Adam's Ideas

 

Awhile ago I posted a piece about addictive behaviors. (http://www.adamideas.org/?s=Addictive).  These are drives and instincts that are rooted in human biology and evolution that modern technology and business can easily exploit, things like our cravings for sugar or sex.  I think our fascination with guns also falls in this category.

GUNS

Among the many reasons people give for wanting access to all kinds of guns is that shooting is just a lot of fun. I think that’s obviously true, but why exactly is that? Let’s think of shooting as an extension of throwing. From an evolutionary point of view, humans evolved about 2 million years ago to be terrific throwers, much better than our ape cousins or any other animal on the planet. This involved changes to our shoulders and other physiological shifts allowing us to coordinate leg, torso and arm motions. Better throwing made us better hunters and better fighters, increasing our intake of protein, altering the course of evolution and setting us on the path towards bigger brains and modern Homo sapiens.

In short, throwing is a Big Deal. Being able to project a rock or stick or spear accurately and at high velocity over a long distance was an extremely valuable skill. Human beings were praised for it, taught it, had more children because of it, and the talent and the liking for it was bred into us. Oh, and there appears to be a significant gender gap here, with males not only being able to do it better because they are bigger and stronger, but because there is a neurological component that makes it easier for men to coordinate the complex coordination of leg, torso, and shoulder. In any case, whether via nature or nurture, throwing well became a central part of being a successful man. It made you a good hunter and useful warrior. It got you recognition, status, better mate selection.

The key thing here is that throwing, and throwing well, became something to enjoy for its own sake. It was closely connected to survival and evolutionary advantage, but like many activities (e.g. sex) it became enjoyable for its own sake. It was incorporated into games and sports. It was what boys did when they didn’t have anything else to do—skip rocks, throw snowballs, flip knives into trees.

Over time we added new ways to throw. Spears. Darts. Slings. Bows and arrows. And eventually guns. Guns don’t require the same physical skills as throwing but satisfy the basic urge to project something and hit a target quickly, accurately, at a distance.

We still highly value a good thrower. We pay pitchers and quarterbacks a heck of a lot of money. Most of our popular sports involve some type of accurate throwing to hit a target—baseball, football, basketball, tennis, lacrosse.  Soccer does it with kicking but the core objective—projecting a ball quickly and accurately—is the same. What video game doesn’t make shooting or throwing of some kind a central feature?

And so too with guns. Someone who is good with a gun is praised for having a valuable skill. Like a good accurate throw, a good accurate shot just feels…fun. Satisfying. People admire it, identify with it. And while throwing a baseball or spear is hard and difficult for many people to do well, shooting is a lot easier and can potentially be taken up by more people.

So there is a very strong biological, evolution-based desire for the gun industry to build on. Yes, there are other drivers too, for safety or power or as a symbol of freedom or whatever. But all these ride, it seems to me, on the underlying satisfaction and enjoyment people get from throwing. And it’s easy for a firearms company to make a gun more ‘fun’ by emphasizing that it’s faster (assault rifles have much higher muzzle velocity than handguns), or shoots more quickly, or is more accurate, or projects something bigger and heavier—any of the basic components of satisfying throwing.

Does this make shooting a potentially ‘addictive’ behavior? There certainly does seem to be an irrational attachment to shooting and guns by their most fervent defenders, a good sign that we are dealing with an instinctive drive that can turn addictive.

Of course this doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t regulate guns. People have plenty of other outlets for their throwing needs, and we could easily accommodate the use of guns of different kinds at licensed ranges. If we recognize and deal with the connection to throwing, we have a better chance of crafting arguments and policies that all of us can live with.

How to Think About Guns

(I wrote this initially after the mass shooting at Sutherland Springs, Texas in November, but it applies just as much after yesterday’s Parkland school shooting in Florida, AND THE MAY 24 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL SHOOTING IN UVALDE, TEXAS).

After the latest mass killing in America, in Texas, at a tiny church in the middle of nowhere, in a town that loves its guns and still loves them–another demonstration to us all, as though another demonstration was needed, that we human beings are made of some kind of special steel that is impervious to evidence and logic and heartache—after this bloodbath we were inundated, again, with calls to treat the perpetrator’s mental condition, or fix the loopholes that kept him from being listed as a child-abuser and on a no-buy list for guns. From the Attorney General of Texas, no less, we heard once again the astonishing truism that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’

