"I Hate New Year’s Day" by Antonio Gramsci (1916)

Every morning, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s Day.

That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit. You end up seriously thinking that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning; you make resolutions, and you regret your irresolution, and so on, and so forth. This is generally what’s wrong with dates.

They say that chronology is the backbone of history. Fine. But we also need to accept that there are four or five fundamental dates that every good person keeps lodged in their brain, which have played bad tricks on history. They too are New Year’s. The New Year’s of Roman history, or of the Middle Ages, or of the modern age.

And they have become so invasive and fossilizing that we sometimes catch ourselves thinking that life in Italy began in 752, and that 1490 or 1492 are like mountains that humanity vaulted over, suddenly finding itself in a new world, coming into a new life. So the date becomes an obstacle, a parapet that stops us from seeing that history continues to unfold along the same fundamental unchanging line, without abrupt stops, like when at the cinema the film rips and there is an interval of dazzling light.

That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigor.

No spiritual time-serving. I would like every hour of my life to be new, though connected to the ones that have passed. No day of celebration with its mandatory collective rhythms, to share with all the strangers I don’t care about. Because our grandfathers’ grandfathers, and so on, celebrated, we too should feel the urge to celebrate. That is nauseating.

I await socialism for this reason too. Because it will hurl into the trash all of these dates which have no resonance in our spirit and, if it creates others, they will at least be our own, and not the ones we have to accept without reservations from our silly ancestors.


--  "I Hate New Year's Day" by Antonio Gramsci, first published in Avanti! on January 1, 1916 and translated by Alberto Toscano for Viewpoint Magazine. Accessed at Jacobin on January 4, 2016.

"Dependents of the State" by Amia Srinivasan

Dependents of the State


Of all the sins to which an American can succumb, the worst may be dependence on the state.

Think back for a moment to the two biggest missteps in the 2012 presidential election: Mitt Romney’s dismissal of the “47 percent” of people “dependent on the government,” and President Obama’s “you didn’t build that,” intended to remind American business owners that their success wasn’t all due to smarts and hard work, but also to the roads and bridges built by others, the government-sponsored research that produced the Internet and the “unbelievable American system we have that allowed you to thrive.” Both statements came off as stinging insults directed at large groups of voters, and both were seen as tactical disasters.

Conservatives champion an ethos of hard work and self-reliance, and insist — heroically ignoring the evidence — that people’s life chances are determined by the exercise of those virtues. Liberals, meanwhile, counter the accusation that their policies encourage dependence by calling the social welfare system a “safety net,” there only to provide a “leg up” to people who have “fallen on hard times.” Unlike gay marriage or abortion, issues that divide left from right, everyone, no matter where they lie on the American political spectrum, loathes and fears state dependence. If dependence isn’t a moral failing to be punished, it’s an addictive substance off which people must be weaned.

Like so many politically important notions, the concept of “state dependence” purports to do no more than describe the way things are, but contains within it a powerful and suspect moral judgment. What is it for one thing to depend on another? Put most simply, X depends on Y when it’s the case that X wouldn’t exist if Y didn’t exist. More subtly, X depends on Y when it’s the case that X wouldn’t be in the state it is in without Y’s being in the state it is in. Americans who collect food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance or welfare checks are said to be dependent on the state because the lives they lead would be different (indeed, worse) if the state did not provide these services — at least without their working harder and longer. Despite the symbolic resonance of Ronald Reagan’s fictitious “welfare queen,” most of the people who rely on means-tested social services either cannot work, have been recently laid off thanks to the economic downturn, or are already working in poorly paid, immiserating jobs. Of the 32 million American children currently being raised in low-income families — families who cannot afford to meet their basic needs — nearly half have parents who are in full-time, year-round jobs.

But if the poor are dependent on the state, so, too, are America’s rich. The extraordinary accumulation of wealth enjoyed by the socioeconomic elite — in 2007, the richest 1 percent of Americans accounted for about 24 percent of all income — simply wouldn’t be possible if the United States weren’t organized as it is. Just about every aspect of America’s economic and legal infrastructure — the laissez-faire governance of the markets; a convoluted tax structure that has hedge fund managers paying less than their office cleaners; the promise of state intervention when banks go belly-up; the legal protections afforded to corporations as if they were people; the enormous subsidies given to corporations (in total, about 50 percent more than social services spending); electoral funding practices that allow the wealthy to buy influence in government — allows the rich to stay rich and get richer. In primitive societies, people can accumulate only as much stuff as they can physically gather and hold on to. It’s only in “advanced” societies that the state provides the means to socioeconomic domination by a tiny minority. “The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other,” the writer John Berger said about the 20th century, though he might equally have said it of this one: “It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.”

The irony isn’t only that the poor are condemned for being dependent on the state while the rich are not. It’s also that the rich get so much more out of their dependence on the state than the poor. Without the support of the state, poor people’s quality of life would certainly drop, but only by degrees: their lives would go from bad to worse. Take the state’s assistance away from the rich, however, and their lives would take a serious plunge in comfort. No wonder rich people are on the whole conservative: the most ferocious defenders of the status quo are usually those who are most dependent on the system.

So, the question should not be why Americans loathe and fear dependence on the state, but rather: why do Americans loathe and fear some forms of state dependence but not others? Why is state dependence condemned when evinced by the poor, but tolerated, even unrecognized, when enjoyed by the rich? What justifies this double standard?

Here’s one possible answer. While the rich are dependent on the state, the state is in turn dependent on them. The elite might enjoy levels of comfort and prosperity that the majority can scarcely imagine, but it’s no more than they deserve: they are, after all, the “job creators,” the engines of economic growth. The poor, by contrast, are just a drag on the system.

Even if it were granted that some sort of market-driven economy is in the public interest (or, to adapt Churchill’s quip about democracy, that it is the worst option except for all the rest), the case would remain to be made that the sort of market-driven economy we have in the United States serves that interest. Indeed, this case would be especially difficult to argue at a time when we are living with the effects of an economic recession caused by the wealthiest among us, the cost of which is being paid largely by the poor and middle classes — in the loss of their homes and jobs, but also in the form of tax-dollar-driven bank bailouts. The orthodoxy is that inequality is the necessary price of economic growth, but research strongly suggests that inequality of income causes economic instability and slows overall growth, and that the rapid rise in inequality in the last few decades is to blame for the current economic recession.

