that is absolutely, necessarily true. For example, A = A is an identity and therefore a tautology. A proper identity in philosophy is always true and a tautology. However, the set of all not-As has just as much to do with A being A as the positive statement. Without the not-A, the A not only would not ‘exist’ but it could not even be thought. Likewise, in any hermeneutic of history a canon, a dominant narrative that gets established as ‘true’, must perpetually topple any counter narratives, any themes that oppose or contradict the dominant narrative. The very fact the task is continual shows that the counter themes are never extinguished completely. A symbiotic relationship exists in which both canon and not-canon must preserve each other in order to ‘be’, to even ‘be able’ for thought. So, the proper cannot do without the improper. The proper must, of necessity, sow the seeds of the improper. It must provide the themes for its destruction as it insists on its proper-ness. In the context of this essay, conservatism owes its existence to what it cannot and does not want to maintain – the nemesis of historical truth – hermeneutics (historical interpretation). Regular folks call this relativity or relativism.
Relativism as commonly thought means that tautology is impossible. However, to suggest that true is not true is utter nonsense. What gets conflated in the common notion of relativism is historical and moral uncertainty, viz. the play of hermeneutics, is tantamount to no absolute, no tautology, no truth. This is an unfortunate equivocation of the legitimate direction of ‘relativism’. Even Einstein, the father of modern relativity, was harshly criticized for overturning the absolute time and space of Newton. However, Einstein did not mean that all is falsity, or ambiguous mush. For Einstein there are ‘truths’ but they are relative to each other not to some absolute, metaphysical construct of time and space or ether. The tension here is one of habit. Up until Einstein, we had a historical tradition of understanding time and space as absolute. Our ‘common sense’ was a habitual and linguistically enforced ‘filter’ for making sense of ‘reality’. Anytime a habit is uprooted, whether it is personal or sociological, there is tension, the compulsion to adapt, the loss of a ‘past’ and the ‘thrown-ness’ toward an uncertain future. The future is shown in the need to reinterpret the past according to some new paradigm and therefore, the past itself shows an almost ‘movie-like’ projection screen whose projector has the lens of the future – the uncertainty of what will be taken into the showing of the past.
For Martin Heidegger, a contemporary philosopher, the uprooting of our previous historical constructs (historicity) was the very possibility for authenticity. In other words, the need for fundamental change, adaptation, reflection was anxiety. He called this being-toward-death. He wanted to identify my death, my end, and the anxiety it induces with the absolute requirement for the possibility of ‘truth’. He interpreted ‘truth’ as aletheia – unconcealedness or what shows itself as itself as distinguished from concealment. So, for Heidegger, the ‘truth’ of human being is in our capacity for being-towards-an-end.
Our truth is not gained from some apriori, metaphysical understanding of the ‘truth’ but from our ability to stand in the face of our end. In the context of this essay, this would mean not having to ‘conserve’ the past but living in the uncertainty of the past and our dogmatic notions of what its ‘truth’ really was. This is not to suggest that there was no truth as Einstein was not suggesting there wasn’t truth but to try to get us to think differently about what a ‘truth’ could be; not absolute time and space but space-time continuum.
In conclusion (please don’t applaud), I believe that the dilemma of conservatism does not necessarily have to be viewed as some kind of relative gaping void from the absence of truth. The alternative to conservatism is not relativistic mush and nihilism. Fundamental change is not necessarily bad and improper. It certainly creates anxiety in the openness of the question but the openness itself is what makes one young, engenders the notion of freedom, the possibility of change to something more authentic. What is more, it resists the heaviness of banality and empty repetition, the slow decay of the novel and passion. The transform that I alluded to with Heidegger is not to another movie for the projector but taking the step back to see the wonder of truth and its showing – and the ways that it continually thwarts our insistence on the ‘final’ showing. In my opinion, conservatism is an illusion that we sincerely feel like we need but carries an essential downside that must of necessity reappear – why not give up that Herculean struggle and just take a look around?
Addendum:
Let’s take a recent example:
Mitt recently stated, “The president says he wants to transform America, I don’t want to transform America into something else. I want to restore it.”