I say truth because it is, of course, undeniable. Human beings are the problem. On this we can all agree. If we can fix the human problem, it would be safe for us to have guns. If we can keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, we will be safer. If we can keep guns out of the hands of all the people who lose their tempers, who get road rage, who envy their neighbor’s shiny new car or hate the way they keep their yard; all the people who drink too much at parties, or use opioids or meth or coke; the ones who take anti-depressants and lithium, and the ones who throw them away; all the people who get jealous at their girlfriends and boyfriends, who want to dominate a spouse or a date; all the people consumed by lust, who think ‘no’ means ‘yes’; all those obsessed by power and needing praise and validation; every young man on the streets with too much testosterone; everyone who’s careless and forgets to put dangerous things away or lock them up; everyone who’s lost their job, had a bad boss, got passed over, seen their dreams go up in smoke; all the daredevils, the risk-takers, the ones who think they’re invulnerable; all the rich people who feel entitled and can’t imagine anything bad happening to them, and the poor who don’t expect anything but the bad; all the stupid people, the confused, the baffled, the frustrated; all the power-hungry ideologues and the people in thrall to their conspiracy theories and lies; everyone who’s been traumatized and has PTSD; all the ones left behind, lying in the dust, and those who put them there.

Yes, if we can keep guns out of the hands of these dangerous folks, we’ll be safe.

Raise your hand if you’re a candidate for sainthood. Look to the left, look to the right, look in the mirror. Not too many hands up.

I’m a good person, you’re thinking. I would never hurt anyone except in self-defense, never use my gun dangerously. I haven’t done drugs, committed any crimes, threatened anyone.

Good for you. But…never? NEVER?? No one knows themselves that well.

We aren’t able to predict who is going to be the next killer. What do people always say, afterwards: “He seemed like such a nice guy.” “I would never have imagined he would do anything like that.” Here’s the thing—people change. People snap. Stuff happens to them, or in them, that no one else can see. There are no signs, or only ones that can be interpreted correctly after the fact. Look at the Las Vegas killer. No one saw him coming. No criminal record. We still don’t know ‘why’ he did it. All we know, in retrospect, is that he spent a lot of his time and money collecting guns and training with them.

I’m not just talking about mass killings. Those are awful but relatively rare. We have zero ability to find those people ahead of time and put them on some no-buy list. And these are usually determined people who are not deterred by easy-to-get-around restrictions. No, I’m talking about all the day-to-day, mundane stuff. The botched robbery. The wife-battering husband. The street-level gang-banger. The depressed teenager. All the killings that add up to over 11,000 homicides by gun in 2014. To a US homicide rate 7 times higher than the average for other developed countries, and a gun homicide rate over 25 times higher. To over 20,000 suicides every year, from guns.

We have a shitload of guns floating around in the hands of virtually everyone. In the hands of all of us with all of our frailties, all of our selfishness and anger and stupidity. Technology has made these weapons cheaper and cheaper, and more and more lethal. To make it worse, we live in a consumer driven society where amoral companies compete to develop and sell us the coolest, most effective, do-the-most-damage-in-the-least-amount-of-time toys. Other amoral companies compete to glorify gun violence in movies, TV, music, and video games. All this is insane and suicidal. Any society would suffer if it imitated this. But it’s only part of the story.

Let’s be serious for once. We have a problem that won’t be solved by restricting bump stocks or assault rifles or gun-show loopholes with all those ‘common-sense’ laws we hear about. Gun advocates laugh, rightly, at most of these well-meaning but inadequate ideas. They wouldn’t do much. The problem requires solutions commensurate with reality. We have a lot of people who exalt guns and the gun life, who get their meaning and identity largely from guns, who place guns at the center of their world. Fewer and fewer Americans own guns or use them, but those who do are more and more committed. They buy more guns. They care about guns more than anything else in life. This needs to be turned around. And that will take real action and strong laws. It will require a shift like the shifts we’ve seen about smoking and drunk driving, a rejection of a set of attitudes and behaviors that characterize a lot of Americans right now.

Yes, gun enthusiasts, I do mean you. We need to de-legitimize having guns for ‘fun’, collecting guns, seeing guns as signs of manhood and authority, and viewing guns as central to being an American. Protecting your family in your home, yes. Going hunting in the fall, yes. The current pornographic obsession with guns that we see at gun shows, in Hollywood, in the NRA, no.

These cultural shifts can’t be legislated, but laws and public action and statements matter. The de-legitimization needs to start at the top with some bright lines. Registration. Tough restrictions. Buy-backs. Destruction of illegal weapons. Lawsuits against gun manufacturers. Condemnation of cultural products that glorify guns and the gun life. Rolling back open carry laws and prohibiting guns outside the home except in carefully defined circumstances. Courage in the face of inevitable pushback and anger, knowing that the majority of Americans—even conservatives and gun owners—already back many of these measures.