The case for our current arrangements is still harder to make once one acknowledges the argument, put forward by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level, that economic inequality has a negative multiplier effect, making poor people in very unequal societies like the United States’ worse off — in terms of mortality, education, imprisonment rates, social mobility and so on — than they would be in more equal societies, even if they were just as poor. In other words, when the rich get richer, it doesn’t just make them better off: it makes everyone else worse off.

Neither will it help anyone trying to make the case for the American way to compare the United States with other developed nations, where the average citizen is healthier, happier, better educated and enjoys more social mobility. Here we have a real-life chance to apply the political philosopher John Rawls’s test for a just society, what he called the “veil of ignorance.” If you didn’t know what kind of person you were going to be — your gender, family circumstances, ethnicity — which of the developed nations would you choose to be born into? Would you be hoping to have a home, a job and good medical care? Would you like to be able to clothe, feed and educate your children someday? In that case you’d be foolish to pick the United States. You’d be better off choosing Norway, or any one of a number of countries that have better evened the balance between rich and poor state dependence with higher taxes and greater investment in social services.

Here’s another answer one might give when asked why we should tolerate state dependence on the part of the rich, but not of the poor: the rich earn the benefits they accrue from the state, while the poor get something for nothing. Sure, the rich might have needed the state’s help to get rich, but they have also had to work for their success; the poor can just sit back and wait for the welfare check to arrive. But this is to ignore the fact that most rich Americans didn’t earn their wealth: they were given it, either directly through inheritance from their parents, or only slightly less directly through their access to elite secondary and higher education. Despite the sustaining myth of American meritocracy, one of the most significant determinants of where a child will end up on the socioeconomic ladder is which rung his or her parents occupied. (This reminds me of a story I heard from a fellow philosopher, Jason Stanley, about a guy he met in a bar, who explained that he had lost his job in the economic downturn, but that he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and re-launched his career as an entrepreneur. If he could do it, he said, anyone could. It turned out that he got his start-up capital from his father, a venture capitalist.) While middle-class and rich children no doubt have to burn the midnight oil to get into Harvard and Yale, they mostly end up at those places because of the huge advantages that wealth confers in the context of a failing public education system. Liberals and conservatives alike pin their hopes on education as the “great leveler,” but the data tells us that the American education system magnifies the advantages of wealth and the disadvantages of poverty. The unearned advantages enjoyed by the children of rich parents dwarf the sums given to welfare recipients.

To claim that the rich earn what they have also ignores the fact that most of the people who depend on social services do work — only they work for their poverty rather than their wealth. Many of them depend on the state because the jobs available to them — the ones produced by the much-vaunted job creators — don’t pay enough to allow them to live. Thus welfare payments to the poor effectively operate as yet another kind of corporate subsidy, making up for the difference between the increasing cost of living and declining real wages. California taxpayers alone pay $86 million dollars annually to subsidize Walmart via state assistance to its employees and their children.

America’s socioeconomic elite has been successful in part because it has been allowed to get away with the argument that its success has nothing to do with the state: with a little elbow grease, the rich seem to say, the poor can be just like them. And the poor may all be too ready to agree. “Socialism never took root in America,” John Steinbeck said, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” It’s a myth dear to the American psyche, the myth that Obama tried to pierce when he insisted that “you didn’t build that.” And while Obama might have retained the presidency, Romney and his ideological comrades have won, it seems, the long fight against “state dependence.”

The tax bill passed by Congress just in time to avert the “fiscal cliff,” making the Bush tax cuts permanent for households under the $450,000 threshold, will cost the government $3.6 trillion over the next decade, as compared with the $4.5 trillion it would have cost if the Bush tax cuts had stayed in place. That isn’t a lot in savings — and isn’t enough to allow the government to continue funding social services at current levels. In the short term, America’s rich, those earning above $450,000, will see their tax bills increase. But in the long term, it’s America’s poor who will be paying. Under the terms of the latest deal, the poor will enjoy a temporary extension on refundable tax credits; at the same time, the Bush-era estate tax cut, which will cost about $375 billion over the next decade as compared with the Clinton-era estate tax policy and will benefit only millionaires and their children, was made permanent. Now the once unthinkable sequester will almost surely go into effect on March 1, bringing $85 billion in budget cuts. The Democrats are scrambling to replace some of the most drastic of those spending cuts – to primary and secondary education, vaccination programs, medical research and environmental protection – with increased taxes on the rich, but the Republicans aren’t budging. The sequester will almost certainly come into force by the end of this week, and is estimated to cost 700,000 jobs. Meanwhile, of the 47 percent that Romney lambasted for not paying taxes and scrounging off the state, 7,000 are millionaires.

We are all dependents of the state, not just the poor, and it’s certainly not the poor who benefit most from their dependence. The question isn’t who is dependent on the state, but whether the current political settlement treats everyone with fairness and dignity: whether the odds are stacked in particular people’s favor, whether some are able to prosper only at the expense of others, whether everyone has an equal opportunity to make a decent human life. That we may not like the answers to these questions is the very reason we should ask them.


-- Amia Srinivasan, "Dependents of the State," New York Times' Opinionator blog, 2/26/2013.

"The Tryhards" by Freddie deBoer

The Tryhards

These are tough days for the liberal imagination.

The election of Barack Obama was, for many conventional progressives, the culmination of a long, hard walk through the valley of politics as usual;  the years since, a lesson in the limits of what politics as usual can do for the left-wing cause. If today’s liberals are defined equally by the directness of their moral convictions and the circuitousness of their incrementalist tactics, the Obama candidacy was a perfect summation of the two: Candidate Obama used the soaring rhetoric of radical reform to express a vision safely within the confines of mainstream politics. Marrying the rhetoric of revolution to the platform of moderation is no novelty, but the Obama campaign melded them in a way that deftly played on both the ambition and defensive caution of the American left. And he won.

