Changing hearts and minds

I went to a presentation the other evening at Columbia University by a colleague of mine. The subject was the "anti-utilitarian movement" in France, which is probably a French intellectual movement that no one has heard of, maybe not even most French. As Wikipedia tells us, "Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility," with "utility" usually defined in terms of the well-being of sentient entities. I suppose that Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, meant here the well-being of humans. So, who on earth would be against (i.e., "anti") utilitarianism?

From what I gleaned from the presentation the objection comes from the crass correlation between the provision of welfare by the state as a way of minimizing social tensions. One should not take from this that the anti-utilitarians are conservative. No, the AUs are utopians, although some scholars, e.g., David Graeber, associates them with the Left. At least, this is what I get from his piece "Give It Away." "Giving" should be a gift, something freely disposed of, without any anticipation of a reward or even thanks. Even the provision of welfare anticipates a reward: the poor won't riot! From what I have read the AU movement derives its ideas from Marcel Mauss, who wrote a book called The Gift (available here in English). Mauss was Emile Durkheim's nephew and heir of his sociological theories, and The Gift "is the foundation for social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange." Mauss, besides being something of a socialist, was a scholar of so-called primitive societies that did not participate in the kinds of modern economic exchanges with which we expect a return for our money. We give a dollar; we expect something in return. Proceeding from Mauss, the AUs (again as I understand them) hold that we also owe something that might be called "social debt."

At the same time as I heard this talk I happened to be reading a novel by the Swedish writer Jonas Karlsson called The Invoice. It seems that "a big international agreement" has been signed by "politicians and leaders from different areas of society," in which it was agreed to tax people on the basis of their levels of happiness. After the taxes were collected, there would be a redistribution to those with negative scores, who would receive compensation for their unhappy lives. It was reckoned by the powers that be that the "happiest" would be people with high incomes, those who had been born with silver spoons in their mouths or otherwise had won life's lottery.

The first-person narrator of the novel, a very average man of 39 -- he works part time in a video store and has no girlfriend -- receives an invoice in the mail for 5,700,000 kroner. (That's U.S. $740,000.) He thinks this is a mistake: he has no money, no savings even, and has lived the most ordinary of lives. He doesn't even consider himself a happy person, but in the course of the novel you come to see that he is happy, that he enjoys simple pleasures (mint chocolate and raspberry ice cream, listening to the rain beat against the windows), in contrast to all the stressed-out folks who can't bear to get out of beds in the morning. Very funny, very touching. It's not surprising that a socialist state like Sweden would come up with something like this.

Don't I look like I care, esp. if you are an animal?

But wait. Why should money be redistributed to people who are unhappy because they have jobs they don't like or are stuck with partners they have come to loathe? Taxing the wealthy (are we presuming they are happy?) to ameliorate inequalities is one thing, but a tax on happiness? The principle, which is not really worked out in the novel, is that society gives us a certain amount of "wealth." (Elizabeth Warren would say that "you didn't built it.") In socialist Sweden that wealth would include all the goodies of the modern welfare state. Having enjoyed those one's entire life, the presumption is that one should be happy and that one should cough up when someone else is unhappy. Well, as I said, the principle is not well worked out. Nevertheless, I am aware that international busybodies are afoot with ideas to institute "international taxes" that would then contribute to the busybodies' desire to fix the world.

The AUs, although people of the Left, are not yet there. As I mentioned, I find them utopian. Their aim, like that of most utopians, is to change people's "thinking." Thus, when we give it would be because we wish to do so, not for crassly utilitarian motives or in anticipation of gratitude. Shades of Kant here.

We are all smiles now

When did I first notice that everyone was smiling, indeed laughing? It must have been when I returned from Japan, circa 1980. The TV commercial that most impressed me in this respect was for a soda -- Coke or Sprite. It showed a party of happy young people, on a beach perhaps. All were happy, all were smiling. I also noticed at that time that people were more gentle, especially with their kids. You noticed it on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I had come to live (and still reside).