Let’s see, restore it to…
…the Bush administration?
During the Bush administration two wars were started and the economy was bankrupted. The national debt increased twice as much as the current administration. During the Bush administration unemployment went up 77% more than during the Obama administration.
Bush administration increase in debt: 85%
Obama administration increase in debt: 43%
Bush administration increase in unemployment: 86%
Obama administration increase in unemployment: 9%
Transition Date: January 20, 2009
Note: The latest unemplyment rate is 8.5%.
For more details see this
Note: The debt numbers are a bit of a broad brush as it does not break down discretionary and non-discretionary parts of the budget and the contribution of each administration to both of these types of spending.
From the graph below you can see that the unemployment rate exploded just as President Obama got into office. I think this explosion arguably was not due to anything President Obama did in his first few months (just 4 months later the rate was 9.4%) as the national unemployment rate does not turn on the dime. Given this, the difference would be a 134% increase in unemployment during the Bush administration over the Obama administration.
Bush administration increase in unemployment: 124%
Obama administration decrease in unemployment: 10%
Transition Date: End of May, 2009
Link
Note: For some reason, you may have to do a couple refreshes on this link to show the graph.
Also, see
…prior to Medicare and Medicaid?
“Before Medicare, only 51% of people aged 65 and older had health care coverage, and nearly 30% lived below the federal poverty level.”
…before women had the right to vote and blacks and gays were hung for entertainment?
…before Social Security?
the best estimates show that the elderly poverty rate in 1935 was probably somewhere in the range of 70 to 90 percent”
…before the civil war?
Slavery
…from the beginning?
In 1800, the mean life span in the United States was about a quarter century
In 1900 the mean was about 50 years
Do you REALLY want to go there?
The Republicans are painting a fantasy picture for voters that need to believe fantasies of the past – it NEVER happened. The fact is that we have progressed from a dark past albeit in a bumpy and messy way. It is absolute insanity to want to go back to the way it really was. There was no earlier, greater time than now for the United States. Yes, a few things may have been better but don’t let them fool you, things are better now than they have ever been for folks.
So, here is the question, do you want to transform our future or restore our past?
By ctapplied, on January 16th, 2012
 Today we have a guest blogger, Mark Dreher. In response to our recent post on anger towards the rich and concern over income inequality, Mark posted this on his own blog, and has graciously allowed us to share it here. Although Mark took issue with our post, his response was evidence-based and civil, representing the kind of dialogue we strive to highlight on Critical Thinking Applied.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In response to this post about the poor’s rich envy…
http://critical-thinker.net/?p=943
I think you may find the Economic Policy Institute has some interesting facts concerning the rich and poor.
http://www.epi.org/publication/11-telling-charts-about-2011-economy/
For example:
“In other words, the richest 5 percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation’s gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period.”
http://www.epi.org/publication/large-disparity-share-total-wealth-gain/
“In 1978, compensation of CEOs was 35 times greater than compensation of average workers. Since then, this ratio has skyrocketed, peaking at 299-to-1 in 2000. During the Great Recession, CEO pay fell relative to pay of typical workers because much of CEO compensation is directly linked to the stock market, which fell sharply in 2008 and 2009. However, the ratio bounced back during the recovery and stood at 243-to-1 in 2010. At this rate, it likely will not take long for the gap to reach its prior peak.”
http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-ratio-average-worker/
However, the unemployment situation has improved since President Obama took office – checkout the graph.
http://www.epi.org/publication/job-seekers-ratio-remains-4-1-34th-straight/
I have also tracked this data at…
http://www.mixermuse.com/blog/2012/01/06/all-you-need-to-know-about-politics-1-6-12-2/
I think what is at issue here is not the ‘envy’ factor but the relative growing disparity between the rich and the poor and the erosion of the middle class. Put another way, how far would you let it go before you thought there may be an issue – 5% very wealthy and 95% very poor as many small countries have been historically and continue to be? Would you employ the same logic of envy and wealth creation if this were the case? In other words, have you set up an absolute ideology of your stated terms or are your concerns relative to the ‘current’ situation? If the current situations in these graphs is true or were true, is this acceptable to your current ideology? If not, what would be the trigger point where you might concede a break down in your ideology? Also, do you believe that the facts cited are wrong?