But being elected and governing are two separate challenges. Even the most dedicated supporters of the Obama administration would admit that his first term has been a difficult slog. The problem with revolutionary rhetoric is that your supporters become disillusioned by your results; the problem with conventional platforms is that our convention is corruption and failure. In the wilderness of political exile, the two conflicting impulses of revolution and incrementalism could coalesce without problem, but with the Democratic party in power, their fundamental tension threatens to drive the coalition apart. Nothing is likely to satisfy the revolutionaries; nothing is likely to calm the anxieties of the incrementalists.

But perhaps this disappointment represents opportunity. More than ever, conventional American progressives are pondering ideas previously considered radical and unseemly: universal basic income, support (albeit tepid) for street protests like Occupy, and frank discussion of the plain fact that America’s democracy has been captured by the wealthy. The humanitarian disaster of the continuing economic doldrums and the structural threat of permanent American decline has finally led the cautious to contemplate more thoroughgoing change. Increasingly, the question that animates American politics is not “What is to be done?” but “Who will decide what is to be done, and how will they be empowered to do it?”

The fundamental questions, then, are not matters of policy but of process. Who will lead? And from what will their legitimacy stem? Extremists on both sides speak bitterly of a conspiracy at the top, a concert of elites designed to rob and marginalize the common man. Such talk invites critique of the firmament of our system—how we choose our ruling class. If those who posit American plutocracy (as I do and must) are to produce an alternative, we must identify the root causes; our system of reward and empowerment must undergo an autopsy. Who killed our egalitarian dream?

It’s this question that one of America’s most prominent and principled liberals has recently pondered. Christopher Hayes, a longtime writer for the Nation and, more recently, a weekend morning host on MSNBC, has in his book Twilight of the Elites indicted our system of personal, financial, professional, and political advancement. Hayes writes of a culture suffering from its fanatical embrace of a terribly misconceived system of personal advancement and power relations. Meritocracy, a kludgy term for a kludgy purpose — defending aristocratic privilege under the cloak of human fairness — is coming undone. It is defined, in the idiom of cheery fantasy that composes much of our national conversation, as rule by the best. It is marked these days by its tendency to produce the worst. Our betters are failing us, and loudly. Hayes wants to find out why.

It’s an important story and typically well-told, yet the book is a curious, kludgy affair, one that finds its arguments in constant struggle with one another. Hayes looks out at a burning house and with true moral conviction and unsparing vision, describes it. He then proposes solutions that amount to washing the windows while the building is engulfed in flames. He is, in other words, a thoroughly conventional American liberal: all Karl Marx in description, all Tom Daschle in prescription.

Early in Twilight of the Elites, Hayes claims that there are two principal assumptions of the meritocratic ideal: that people are substantially different in their inherent talents, and that those with the most talent deserve to enjoy both more power and more money. The first is an empirical claim, and the second a normative claim. The popularity of meritocracy suggests that most assume that the second claim follows from the first, but Hayes argues that both are unhelpful or unfair.

The tension in Twilight of the Elites lies in Hayes’s uncomfortable relationship with the ideals and institutions of meritocracy, the churning machinery of status in America that speeds dead-eyed tryhards to their lives of influential, well-remunerated spiritual death. When discussing the current state of meritocracy, it’s necessary to separate three lines of inquiry: Are we meritocratic? Should we be? Can we be? At its best, Twilight of the Elites acknowledges that these three questions are different and separates them, but at other times, Hayes’s method is less sure, and the basic argument becomes confused. Though he assails meritocracy, he can’t help but reveal a certain anthropological longing, a romance for the rule of a benevolent elite.

The book struggles with the question of whether meritocratic ideals and institutions are failing because they have been disrupted or undermined, or because they were poorly conceived to begin with. At times, he’s caustic about even the hypothetical meritocracy that could establish perfect equity between what one deserves and what one receives. At other times, he’s almost naïve in his depiction of “good” meritocracy.

Twilight of the Elites is a good example of a nonfiction book written in the shadow of the blogosphere, by an author who operates in a media landscape that assumes near-instantaneous access to information. The problem is one of prerequisite knowledge. Hayes’s main argument is interesting and novel, but to construct it he is forced to retell stories most of his audience knows by heart: the subprime mortgage fiasco, the Iraq war disaster, the fraud at Enron. When telling the particular story he wants to tell, Hayes is assured and concise; when he is retelling tales he knows his readers already know, he is less so. The book is brief, yet a considerable portion is devoted to telling stories few in the likely audience need to be told.

Hayes’s audience, we can surmise, is in large measure that species of connected media obsessive to which I belong, fattened on an informational diet of blog posts, Twitter, long-form magazine articles, cable news, podcasts, Charlie Rose. To suggest that this condition engenders knowingness rather than knowledge is cliché; I would merely point out that most of Hayes’s readership will skim his talk of financial crises and steroids in baseball the way one gazes over the summarizing in a TV recap.

That is not say the time is wasted. Familiarity, Hayes seems to fear, has bred complacency, so he takes it upon himself to recount these stories with alarm, so as to rattle readers. His effort is powerful. For example, most of us are aware, in a vague way, that the U.S. political system is full of the fabulously wealthy, to pick one example. But Hayes lays out in great detail the degree of this problem, and the cozy relationships between corporations and Congressmen, government officials, and the Obama administration. The effect is frightening, even for the jaded.

But the need to scare readers leads Twilight of the Elites to frequently tell too simple a story about advantage and ability. In media appearances to promote the book, Hayes has often told the story of his elite public high school, a tale that opens Twilight’s main argument. At Hunter College High School in New York, students are selected from all five boroughs based on two high-stakes entrance exams and nothing else. There is, according to Hayes, no preferential treatment for the rich or powerful; he claims that Michael Bloomberg’s children would have no better chance of getting into Hunter than your child or mine.

So Hunter is supposed to be a gleaming symbol of the meritocracy: Entrance is based entirely on your intellectual aptitude, provided we accept the dubious notion that the entrance exam is a valid and reliable assessment tool for intelligence. And in its history, Hunter has indeed attracted an impressive diversity of students in terms of race, ethnicity, and economic class. But Hayes claims that this onetime haven of equal opportunity has been corrupted by the rise of the for-profit test-preparation industry, which offers New York City parents the opportunity to spend vast sums to better their children’s odds of getting in to Hunter. Meritocracy subverted.