The starting point should be taking back the Second Amendment. One of the gun movements great successes was a deliberate campaign to re-define the historic understanding that connected gun ownership rights to a broad public purpose, maintaining a militia for community self-defense. The Heller Case as articulated by the late Justice Scalia is a travesty of bad scholarship and sophistry. (I suggest you read it and judge for yourself). It needs to be aggressively challenged and questioned. It is not ‘normal,’ and not consistent with most legal scholarship or most Americans understanding of the English language and the meaning of the Constitution. It is now used by gun extremists to justify any type of weapon, to anyone, anywhere. On this issue Americans should never give in, never, never, never. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. It aims at securing us a decent life.

Part of this fight is to knock down the idea that guns in private hands are our protection against bad government. Gun enthusiasts often seem to see themselves as protagonists in the next re-make of “Red Dawn”, taking to the hills with their Bushmasters to fight some shadowy state power. But if modern government does go bad, no number of pop guns will stop the 82nd Airborne or the 1st Armor Division. More to the point, the architects of the Constitution looked to strong states to help check national power, not groups of armed insurrectionists. The inability of the national government to deal with various local rebellions was a major reason to create a stronger structure under the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is designed to protect state authority by checking the national government from taking away the weapons needed for state militias. (And also to make sure that in slave states, white citizens always had the means to keep slaves under control).

The 2nd Amendment is the only one of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights that has an explanatory preamble. The others simply define the rights being protected. That tells us this ‘right’ is something different and needs to be carefully circumscribed.

To the extent 2nd Amendment purists are motivated by genuine arguments, they rest on a deeply flawed understanding of freedom. When advocates are confronted with the undeniable consequences of their stance—the 30,000 gun deaths (and many more injuries) each year, the mass shootings, the degradation of our public space, the huge financial burden (and cost in lives) for police and private security, the humiliating damage to America’s soft power—they tend to shrug. This is the ‘price of freedom,’ as Bill O’Reilly said after the murders in Las Vegas.

The freedom arguments used here focus, as is all too common for modern conservatives, almost exclusively on possible abuses of government power. To be free is to be free of the state. But there is no freedom in practice without states. The drafters of the Bill of Rights were steeped in the arguments of natural rights theorists—Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu. Human beings living with no agreed authority over them, in some version of the ‘state of nature,’ can be argued to have a natural right to defend themselves and preserve their lives (and property, to the extent it is needed for life). But as Hobbes pointed out, this is a life “of all against all”—nasty, brutish, violent, and short. We have plenty of examples of this sort of life today, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in El Salvador. These are not places with any shortage of guns.

The primordial threats come from our fellow man. It is to ease these that we have government, to protect first of all Life, along with Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is the natural right tradition that our Founders lived and breathed. Government cannot take away the right of individual self-defense but it can and must check the rights of individuals to use force or the threat of force to have their way in the world. Human beings are not angels. Self-defense cannot become an excuse for every manner of pre-emption or implied violence. Having and displaying modern firepower and allowing it to be widely available sends a message to your fellow citizens that any and every interaction has the potential to become deadly; that doing or saying anything offensive, even accidentally, may result in lethal violence. It signals that I as an individual, someone you may not know and have no way of knowing, am prepared and willing to take things into my own hands rather than rely on police or courts or designated authorities.

The implied threat from owning modern weapons inhibits free speech and democratic debate. This is especially the case for weapons that a reasonable person would interpret as beyond what is needed for personal defense, e.g. any type of assault rifle, or armor-piercing or extra-lethal rounds, or large clips. The same for carrying any type of gun in public.

“An armed society is a polite society” is another way of saying it is an intimidated society. Arms used to be the monopoly of the ruling elites, who used naked force to keep the lower classes submissive but among themselves relied on codes of honor backed by the threat of duels or vendettas to settle disputes. An elaborate etiquette and courtly language accompanied these norms to avoid giving offense and triggering violence. This is incompatible with a healthy democracy where we need open and unconstrained debate.

Gun enthusiasts who want to make the world safe for guns by identifying potentially dangerous people and not letting them buy guns are heading down a perilous road.  All of us are potentially dangerous.  And in a society saturated with guns, there is no way to keep even a mildly determined person from getting a weapon.  These arguments are not serious.  They are pretexts.

The true believers and 2nd Amendment purists are a minority but a very vocal and determined one, backed by abundant funding from firearms companies. They are in my view committed to a false vision of human nature and human community that violates our fundamental rights to life and liberty, and undermines democracy and individual freedom. This must be checked by the use of political power. People committed to a different agenda have to be elected and then supported in the face of intense blowback. And we must change the debate, going beyond feckless calls for ‘common-sense’ compromises and taking a clear stand against the association of guns with freedom, manliness, fun and the Constitution.