I could not fail to notice a great change in the moral atmosphere of the U.S. Had I not been absent from the U.S. for several years at the end of the 1970s, this change might not have been so apparent to me. One seemingly small thing caught my attention immediately on my return. It was the kinder, gentler mood of child-raising that I observed. Parents, I noticed, constantly talked to their kids, even with babes in strollers. They had conversations with three- and four-year-olds, as if they were adults. They held hands with their children way beyond what one would have seen in the 1950s: fathers with girls on the verge of puberty, mothers with their growing sons. Little League teams were made up of girls and boys. Parents immediately demanded to know what their kids wanted on entering a store. Yes, a gentler, kinder world, one contrasting to the era in which my generation had been raised, when we had been required to eat all the vegetables on our plate at dinner and when our parents took the side of teachers, not of children.

It turns out that this small difference was really not so small at all, and it was a sign of the different priorities of my cohort going forward. Gentleness, kindness, after all, are virtues that are easy to practice when you never doubt that you will always have a roof over your head and enough to eat. And it is only one generation in American history that has been so fortunate in this respect. It was our values, those of the authentic “Sixties” generation — of tolerance and gentleness, of feeling good about ourselves — that now began to dominate American life.

It is perhaps not surprising that young people in TV commercials in 1980 looked so happy. The commercials, after all, were produced by my cohort, the people who were now doing well. We had entered "the institutions" by the early 1970s: the universities, the media, the professions. By 1980, however, the U.S. was entering an age of economic instability that still affects most Americans. Remember the oil crisis of 1973? The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, the U.S. had allowed itself to become dependent on oil imports.

The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” as it says in Rilke's poem. Indeed.

Instead, we continue to smile.

Picture credit: Coca Cola Journey

Supplanting Authority: the Enlightenment

Encyclopedias have been around for a long time. One of the earliest in the West was Pliny's Natural History. Pliny is a source of information, for instance, on Roman technology, engineering, gold mining in Spain, and so on. Although a personal creation, it represented a a compilation, as Pliny wrote, of 2,000 "facts" that he had gleaned from over 2,000 works by 200 writers. Other civilizations also produced encyclopedias, but, before printing, the collected knowledge of humanity was accessible only to the learned.

The early modern period produced a modification of the genre. Encyclopedias would henceforth provide the general public with the fruits of knowledge. Knowledge was to be accessible. Accessibility was enhanced with alphabetical entries and diagrams. The most famous project of this genre was that of Diderot and D'Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published during the years 1751 and 1772. It had a very grand purpose: to accumulate all the knowledge of the world. Clearly, many collaborators and contributors would be required for such a project, even more than Pliny had accessed for his Natural History.

Previously, knowledge had been institutionalized. The Church and the Crown were major institutions, and also the curators of what was known. One could say the same about craft guilds, which guarded their industrial secrets. The Encyclopédie showed how to make cloth, to dye, to brew, to produce horseshoes, and so on, processes that in the past had been closely held by practitioners in order to curtail competition. There was an aura surrounding such authority, as there was no appeal beyond them. The story of Galileo's troubles with the Inquisition are an instance of the pitfalls of seeking to offer an alternate version of institutionalized wisdom. So, along with the praiseworthy goal of enlightening the public, the authority of such traditional authorities would be undermined by demystifying knowledge, by making it accessible in readable form.  The idea was that individuals, instead of accepting the truth of a single authority, could read an article in the Encyclopédie, on which a number of learned scholars had contributed, and decide for themselves what constituted truth.

The perils of institutionalized knowledge

Until a few days ago, I had never thought much about the way that a collaborative work functioned to overcome or transform existing forms of authority. I attended a talk at Columbia University concerning the first alphabetically organized encyclopedia of Jewish law, the the Pahad Yitzhak, by the Italian rabbi and physician Isaac Lampronti (1679–1756).

I asked myself, however, whether a work that is produced by a gaggle of collaborators or contributors is any more "truthful" than the authority of a single instance. Today, for instance, 97 percent of scientists are said to agree that humans are responsible for global warming. But, back in Galileo's day, 97 percent of scientists thought that Galileo was incorrect about heliocentrism. Thus, a consensus is just as prone to errors and, indeed, biases, as is a religious or other traditional authority. Indeed, "experts" are not always reliable.

Picture credit: Slate