Hayes likes the simplicity and narrative power of this story, but in constantly casting blame on the test-prep industry—the Princeton Review, Kaplan, sundry smaller companies— he finds a specific and obvious culprit for inequality when the real culprits are multiple, vague, and diffuse. Educational outcomes are dictated by a vast number of factors uncontrollable by students, parents, or educators, and the lines are never as bright as “took a test prep class/didn’t.” If it’s anything like the SAT and most other standardized tests, the Hunter exam is undermined by sociocultural factors that condition our metrics for intelligence.

The students who take Hunter’s exam — students like the young Chris Hayes — are constrained by sociocultural conditions that they have absolutely no control over. Rich students enjoy significant and measurable advantages over poor ones even when they have not received formal test-prep training. In my own field, writing and literacy education, we know that consistent early exposure to syntactically rich language, oral and written, is essential for later literacy tasks and academic performance. But the levers to create those conditions are hard to push, because “early” here means very early, with the critical period (if indeed it exists) beginning perhaps as early as six months, with some researchers claiming that the most important period for later literacy ends as early as 30 to 36 months, well before children begin formal schooling. Since syntactic maturity tends to be heritable from one generation to the next (through behavior, not genetics), in many cases the parents had essentially no control over what they bequeath to their children. Given these buffeting forces, how could such a test be considered “fair”?

To put it simply, the Hunter system never was “purely meritocratic,” even before the test-prep industry. Where Hayes suggests a new and different kind of subversion, I see simply a particularly obvious version of a common, even ubiquitous form: the replication of educational and intellectual advantage from one generation to the next. Hayes’s digestible narrative risks obscuring the complexity of inherited disadvantage and thus increasing the difficulty of combating it.

It’s not that I think Hayes is unaware of this or is naive about how disadvantage persists generationally. But often he lapses into a false nostalgia for a fairer past. The reality is that meritocracy has never existed in anything like the theoretical form that people in America believe in, and there’s no use sugarcoating the achievement systems of the past.



***

As Hayes points out, we believe in meritocracy because we must. We have no vocabulary for what might possibly replace it. The normative eats the empirical: Faced with evidence that points to an unthinkable rejection of a cherished set of norms, the evidence is ignored, denigrated, or suppressed.

A similar mechanism is at play in our discussions of education. A vast discourse about our education system exists, but remarkably little of it considers an elementary facet: the possibility of failure. Our education discussions exist in a strange theoretical world, one lacking the basic adult recognition that failure is always an option, that we often must sort between least bad options, and that human ambitions are constrained by the rational. Across the broad landscape of the education debate, commentators from across political aisles and intellectual divides agree to speak and reason as if educational outcomes are constrained only by our national will.

In a discussion of gaming ostensibly meritocratic systems, Hayes mentions the widespread cheating scandals, such as those in Washington D.C. and Atlanta, arguing that cheating generally flourishes under two conditions: when people lack the ethical foundations and socialization that would preclude them from cheating, and when there are no systems in place to discourage cheating and encourage honesty. But it seems to me that there’s a third condition: when the goals people are expected to meet can be accomplished in no other way.

Reformers such as Michelle Rhee use the rhetoric of harsh accountability and sweeping change in service of a privatization movement that hopes to wring profit out of nonprofit public schools, asking teachers to achieve what is impossible given the parental, sociocultural, economic, and (yes) genetic factors that contribute to our reductive conceptions of education and intelligence. The penalty for teachers if they fail to meet these impossible standards is lower pay or firing. Under such conditions, cheating is not merely understandable; it is inevitable.

The connection between these cheating scandals and the broader mechanism of our system of social and economic advancement is neither minor nor idle. It speaks to the grand delusion contemporary liberals, conservatives, and libertarians all share, that through time, a “quality” education, and good old American can-do, all people can be raised to a certain level of performance captured in our crude educational metrics.

Why this delusion? Because our system now depends on the idea that children are universally capable of being educated to certain necessary levels to benefit our economy. Globalization and neoliberalism — the basic economic consensus of policy elites — destroyed working-class jobs and incomes and sparked a furious attack on labor’s ability to unionize and collectively bargain for better conditions. Yet the neoliberal policy apparatus still needs a mechanism to improve wages for those at the bottom, in part to improve their living conditions and in part because the economy requires them to be consumers as well as producers. Having cut the legs out from underneath the traditional mechanisms of social mobility for uneducated Americans, the necessary step becomes plain: educate all of them. Questions about whether everyone can be educated to the necessary level cannot be countenanced, to say nothing of whether this system breeds zero-sum competition for limited “skilled” jobs.

Our vexed arguments about education reform stem from our refusal to acknowledge that we are constrained by reality, regardless of the needs of our economic system. But what drives that system in the first place? Why have we decided that there is no such thing as enough prosperity, enough money, enough stuff? Hayes refers to C.S. Lewis’s concept of the inner ring, the feeling that, as we come closer and closer to social or economic success, there is always another, more exclusive group that finds us unworthy. Lewis said it was like cutting into an onion: rings all the way down. Hayes echoes Lewis in saying that this phenomenon makes corruption inevitable. As long as there is one more level to climb, there will be striving, and as long as there is striving, there will be cheating and rationalization. The inner ring, Lewis argued, tantalizes more the closer one seems to get, but never permits a feeling of true accomplishment. Hayes asks, “What is the meritocracy if not an endless series of inner rings?”

But then, what is capitalism, if not the same? Hayes recognizes this clearly: “Because competition is the central engine in the model of both the meritocratic and capitalist achievement, affection for it and acclimation to its spiritual and psychological demands are inculcated from a young age. To be successful, one must never be satisfied, and so one never is.” Yet rather than draw the natural conclusion that this produces spiritual death and a culture of omnipresent anxiety, Hayes marries this accurate criticism of capitalism to a moderate, capitalism-sustaining set of policy proposals.

