My wife
Carol and I were discussing the collapse of the pillars of the U.S., economy
and the greed that contributed to it. The golden parachutes of the CEOs are
well known, textbook illustrations of what the Commies always said about us,
but I suspect that a key component of the fall of the big three car
companies had something to do with the salaries of American auto workers,
artificially inflated (one suspects) by unions. They are way above those of
their Japanese counterparts, who make better cars—well, all of it leads one
to suspect that, in one way or another, greed is the big factor. Carol and
I, munching our Hardee’s breakfast biscuits (I sure hope they don’t
go down!), began to rehearse our years-long debate (a completely friendly
one, let me assure you): what is the key element in social crises like the
one we face? What sort of human failing is at fault? That is quite
important, just as important as determining the specific nature of an
illness before you prescribe treatment for it.
Carol’s
Mindvendor.com website is dedicated to the notion that all social and moral
problems stem from muddled, immature thinking. And from a lack of
self-reflection. Essentially, I believe Carol espouses the classic Socratic
view: every individual would behave better, would behave morally, if only he
or she understood the options and their repercussions. Socrates argued that
everyone seeks what is best for him, and one is right in that instinct. The
trouble is, too often one doesn’t see what it is that is best for him. He
wants immediate gratification, and he can’t see past next week. “Two
weeks? What kind of foresight is that?” (Ike, in
Manhattan).
This is why the dumb crook thinks the best thing for him to do is steal.
He’s wrong. What is best for him is to contribute, by honest behavior, to a
social condition in which all needs may be met by means of people getting
jobs to supply one another’s needs, and being paid decently, so we can buy
the goods we need, that others make. He fails to see that he is, by
stealing, helping create a lawless chaos in which not even his own
ill-gotten possessions will be safe from his thieving colleagues. He is
right to seek his own good. That’s what every individual should do; he just
doesn’t see what is good: the common good. It will cause all boats to rise.
So, my
wife the philosopher (why do you think I fell in love with her? This, plus
her beauty, her sense of humor and a million other things!) says the
solution is better thinking, a conviction she has held most of
her life. It’s what attracted her to study with Matt Lippmann at the
Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children. We need to get in
on the ground floor of people’s cognitive development and encourage them,
via Socratic questioning, to think for themselves. If this becomes a
life-long habit, people will be much less likely to make fatal mistakes,
e.g., jumping the gun in choosing a mate, in having sex and possibly kids
too early, etc. If people were enabled to think clearly, a generation would
grow up without superstition, without its equally irrational cousin racism,
without the blinders of selfishness (they’d see it was counter-productive
and would boomerang on them). If young women toyed with the idea of getting
pregnant as a way of securing Lothario’s commitment, they’d know better and
wouldn’t risk it. Instead of becoming drunks or addicts, people would
realize that is a death trap of diminishing returns and increasing
deprivation. And so on.
But that’s
where my problem comes in with Socratic Rationalism. (It’s not much
of a problem; I agree we’d be loads better off if kids could be taught to
think clearly and that it is “cool” to do so.) Isn’t it obvious, starkly so
in the case of the addict, or the smoker, that pure reason just isn’t going
to cut it? They probably know well enough what they’re walking into. What is
it that carjacks their behavior, so that reason is ejected from behind the
wheel? Plato understood that the appetites are easily as strong as reason
and can be kept to heel only with a great effort of will. It also goes by
the name Poe gave it: the Imp of the Perverse. Life is more (and less) than
Pure Reason.
A good
will is probably energized by a good conscience, a sense of oughtness.
It has to be a mighty voice that will intervene at the point of selfish
decision and order us to stand down—with a good probability of being heeded.
How do we obtain such a conscience? We are not born with it intact, or whole
all at once, though we are born with a facility for it, just like language.
Also like language, we develop a conscience through interaction with others.
As neo-Freudian psychologist Jacques Lacan says, we learn we are human by
recognizing ourselves among the gallery of humans, picking out our face in
the crowd scene and realizing: “Oh! I am one of them!” Lacan calls it
“the Mirror Stage.” Our first interactors are our parents. And their job is
to begin our socialization. They impose upon us what Lacan calls “the Law of
the Father.” This is the social code of roles and rules that define what it
is to be a person in one’s particular culture and society. As Durkheim
explained, certain values, held sacred by the group because they foster a
stable society, are imposed upon us as children. The remembered and imagined
voices of society (of parents, teachers, examples, authorities) which warn
us to do this and not to do that become internalized. They speak to us from
memory when we are tempted. They congratulate us when we resist antisocial
temptations. They condemn us when we give in and act selfishly, disregarding
what society has told is good behavior, i.e., good for the group (including
us). That feeling is called “guilt.” It is instilled in us “artificially.”
We wouldn’t experience guilt feelings if society didn’t impose its laws,
“brainwashing” us into accepting and respecting them. Some view that as
oppression (see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus), but what do you
get when “the Law of the Father” is not imposed, let’s say, because
of parental neglect? What you get, we call “sociopathy.” What you are
missing is a little thing called “conscience.”
