Assholes (22 page)
Authors: Aaron James
Cooperative faith
. A further possibility is that enough of us place our trust not in any particular dampening system but in our fellow cooperators as such. Despite perhaps yawning differences, we hold faith that they, like us, will do what it takes to keep things from completely falling apart. Yet, if this may well work under favorable circumstances, it surely has its limits. When circumstances turn unfavorable, even generalized trust can be shaken, for any of the reasons noted above (e.g., exhaustion, underassurance, rising costs, or unfair burdens). Societies once marked by trust do, after all, fall apart.
We have presented the possibility of decline in general terms. How or to what extent such dampening systems break down will vary from society to society, in part depending on how far entitlement culture has taken hold. I have suggested my sense of where things stand in a few cases (Japan is fine, Italy already qualifies as an asshole capitalist system, and the United States is in trouble). While I have my favored set of policy responses, our present point is more general: the risks to many capitalist societies are grave indeed. And even as constructive and potentially major solutions are urgently needed, there is no ready set of fixes. Much as with asshole management generally, as characterized in
chapter 5
, any degree of success will depend
on both fortunate circumstances and the persistent efforts of cooperative people, made in good faith. The problem of the asshole, in this regard, is thus not simply a problem for capitalism, whether in entitlement-oriented styles or generally. As we will now see in the closing chapter of this book, the problem is, in a basic way, the problem of the human social condition itself.
1
. In general, a
capitalist
society widely relies on markets in the production and distribution of goods and services and in the allocation of capital. Instead of directing investment by centralized decision making, financial markets are trusted to put a society’s savings to its most productive uses in the real economy. This general reliance on markets can take numerous different institutional forms, according to how market outcomes are or are not regulated and according to what values. Our concern is with but one of innumerable ways of striking the market-state balance.
2
. Though Rockefeller was also a great philanthropist. This mitigates against the asshole attitude reflected in his remark “God gave me my money.”
3
. A more careful formulation of this idea is outlined in the Appendix.
4
. Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89.
5
. Jared Diamond,
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(New York: Viking Press, 2005).
6
. Uri Gneezy, “The W Effect of Incentives,” University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, September 8, 2003.
7
. Richard M. Titmuss,
The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1970). For other examples, see Samuel Bowles, “Policies Designed for Self-Interested Citizens May Undermine ‘The Moral Sentiments’: Evidence from Economic Experiments,”
Science
320 (June 2008): 1605–9.
8
. F. A. Hayek,
Individualism and Economic Order
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 11.
9
. Samuel Bowles, “Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition?,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs
39 (2011): 46–81, italics mine. See also pp. 53–57 and Appendix 1 on p. 78. I am greatly indebted to Bowles’s review of the issues and have followed many of his citations.
10
. Daniel Bell,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
(New York: Basic Books, 1976). Similar themes have been sounded by Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, F. A. Hayek, Karl Polanyi, Jürgen Habermas, Fred Hirsch, Joseph A. Schumpeter, and Robert D. Putnam.
11
. Hyman P. Minsky,
Stabilizing an Unstable Economy
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
12
. For the social scientific case against seeing traditional family and culture as paramount, see Bowles, “Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition?”
13
. Which might even be consistent with Max Weber’s famous account of how the Protestant work ethic supports capitalism by treating acquired wealth as a mark of salvation. See
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
14
. As the godfather of neoclassical economics, Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, puts the point, the proper functioning of markets depends on social and moral preferences. “Political and Economic Evaluation of Social Effects and Externalities,” in
Frontiers of Quantitative Economics
, ed. Michael D. Intriligata (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971), 3–23. For a similar point with emphasis on the practices or institutions that embed markets, see sociologist Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).
15
. See John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) and
Political Liberalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
16
. Ron Suskind,
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
(New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 123–24.
17
. Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
, sec. 24.
18
. Hobbes’s reply is in effect that this will not work. David Gauthier’s similar argument in
Morals by Agreement
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) is that people motivated only by self-interest will be unable to deceive others about their self-interested motives and so unable to earn the trust required for mutually beneficial cooperation. They therefore have to actually acquire moral motives in order to advance their overall self-interest. The asshole, by contrast, is morally motivated already.
19
. Rawls calls this the “strains of commitment” in
A Theory of Justice
, sec. 29.
20
. In still different cases, withdrawal may be a form of protest against gross and fundamental unfairness. Tommie Shelby defends this view of ghettoized black Americans in “Justice, Work, and the Ghetto Poor,” in
Law & Ethics of Human Rights
(forthcoming).
21
. Apparently, parents who take orders at work put less value on independence in raising their kids, according to Melvin Kohn et al., “Position in the Class Structure and Psychological Functioning in the U.S., Japan, and Poland,”
American Journal of Sociology
95 (January 1990): 964–1008. The reverse tendency might also hold: parents who give orders at work may put greater value on independence in raising their children.
22
. This theory was advocated (in personal communication) by sixty-five-year-old surfer Bob Montgomery, who pointedly claims that liberals and professors (like me, he notes) undermined spanking practice and thus caused the rise of assholes we see today.