Liberal critiques like Twilight of the Elites inevitably lead to the elementary failures of the capitalist model, but the professional political commentator’s first axiom is that alternatives to capitalism are beyond the realms of acceptable discussion. Still living in the supposed bad old days of ‘70s-era radicalism, liberals forever fear a new Reagan revolution, forever blame their failings on the quasi-mythical old guard of Stalinists and boutique anticapitalism. Liberal commentators are thus haunted by specters, compelled by reality to perceive radical failure but constrained from presenting a response sufficiently radical to meet this failure. Chris Hayes is about as far to the left as a prominent politico can be; that he has nationally televised news show is something of a miracle, in the best sense. Yet his prescriptions for solving the massive problems he identifies in the book are the typical incrementalism that has constrained the American left for over 30 years.

Therefore I find the book’s diagnosis of the ailment more convincing than its recommended cure. Hayes speaks of balancing fundamental trust of authority with undermining it, of redistributing our way to a more just and equal world, of repairing the social fabric by making it more horizontal, of creating a culture that stops treating intelligence as the only criterion for human quality. Do I disagree with these ideas? I do not. Are they remotely sufficient to solve the problems Hayes has described? No.

More troubling is the sense that Hayes, while quite critical of his class, is not quite willing to let authority go. He advocates for a newly radicalized upper-middle class, playing on fantasies I’ve encountered among dissatisfied Ivy League graduates that they will lead a great proletarian vanguard against the system. It is a cruel trick to embed in a book with such anti-elite convictions the argument that only the slightly-less-elite elite can lead. The upper-middle class, according to Hayes, “feels most keenly the sense of betrayal, injustice, and dissolution that the Crisis of Authority has ushered in.” I can only say, with respect, Go fuck yourself. The upper-middle class is dealing with the loss of assumed privileged and permanent access to power. In this very book, Hayes writes of a major American city that was swallowed by a hurricane, leaving thousands dead and thousands more impoverished and adrift. I will take talk of betrayal and injustice in a far less figurative form.

Perhaps, though, that’s simply the nature of the beast. For while Hayes’s book is about the educated and affluent elite, it is also for them. It flatters their preconceptions and speaks in their idiom. Hayes writes for a class of people who generally believe that most anyone with an opinion has, like them, attended an elite college. But the world is made up of people who haven’t. Even among the college educated, competitive schooling is rare; there are more than 4,000 two- and four-year colleges and universities in the U.S.; perhaps 125 reject more students than they accept. A significant majority accept essentially any students that apply.



***

Hayes writes from rarefied territory. The problem is that people like him enjoy the view, and they are not likely to volunteer to give up their privilege, even if such a thing was possible. (Can you voluntarily surrender your class rank? Many have tried. The result is, typically, vulgar and ugly.) Revolution must come from elsewhere. But if Hayes’s solutions are unsatisfying, what better prescription instead?

Hayes’s nuanced and passionate consideration of his conflicted feelings about meritocracy  represents the book’s greatest strength. There’s no similar conflict for me, though: I reject meritocracy because I reject the idea of human deserts. I don’t believe that an individual’s material conditions should be determined by what he or she “deserves,” no matter the criteria and regardless of the accuracy of the system contrived to measure it. I believe an equal best should be done for all people at all times.

More practically, I believe that anything resembling an accurate assessment of what someone deserves is impossible, inevitably drowned in a sea of confounding variables, entrenched advantage, genetic and physiological tendencies, parental influence, peer effects, random chance,  and the conditions under which a person labors. To reflect on the immateriality of human deserts is not a denial of choice; it is a denial of self-determination. Reality is indifferent to meritocracy’s perceived need to “give people what they deserve.”

For this and other reasons, my desire is to live beyond reciprocity, to escape the notion of trade and equality in effort and reward. Though rarely entertained by the ranks of the “serious,” it is a natural extension of the elementary morality that so many share and is entirely inimical to meritocracy, real or imagined. I find the concept of equality of opportunity morally insufficient, ideologically confused, and worst of all, unattainable given the fog of limited human perspective. How would we know equality of opportunity when we’ve reached it? Though distinguishable in theory, in practice there is no distinction possible between ability, effort, and circumstance, and without it equality of opportunity is impossible. Any such easy, romantic belief falls to pieces with the barest reference to empiricism, to the scramble of real life. Meritocracy is oligarchic society’s ongoing excuse.

The only alternative to an oligarchic society then is a radical leveling, a forever jubilee. The details of this become irrelevant if the outcome is assured: no false diversity in resources or power, only the teeming difference of all things human. No notion of human deserts, no thoughts of reciprocity, no assumption that exchange is beneficial or proper, no anachronistic concept that one can justify one’s conditions through reference to their behavior. And the leveling must be enforced by all means necessary. Today’s liberals love to debate regulation against redistribution. When you’re facing a man with a loaded gun, what’s the difference?

I think again of Hayes’s contention that it will take the upper-middle class — people like him — to solve our crisis. “The most militant and effective political mobilizations of our last decade were, for the most part, upper-middle-class uprisings…. They gained their momentum from specific class origins.” Those capable of reforming the system, to Hayes, are only those within it, and to them, abandoning it must seem an act of sociopathy. I can think only of what a profound convenience this is for Hayes, as he wanders the halls of elite media power. He might think of himself as a lefty with a word processor. But when you regularly step in front of a television camera at a national network, you are in rarefied territory, indeed.

The reification of privilege and power in the transition from Exeter to Harvard to Goldman Sachs is gross, obvious. The kind transferred over beers and jokes is another level of danger altogether. The social transfer of influence — and with it, the promise of remuneration and power — is seductive, natural, and ubiquitous. It is practiced by this very publication and its marketing.

We must dismantle not just the existing spheres of influence and also their reason for being. The effort is impossible but simple: dismantle all the relationships that causes us to hand out and to seek favor, erase the notion of what is owed, render farcical the very idea of acknowledgments. An idealistic notion, yes, but I am just cynical enough to point out that this book of elite-bashing contains a pages-long acknowledgments section where Hayes pays due deference to a murderer’s row of wealthy, connected elitists. With each person he thanks, I can see the invisible lattice of patronage and nepotism, so archly dissected in the main text, spiral out and off the page.


-- Freddie deBoer, "The Tryhards," The New Inquiry, 8/31/2012.