Is the relative growing disparity between the rich and the poor because the rich deserve it more or the poor deserve it less (let’s not get into blame about what party is responsible yet – just want to get an idea of your belief system)?
Interesting Note:
Here are America’s Highest Paid Chief Executives…
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_rank.html
By Jeffrey Ellis, on January 12th, 2012
The dialog on income inequality in America has become more strident in recent years. A new Pew Research Center poll finds that a rising share of Americans – now 66% (compared to 47% in 2009) – believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor. Consequently, the conflict between rich and poor now ranks ahead of other group tensions, including immigrants vs. the native born, blacks vs. whites, and young vs. old.
But is the growing public anger towards the rich justified? Is the rising concern over income inequality in America warranted?
The poll result on perception of rich/poor conflict alone does not indicate whether people believe that anger towards the rich is justified, or that any measures to reduce income inequality are called for. But other questions in the survey do address attitudes towards the wealthy, and show relatively unchanged results compared to 2008 survey results:
- 46% believe that most rich people “are wealthy mainly because they know the right people or were born into wealthy families.”
- 43% believe that most people become rich “mainly because of their own hard work, ambition or education.”
- 8% believe that most people become rich either due to neither of these factors or both of them equally.
(Not surprisingly, 58% of democrats attribute wealth to family and connections, and 58% of republicans attribute wealth to hard work, ambition, and education; independents fall in between these two.)
So conflict between the rich and poor is growing while public attitudes towards the rich remain unchanged. Thus, those who resent the rich are becoming more vocal, rather than more numerous. The conflict is being fueled by a small vocal minority — demagoguing politicians chief among them — assisted by sympathetic media reporting of, and leftist editorializing about, income inequality.
A common feature of the demagoguing and editorializing about income inequality is that it almost always falls victim to the fixed pie fallacy: the mistaken belief that there is a fixed amount of wealth in existence, such that a person can only get a bigger piece of the pie at the expense of others getting smaller pieces.
Wealth signifies that something of value has been produced. Thus, total wealth is not fixed, but is created by hard work and innovation. (See here for an animated plot of just how much wealth has been created in the last 200 years; see here for a World Bank report on increasing world wealth.) In a (mostly) free market economy such as ours, the rich only get rich by producing things others want. Consumers benefit, as do those who get jobs created by the enterprises funded by entrepreneurs and wealthy investors. And the dependence on the wealthy for job creation and business investment seems to be increasing. In short, we need the rich. The explosive growth in technology and standards of living we have experienced over the past 200 years and continue to experience would not have happened and will not continue without the investments of the wealthy.
To the extent that some do get rich at the expense of others, it is usually the result of rent seeking and other efforts to capture special treatment from government, which ends up being at the expense of taxpayers. Subsidies, bailouts, preferential tax codes, and legislation to protect market incumbents from competition are examples of this. But in these cases, ire should be directed at politicians and government officials who engaged in power brokering rather than playing government’s required role in a free market economy.
The demagoguing and editorializing about income inequality also assumes that people are permanently trapped into their current economic class. As Obama said in his Osawatomie, Kansas speech on Dec. 6, 2011:
“And yet, over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk… it’s estimated that a child born today will only have a 1 in 3 chance of making it to the middle class… It’s heartbreaking enough that there are millions of working families in this country who are now forced to take their children to food banks for a decent meal. But the idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.”
In addition to being factually incorrect, this demagoguery ignores an important fact about income mobility: the “rich” are not the same people over time. Nearly 58% of those in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into higher groups by 2006; 25% of the poorest had moved into middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% moved all the way up the highest quintile income group; and of those who started in the second poorest quintile in 1996, nearly 50% had moved into the middle quintile or higher. Our society is not stratified into fixed income levels into which people are permanently trapped.
Finally, worrying about income inequality is not the same as worrying about the poor. (More likely, it represents an attempt to further a political agenda by means of fomenting class envy rather than an attempt to address any real concern.) It is poverty, and not income inequality, that we should be worrying about. But while income inequality may have grown in recent decades, poverty has dropped; consider that the average poor American today enjoys a higher standard of living than did the average middle class American of 35 years ago. Indeed, as standards of living rise worldwide, consumption inequality drops even while income inequality may continue to rise.