23
. Joel Osteen, pastor of Houston’s Lakewood Church, one of the largest evangelical congregations in the country, goes one step further in his televised sermons, suggesting that if there were, say, two insurance agents in town and one of them committed to Christ while the other did not, then God would sluice more business the Christ guy’s way. Osteen thus harnesses the power of the market in the service of religious entrepreneurialism. Apparently, God doesn’t mind if faith arises from a profit motive.
24
. This happens in some experimental games in which students are asked to contribute to public goods. See Bowles, “Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition?,” 67.
25
. Bowles, “Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition?,” 60.
26
. In numerous experiments, exposure to markets was correlated with and possibly a cause of support for liberal values (see Bowles, “Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition?,” 62–73). In experiments designed to measure a preference for fairness, groups that were more exposed to markets showed a greater generosity than control groups. In other experiments that measured willingness to contribute to public goods, participants from richer countries tended to contribute more for longer than in less market-oriented countries. Willingness to contribute also coincided with societies that scored higher according to measures for the rule of law, democracy, individualism, societal equality, and trust.
27
. George Packer, in “The Empty Chamber: Just How Broken Is the Senate?,” explains: “Like investment bankers on Wall Street, senators these days direct much of their creative energy toward the manipulation of arcane rules and loopholes, scoring short-term successes while magnifying their institution’s broader dysfunction.”
The New Yorker
, August 9, 2010,
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer#ixzz1emqi5el2
.
28
. This is the main idea behind Rawls’s conception of stability in
A Theory of Justice
, sec. 69.
7
]
ACCEPTING THE GIVEN
Assholes are a given fact of life. They are a fact of life we must somehow make peace with if we are to be at peace with life itself.
In one of his last published writings, the late G. A. Cohen, the brilliant and sadly missed political philosopher, begins with the following “Hegelian prelude”:
For me, it is a pregnant moment in the New Testament when Jesus, awaiting his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and foreseeing the toils to come, cries out “Oh, Lord, take away this cup,” but then corrects himself: “but not my will, Lord, thine.” The motif is abandonment of striving, of seeking a better state, and instead going with the flow, as do the lilies of the field, which are at peace with the world, and therefore with themselves.
1
Cohen connects this with Hegel’s obscure claim that “Spirit” achieves freedom when the subject finds itself in its own object, so that “it is home with itself in its own otherness as such.” In plainer language: in accepting what is given, what is just there,
we can, like the lilies of the field, be at peace with our world and so with ourselves.
Given our argument so far, it may easily seem that peace is impossible. Assholes are a given fact of life. They are not only a given part of each human’s condition, in that few of us can wholly avoid interacting with them or expect them to change, but also part of the human condition generally. To different degrees in different eras and places, they are an unavoidable part of social life itself. Any attempt to eliminate them entirely would either fail or amount to tyranny.
2
But we have also said that assholes are unacceptable. We can’t, or shouldn’t, accept the way they treat us, even if we could get used to it. And we can’t, or shouldn’t, accept their destabilizing influence in cooperative life. Both are unacceptable from a moral point of view. This leaves us with a predicament. If peace depends on accepting the given, and assholes are a given fact of life, but assholes are also unacceptable, then being at peace seems to require
accepting the unacceptable
. To the extent that this is impossible or unjustified, so also is peace.
In this closing chapter, we explore a promising answer: there is a way of accepting life while finding much morally unacceptable about it. Hegel called it being “reconciled” to the human social condition. The question, then, is whether we can reconcile ourselves to a world of assholes. Can we be at peace with life despite the fact that assholes so often spoil it? Our answer is that we can, or at least that there is a decent argument for it.
Not only do we have reason to respect many of life’s givens, but the human condition leaves room for reasonable hope for an acceptable social world. It leaves room for hope in part because the extent of asshole profusion is not simply given but to a considerable degree up to us, a matter of the kinds of societies we together choose.
As we might recall from
chapter 5
, the Stoics recommended ready acceptance of what is beyond our control. To the extent that the problem of the asshole, in our personal and social lives, is beyond the scope of our personal powers, we should simply accept it for what it is. Is this the way of peace?
The Stoics also made peace easy for themselves by allowing a kind of fudge: they insisted that the world is rationally ordered and in such a way that one could trust it to work things out for the best in the end. Likewise, Jesus in Gethsemane is not quite accepting the given brute facts of life and death but embracing a specific plan with a trusted cooperator, God the Father himself. It is quite a different proposition to accept the horrors of life, rank assholes and all, with no inkling of how they could somehow, even eventually, work out for anyone’s ultimate good. If we do take the world to be rationally ordered, whether by Impersonal Rationality or by a Personal Divine Plan, then we are
not
accepting the given world as we know it, as it appears to our eyes. We are not making peace with
life itself
, but reconceiving “life” in terms that make it more acceptable than it would otherwise appear. We are holding faith that the world will somehow
become
acceptable in the end, not accepting the given world for what it just is—assholes and all.