Essay, "The Dispossessed" by William Deresiewicz

The Dispossessed

Sometimes you don't realize that something's been missing—it doesn't matter how big it is—until, for a moment or two, it isn't. This was about ten years ago: I was listening to an interview with the choreographer Bill T. Jones, who had just published his memoirs. Jones is gay and black, and when the interviewer asked him what his father had thought about his becoming a dancer, Jones, somewhat testily, said something like this: "You don't understand. This wasn't a middle-class family. The goal wasn't to become a professional: the goal was to better yourself." The first thing that hit me about this was that it had nothing to do with race or sexuality. The second thing that hit me was that it had everything to do with class, specifically the working class—which, I suddenly realized, I never heard anyone talk about. A little while later, I read a profile of Roseanne Barr in the New Yorker. Only middle-class women care about feminism, Barr claimed. Working-class women already have power, because they're the ones in charge at home.

Working-class career expectations, working-class family structures: two things, it struck me, I knew nothing about. Each revelation gratified me with the feeling of learning something interesting and important and new, but together they enraged me with the recognition that the reason they felt new, the reason I was so abysmally ignorant about this world that lay all around me—the American working class—was that such knowledge had been withheld from me by my culture. It's not just that I'm middle-class myself. I'm white, too, but mainstream culture (popular entertainment, the news media) has exposed me to a steady stream of images and information about blacks. I suspect that American gentiles also know quite a lot about Jews. But the working class is American culture's great lost continent.

There are exceptions: Roseanne’s show was one, Michael Moore's Roger and Me (as well as the whole persona he's constructed) is another, as was the recent HBO series Family Bonds. But the very fact that much of what was seen as important and "edgy" about those productions was their working-class subject matter shows how rare any serious, extended, or sympathetic popular treatment of the working class now is. (Analogous things could be said about Bruce Springsteen, or novelists like Richard Russo and Russell Banks, or the New York Times' recent multi-part series on class in America. Imagine how superfluous it would have been for the Times to do a series about race or sexuality, topics that permeate half the stories it publishes.) Among mainstream films of the last decade, Mystic River and Good Will Hunting come to mind, but far more typical is the kind of thing we got in Million Dollar Baby, where the heroine's family was presented as loutish, contemptible trailer trash, or on the Simpsons, where Homer's working-class characteristics (and he seems to be the working-class breadwinner of a middle-class family) are played strictly for laughs. There are working-class characters all over the place: cops on detective shows, nurses and orderlies on doctor shows, and so forth. But it's the nature of such dramas to present people only in terms of their jobs, asking few or no questions about their lives as such. Look at a show or movie that takes you into its characters' homes, and you'll find that the homes you're being taken into are almost always middle or upper class, even when the characters belong to that vast, imaginary social group we might call the pseudo-working-class, people with working-class jobs but middle-class lifestyles, like the Simpsons or the Gilmore Girls or those lucky kids on Friends.

What we don't have in this country, in other words, is anyone like Mike Leigh, who makes art out of working-class lives by refusing to prettify them. We no longer have anyone, among our major novelists, like Steinbeck or Dos Passos. We don't even have anything like the Honeymooners or All in the Family, whose frank depictions of the material conditions of working-class life (think of the Kramdens' kitchen, with its bridge table and two chairs) didn't prevent them from achieving a monumental universality. When we do get the rare serious mainstream treatment of working-class life, it comes from a middle-class observer like Barbara Ehrenreich. So why is it that the only working-class person anyone will pay attention to these days is a middle-class journalist masquerading as one? More fundamentally, why is it that the working class is treated as an exotic species, while the middle class, which it heavily outnumbers, is regarded as normal, and normative?

It's not hard to begin to answer these questions. First, the people who get paid to create mainstream culture—journalists, editors, writers, producers—are, ipso facto, members of the middle class. As social mobility slows, more and more of them also originate in that class. The middle class is not only what they know and identify with, it often seems to be the only thing they're aware of. Today’s army of cultural commentators, who speak so confidently about the way "we" live now—the crazy hours, the overscheduled kids, the elite colleges and nursery schools—mistake their tiny world of urban and university-town professionals for the whole of society. Second, as TV's creation of a pseudo-working-class suggests, looking at the real one is just, like, kind of a bummer. Just as everyone on TV has to be beautiful now, so does everyone have to have money, or at least live like they do. Nobody wants to watch a show about some fat guy struggling to make the rent. Finally and most importantly, we simply don't talk about class at all anymore. Why should we, when we're all supposedly part of a single one, the great middle? What we talk about is race and sexuality. (Or in the academy, race, gender, and sexuality, the great triumvirate. The humanities, despite their claim to transformative significance, have all but forgotten about class.) Instead of Steinbeck and Dos Passos, we have Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Oscar Hijuelos, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Michael Cunningham.

It was Morrison, in fact, who provided one of the most telling indications of our loss of the working class as an imaginative category, her famous anointment of Bill Clinton as our "first black president": "Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." At least Morrison still employs the term "working-class," but it's still merely a secondary category for her. If it weren't, she would have seen that what those attributes really added up to wasn't that Clinton was black (or "black"), but that he was our first working-class president, if not ever, then in a while, and our most flamboyantly so in a long while. But of course working-class attributes are going to look like tropes of blackness. Just about the only images we have of the working-class are images of black people, understood as black people. In fact, many of the things we think of as characteristically black are really true of the working class as a whole (and aren't true of middle-class blacks). To take only the realm of family structure: having children at an early age, having them outside of marriage, raising them on your own, raising them with the help of an older relative—and not being stigmatized by your community for doing any of these things. It's an old American story: race becomes a surrogate for class, which is to say, a way of not thinking about it at all.

On the rare occasions when we do think about class, our fixation on race also makes us confuse the working class with the poor, as the response to the Katrina disaster demonstrated. For an interval that proved predictably brief, Americans started talking about class again, but we still missed the true picture. For one thing, our discussion of poverty was all too quickly subsumed, again, into a discussion about race. (It's funny how few images we saw of poor, dispossessed whites, though many such people must have existed.) More importantly, most of the blacks we saw wandering the highways or abandoned at the Convention Center were surely not the truly indigent (the homeless, the unemployed), they were laborers and waitresses and hospital workers and maids, members of New Orleans' socially cohesive and culturally vibrant working-class black communities. These are the same communities that are now struggling for the right to rebuild themselves, struggling to get the rest of us to acknowledge that they were more than just slums. The people who comprised them may have looked dirty and disheveled on TV, and some of them may have acted desperately at times, but how would you have looked, and how would you have acted, after four or five days in those circumstances? Yet so deeply has the notion of a working class been pushed to the recesses of our consciousness, and so powerful is the link in our minds between poverty and race, that when we're shown a working-class black, we see a poor person—and when we're shown a working-class white, we don't see anything at all.