The greedy
executives with their golden parachutes: what explains that? Would they
suddenly recoil in self-loathing if someone (maybe Carol, or the Prophet
Elijah) could get fifteen minutes with them in their plush offices to
explain to them the wider effects of their greed? No. Don’t you think they
already know pretty well what happens when you pour Xylene into the river
instead of disposing of it in some safe way (if there is one)? No,
of course they know what they are doing. They do not lack either reason or
foresight. They are like Lex Luthor. They see the big picture. Their failing
is that they don’t happen to care about anyone else. As far as they are
concerned, it is all about them and no one else. It is a choice they
have made, a choice to narrow their focus. Or should I say, to prevent their
infantile self-preoccupation to be broadened out. No one ever programmed the
Law of the Father into them. They are not hearing the implanted voices of
the social chorus warning them away from choices that are bad for the group.
The
civilized sociopath is ultimately no different from Jeff Dahmer, the
cannibal. CEO Lex Luthor’s instincts and crimes are wider-ranging and do not
involve immediate, hands-on acts of violence, no matter how much they may
degrade society--or imperil our collective economic health. Like Dahmer,
they either don’t give a damn about those folks out there, or they make an
exception for themselves. It’s like Aquinas’ argument for priestly celibacy.
“What if everybody felt free to do what I am thinking of doing?” Murder,
rape, theft, etc., if openly practiced, would destroy society, so we decide
it’s wrong. In the same way, wouldn’t the human race vanish if everyone
became celibate? Sure it would, Aquinas replied, but in the nature of the
case, there is no way celibacy is going to become that popular! There is
plenty of room to accommodate the few who will choose it. Dahmer, or your
greedy CEO, probably thinks: “I am an exception. Sure, I wouldn’t want to
live in a world where everybody is like me, but I don’t, and I never will.”
But Lex,
but Hannibal, you’re not holding up your end of the Social Compact! Their
answer: “What Social Compact? I never signed on the dotted line! I
don’t recognize the implied interdependence. I’m not part of the team. I am
acting for myself. If you decided to follow the same path, I wouldn’t blame
you. I’d just try to make sure I won the competition with you.” Do we have a
good argument against that? Doesn’t matter. Even if we do, Lex and his
fellow CEOs are not listening. We just have to stop them—or prevent them.
What is
wrong with the nerd? He is usually quite intelligent, so that’s not the
problem. He wasn’t adequately socialized. What he is missing is a degree of
self-perception. He missed Lacan’s “Mirror Stage” in that it doesn’t occur
to him that, if he is to be accepted by the social group, including finding
a mate, he must become “one of them,” and he doesn’t. He is a victim of
infantile solipsism. So is the heedless greedy CEO. But he is well-groomed
and suave. What he is missing is a different sort of socialization: the
cultivation of an interactive concern, a conscience, the ability to consider
the interests of others (and finally of everybody) as being the same as his
own
Here’s
where I think Carol’s Mindvendor philosophy is right: finally it does come
down to a kind of education as the solution to society’s problems. But what
kind? I agree about teaching children, i.e., all individuals, to think
clearly. But that’s not going far enough. We have to impose the Law of the
Father. We have to implant the chorus of society’s ghostly voices, an audio
track of alternative cheering and booing inside our heads.
Why is
this lacking in our society? I’m not sure if things used to be better, or
even different: maybe not. But there sure is loads of room for improvement.
Maybe each generation has its own version of the crisis. Maybe it is an
ever-shifting, ever-evolving moral virus, a sort of “chronic crisis” if
there can be such a thing. But in our day one big cause of it is that
children are having children. The young parents are not adequately
socialized themselves. They are not the role models for their children.
Clueless, he forfeit the role, and it goes instead to Britney Spears.
In some
circles one hears that it is not the government’s job to teach morality any
more than it is to teach religion. But that’s a big mistake. It does after
all boil down to the Social Compact. That is the belief that government is
strictly pragmatic and utilitarian, a mere device to maximize individual
freedom by restricting your right to act only at the point where it impinges
on my own freedom. That arrangement, that task, implies no particular
religion. But it does imply a kind of value system. It will be enough to
program into the heads of our children the Law of the Father, in our case
the inner chorus that tells us to respect the rights of others, and to
refrain from acts like theft, rape, deceit, and murder which make a livable
society impossible. I am reasoning out the plan, but my plan is not
reasoning with people to get them to see the abstract truth, which they can
then apply to their lives. That’s good, too. Carol and Socrates are right.
But that won’t do the trick, not the main one. The Lords of Greed (and all
the other socio-cultural termites) are suffering from something like a
character disorder more than a lack of reasoning skills. We need to try to
build both. We can try to preach repentance to them now, but I suspect it’s
too little too late. We need to catch them on the way up.