But as I opined here, those who are concerned about income inequality will continue to move the goalposts for defining poverty and “low income” as the world becomes more affluent. In fact, that is already happening; the Census Bureau is now floating a proposed new measure for poverty and low income, in part because ”The current poverty thresholds do not adjust for rising levels and standards of living that have occurred since 1965.”
ADDENDUM: The View from Alexandria blog provides some additional thoughts on inequality. He argues that not only are there are no moral grounds to object to someone becoming more wealthy if done without disadvantaging anyone, but also the fact that the rich have more money matters less than at any other time in history.
By Lorenzo, on January 8th, 2012
 US Presidents generally fulfill, or seek to fulfill, their campaign promises (via):
Michael Krukones in Promises and Performance: Presidential Campaigns as Policy Predictors (1984) established that about 75 percent of the promises made by presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Jimmy Carter were kept. In Presidents and Promises: From Campaign Pledge to Presidential Performance (1985), Jeff Fishel looked at campaigns from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Reagan. What he found was that presidents invariably attempt to carry out their promises; the main reason some pledges are not redeemed is congressional opposition, not presidential flip-flopping. Similarly, Gerald Pomper studied party platforms, and discovered that the promises parties made were consistent with their postelection agendas. More recent and smaller-scale papers have confirmed the main point: presidents’ agendas are clearly telegraphed in their campaigns.
Or, to put it another way, what Presidential candidates say as candidates is generally what you get as Presidents.
Sure, we remember broken political promises (generally, more than kept ones) but a President is generally going to do (or seek to do) as they promise. So, paying attention to what Presidential candidates say on the campaign trail is a very good idea.
Which is good news for democracy-as-voter-power. What candidates tell the voters is what they will (mostly) do if elected. The implicit contract with the voters (if you elect me I will do X) has genuine power. Indeed, a study of how members of Congress behave indicate just how much power:
What he has found is that representatives and senators see every election as a cycle that begins in the campaign, when they make promises to their constituents. Then, if they win, they interpret how those promises will constrain them once they’re in office. Once in Washington, Fenno’s politicians act with two things in mind: how their actions match the promises they’ve made in the previous campaign; and how they will be able to explain those actions when they return to their district. Representation “works,” then, because politicians are constantly aware that what they do in Washington will have to be explained to their constituents, and that it will have to be explained in terms of their original promises.
No wonder Americans generally like their local representative even as they dislike Congress. Their local representative is far more likely to try to do what they want than Congress as a whole.
The deeper question is why? Why are politicians from the President down so fixated on their political promises?
To which the simplest answer is: that there is an implicit contract, an exchange, a transaction, going on between candidate and voters. The exchange is votes-for-promises. In offering this exchange a politician faces various dangers: insufficient promise-credibility (insufficient, that is, to offer voters something worth their votes); misdirected promises (not what the voters want to be offered); misguided promises (not the consequences voters wanted when enacted). Acting as if promises matter signals credibility and so keeps the politician in the exchange-for-votes game.
And, since they are all in that game, it becomes a crucial currency with each other as well as the voters. They do promises trade-offs because that gives them win-wins–they give each other credibility. A clever politician offers specific promises so they can “horse-trade”: they can help other politicians keep their promises without breaking their own. Which means politicians with congruent promises will tend to work together and those with contradictory promises will tend not to.
But they are not only signalling to voters, they are also signalling to their activists, staff and subordinates. This applies particularly strongly to Presidents, who have to signal to an entire Administration. The notion of “secret” channels of communication successfully hermetically sealed from public communication is deeply implausible (especially in such an open society as the US) and hardly any more functional, given the need to interact with other office-holders.
So, what you see is (mostly) what you get because the key communications are public. True, there is some talking in “code” (in phrases which resonate in particular ways with particular groups) but it is a “code” embedded in public speech. Rhetoric matters because it is crucial to the signalling that is so much the stuff of politics.
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