What is the working class? To a first approximation, I'd suggest, a member of the working class is someone who receives an hourly wage. (There are exceptions both ways: airline pilots on the one hand, secretaries on the other.) The virtue of this definition is that it not only excludes the true middle class—professionals, managers, and small-business owners—it also reminds us that working-class people have a very different relationship to their work and their workplace than do those who earn a salary. By this criterion, the working class comprises about 80% of the American workforce. Even if one claims that the cop or firemen or unionized factory worker, who might well live in the suburbs and drive a big car, actually belongs to the middle class, the working class still comprises a large majority of the country. (Besides, as Paul Krugman recently argued in a column on the wage-and-benefit squeeze in the auto industry, a lot of those factory workers—the "working middle-class"—will find themselves squarely back in the working class soon anyway.) The poor may literally be "invisible in America," as the subtitle of David K. Shipler's recent book puts it, out of sight in the human garbage heaps of ghettos and trailer parks, but the great bulk of the working class—which is to say, most of America—is invisible only because "we" aren't seeing what's right in front of our faces: the people who serve our food, ring up our purchases, fix our cars, change our bedpans.

It's as if the vast space between the poor and the middle-class didn't exist. The term "working-class" has been erased from our political discourse, replaced by “working poor” and the insidious "working families." “Working poor” is a valuable term, because it reminds us how meagerly many jobs pay these days and belies the notion of what used to be called the "idle poor." But “working poor” is not at all the same as "working-class," though the trailer-trash stereotype would have us think so. Some working-class people are poor, but the great majority are not, they just aren't well enough off to be middle-class. "Working families" isn't the same as "working-class," either. Whether in the mouth of a Clinton or a Bush, the term is designed to treat the working and middle classes as a monolith. By conflating the two (the doctor struggling to pay for his kids to go to Harvard, the cashier struggling to pay for medicine), it eliminates the working class as a political as well as a cultural category.

But class hasn't completely dropped out of our political discourse. In fact, it's made a comeback of late, only in a particularly devious new guise, our new ruling paradigm of red state vs. blue state—where ideology is rewritten as region (Republicans are from red states, Democrats from blue), region as culture (red-staters drink beer, blue-staters drink wine), and culture as class, though only implicitly (what do you think "beer" and "wine" really mean?). Fifty-seven million people voted for John Kerry in the last election; to speak as if all of them were Chardonnay-sipping professors, or even professionals, is ridiculous. Simple arithmetic tells us that millions of them were members of the working class. But according to the dominant syllogism, if Kerry voters are effete elitists while Bush voters are "ordinary Americans" (the closest anyone comes to actually saying "working class" anymore) then the working class looks like the stereotypical Bush voter: rural, Southern, conservative, nationalist, and fundamentalist—in other words, redneck. This is as gross an oversimplification as imagining that the middle class is composed exclusively of leftist academics. But absent any other or better images of the working class, the redneck myth not only means that Republicans get to present themselves as champions of the working class while ostensibly denying its existence, as Thomas Frank has argued, it also means the true character of the working class, in all its enormous breadth and diversity, remains hidden.

It remains hidden, in particular, from the working class itself, among whom the redneck myth does in fact seem to be taking hold. I lived in Portland, Oregon, last year, a heavily working-class town, and I was struck by the affinity the working class there seems to feel with Southern culture. (Country Music Television, for example, is part of the basic cable package.) The South is the one place where the white working class doesn't hide itself, as Richard Rodriguez recently noted, and its leading cultural expressions—country music and Nascar—are becoming those of the white working class as a whole. This Southernization of the working class surely owes a lot to the red-state/blue-state nonsense, to the ascendancy of Southern Republicans, and to the scarcity of other kinds of working-class images. But is also owes a lot to the decline of organized labor. I've suggested that working-class images haven't always been so hard to find in the mainstream, and it's no accident that their virtual disappearance over the past few decades has coincided with that decline. Fifty years ago, more than one in three American workers were unionized; today, one in eight is. Along with a huge loss in political power has come the loss of a confident, self-conscious working-class culture. Not only were workers visible to the classes above them, they had their own voices, their own cultural institutions, their own sense of who they were and what they did; in short, they weren't dependent on the middle class to define them. People used to speak of the "dignity of labor," and the phrase meant that being a worker was something to be proud of, that the working class saw itself as something more than a collection of people who couldn't make it, that it had its own traditions and values, constituted its own community.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the working class in the ten years since those inciting recognitions. I've kept my eyes open to whatever I could glean from the media and, more importantly, from my immediate surroundings, and I've had long talks on the subject with my wife, who spent many years in a working-class environment, and with a former student, who grew up in one. I've come to believe not only that the working class constitutes a coherent culture very different from the middle-class one that's presented to us as natural and universal, but that that culture possesses a genuine set of virtues. David Brooks has been singing the praises lately of bourgeois values like industry, temperance, prudence, and thrift. I have nothing against industry, temperance, prudence, and thrift, especially since, as a member of the middle class, I practice them myself. But industry, temperance, prudence, and thrift are not the be-all and end-all of the good life. In fact, they are apt to be accompanied by a countervailing array of bourgeois vices, like narrowness, prudery, timidity, and meanness, not to mention hypocrisy and self-conceit.

As for the working class, I'll grant, for the sake of argument, that its vices tend to be the negative of bourgeois values, that working-class people are, compared to the middle class, less temperate, prudent, thrifty, and industrious (though that last seems a rather unfair description of people who do manual labor, work two jobs, or put up with forced overtime). But by the same token, working-class life breeds its own virtues: loyalty, community, stoicism, humility, and even tolerance. Not that every working-class person is a paragon of these virtues; like Brooks, I'm trying to articulate the general contours of a class culture as it arises from the facts of everyday existence. If only because of their limited possibilities in life, working-class people care more about their families and their friends and the places they're from than they do about their careers. Because they haven't been taught to believe that they're entitled to the best of everything, they take what life brings them without whining or self-pity. Because they don't preen themselves on where they went to school or what kind of job they have, they don't act like they're better than everyone else. And when it comes right down to it, they aren't any more prejudiced than the middle class, and may even be less so. Middle-class prejudices are just more respectable—in fact, they tend to be directed against the working class itself—as well as more carefully concealed. What's more, while the middle class espouses tolerance, working-class people, because they can't simply insulate themselves from people they don't like with wads of money, are much more likely, in practice, to live and let live. Maybe what this country needs are fewer bourgeois values and more proletarian ones.


-- William Deresiewicz, "The Dispossessed," The American Scholar, Winter 2006.

                

Essay, "Pleasure Spots" by George Orwell

Some months ago I cut out of a shiny magazine some paragraphs written by a female journalist and describing the pleasure resort of the future. She had recently been spending some time at Honolulu, where the rigours of war do not seem to have been very noticeable. However, "a transport pilot...told me that with all the inventiveness packed into this war, it was a pity someone hadn't found out how a tired and lifehungry man could relax, rest, play poker, drink, and make love, all at once, and round the clock, and come out of it feeling good and fresh and ready for the job again." This reminded her of an entrepreneur she had met recently who was planning a "pleasure spot which he thinks will catch on tomorrow as dog racing and dance halls did yesterday." The entrepreneur's dream is described in some detail:

His blue-prints pictured a space covering several acres, under a series of sliding roofs--for the British weather is unreliable--and with a central space spread over with an immense dance floor made of translucent plastic which can be illuminated from beneath. Around it are grouped other functional spaces, at different levels. Balcony bars and restaurants commanding high views of the city roofs, and ground-level replicas. A battery of skittle alleys. Two blue lagoons: one, periodically agitated by waves, for strong swimmers, and another, a smooth and summery pool, for playtime bathers. Sunlight lamps over the pools to simulate high summer on days when the roofs don't slide back to disclose a hot sun in a cloudless sky. Rows of bunks on which people wearing sun-glasses and slips can lie and start a tan or deepen an existing one under a sunray lamp.

Music seeping through hundreds of grills connected with a central distributing stage, where dance or symphonic orchestras play or the radio programme can be caught, amplified, and disseminated. Outside, two 1,000-car parks. One, free. The other, an open-air cinema drive-in, cars queueing to move through turnstiles, and the film thrown on a giant screen facing a row of assembled cars. Uniformed male attendants check the cars, provide free aid and water, sell petrol and oil. Girls in white satin slacks take orders for buffet dishes and drinks, and bring them on trays.

Whenever one hears such phrases as "pleasure spot", "pleasure resort", "pleasure city", it is difficult not to remember the oftenquoted opening of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan".

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But it will be seen that Coleridge has got it all wrong. He strikes a false note straight off with that talk about "sacred" rivers and "measureless" caverns. In the hands of the above-mentioned entrepreneur, Kubla Khan's project would have become something quite different. The caverns, air-conditioned, discreetly lighted and with their original rocky interior buried under layers of tastefully-coloured plastics, would be turned into a series of tea-grottoes in the Moorish, Caucasian or Hawaiian styles. Alph, the sacred river, would be dammed up to make an artificially-warmed bathing pool, while the sunless sea would be illuminated from below with pink electric lights, and one would cruise over it in real Venetian gondolas each equipped with its own radio set. The forests and "spots of greenery" referred to by Coleridge would be cleaned up to make way for glass-covered tennis courts, a bandstand, a roller-skating rink and perhaps a ninehole golf course. In short, there would be everything that a "lifehungry" man could desire.

I have no doubt that, all over the world, hundreds of pleasure resorts similar to the one described above are now being planned, and perhaps are even being built. It is unlikely that they will be finished-- world events will see to that -- but they represent faithfully enough the modern civilised man's idea of pleasure. Something of the kind is already partially attained in the more magnificent dance halls, movie palaces, hotels, restaurants and luxury liners. On a pleasure cruise or in a Lyons Corner House one already gets something more than a glimpse of this future paradise. Analysed, its main characteristics are these:

1. One is never alone.
2. One never does anything for oneself.
3. One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
4. Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
5. One is never out of the sound of music.

The music -- and if possible it should be the same music for everybody -- is the most important ingredient. Its function is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio is already consciously used for this purpose by innumerable people. In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. For

The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.

It is difficult not to feel that the unconscious aim in the most typical modern pleasure resorts is a return to the womb. For there, too, one was never alone, one never saw daylight, the temperature was always regulated, one did not have to worry about work or food, and one's thoughts, if any, were drowned by a continuous rhythmic throbbing.

When one looks at Coleridge's very different conception of a "pleasure dome", one sees that it revolves partly round gardens and partly round caverns, rivers, forests and mountains with "deep romantic chasms"-- in short, round what is called Nature. But the whole notion of admiring Nature, and feeling a sort of religious awe in the presence of glaciers, deserts or waterfalls, is bound up with the sense of man's littleness and weakness against the power of the universe. The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely. Even the pleasure one takes in a flower -- and this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower -- is dependent partly on the sense of mystery. But meanwhile man's power over Nature is steadily increasing. With the aid of the atomic bomb we could literally move mountains: we could even, so it is said, alter the climate of the earth by melting the polar ice-caps and irrigating the Sahara. Isn't there, therefore, something sentimental and obscurantist in preferring bird-song to swing music and in wanting to leave a few patches of wildness here and there instead of covering the whole surface of the earth with a network of Autobahnen flooded by artificial sunlight?

The question only arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself? one would discover that merely having the power to avoid work and live one's life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude, creative work and the sense of wonder. If he recognised this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human? He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanisation of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions -- in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane -- is to weaken his  consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.


-- George Orwell, "Pleasure Spots," reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1968.

Essay, "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching" by Terry Eagleton

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where he lives.)

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.


-- Terry Eagleton, "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching," review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, London Review of Books, volume 28, no. 20, October 19, 2006, pp. 32-4.