Parades and Infrastructure

Donald Trump wants to hold a big military parade. It makes sense. The military is the most trusted institution in the US, according to polls over many years. So a controversial President might want to identify himself with the military.  He has already larded up his administration with generals.  Certainly there is little payoff in identifying with the government, or Congress, or most other US institutions that have nosedived in popular opinion. The Donald, like a lot of other Americans, looks at our government and dislikes most of it.

Maybe one reason the military stands out is that we no longer try to use government for much else.  It used to be that government led the way on big things that made Americans proud. The Panama Canal. TVA. The interstate highway system. The space program. Social Security, the GI Bill, the Great Society. We don’t do that kind of stuff any more. We have a huge military that bounces around the world–without a whole lot of success, one is forced to add—but is popular partly because there isn’t much else we do as a country.

In Canada and the UK and the Nordic states and a lot of other developed countries, their national healthcare system is tremendously popular—probably the most beloved national institution. It symbolizes something that they do together to share the wealth generated by a successful post-industrial economy.  So do other social programs that offer unemployment benefits and free higher education and family leave. One can argue about the pluses and minuses of each of these programs. But taken together they create a sense of community and shared purpose about what matters for a thriving society.

How do Americans rate our healthcare system? Not so good. It remains astronomically expensive, with mediocre performance that still leaves out a lot of Americans. Obamacare improved it, but it certainly didn’t unite the country behind a shared sense of commitment. Social Security and Medicare are popular, but the rest of our extremely complex and fragmented welfare and safety net programs are often disliked and resented.  The recipients are nickeled and dimed and scapegoated to feel small, while the donors convince themselves they are suckers.  Education costs keep rising and are outside the reach of more and more Americans.  We spend oceans of money on healthcare, education, and welfare, as much or more than the social democracies we like to scorn, but get much less, not just less actual assistance to people in need, but less trust, less sense of common purpose, less of the intangible glue that makes isolated individuals into citizens.

The Donald just floated a plan for an infrastructure program that illustrates his view of government. The idea is to throw out some small sums, a few billion a year, and have them catalyze lots of investment by states and private companies. There is no signature project and even if the idea works (and most think it won’t do much) it will result in projects that are profitable for private investors, meaning it will address only a fraction of the real needs the country faces for fixing the infrastructure we already have. As for building something new and better—high-speed rail like China, or a renewable energy system, or ways to deal with rising sea levels along the Atlantic Coast—that’s not going to happen. Having just triumphantly passed a tax bill that shifts money sharply from government to big companies, there are no resources left.

Think small and short-term and steer benefits to the investor class. Let billionaires and their fancy new foundations handle anything big.  Abroad, advertise our narrow self-interest and leave managing global institutions to China.  That’s the underlying vision.

Without vision the people perish. If the only thing we can agree on is that we love our military and want it to grow and grow and entertain us with parades, we are in serious trouble. Is there nothing else we can muster the will to do collectively to make our country a better place?

A cartoonish version of meritocracy is popular with many conservatives. Newt Gingrich, for instance, during the recent controversy over black athletes kneeling for the national anthem, castigated them on Fox and Friends because they justified it by appealing to the importance of equality and diversity: “All this left wing rhetoric, but the fact is what has made America extraordinary is that we reward winners.” Gingrich argued that rich black athletes are ‘winners’ and invited them to embrace his Darwinian version of America.

The Gingrich view is in fact the opposite of what really makes America extraordinary. “Rewarding winners” is a good definition of the way most of the world has always worked: some set of tough/smart/lucky men win a no-holds-barred, violent, struggle for mastery. They fend off rivals and upstarts. They institutionalize their victory with an army and laws and legitimizing rituals and voila, we have a ruling oligarchy, dressed up as Kings and Queens and courtly aristocrats.  In this society, where the losers are castigated as natural inferiors, a lesser order of human beings, the   Winners rule indefinitely–until taken down by a new set of tougher/smarter/luckier men.

America was meant to be a standing affront to this world. It was meant to be the first society where you didn’t need to be a “winner” to have dignity, to possess rights, to make a decent living, to have a voice in public decisions.  You might gain great wealth and high office, but that wouldn’t mean you were better than other citizens, and it didn’t give you any entrenched privileges or let you pass your status on to your sons and heirs.  You didn’t take power by killing your rivals and their families, and you didn’t keep it by using your immense wealth and power to keep your boot on the neck of every possible challenger.

Our love of the rugged individual is perhaps the American version of original sin. Nurtured by centuries of frontier society, a Protestant emphasis on a one to one relation with God, and the priority placed on individual rights at our founding, it is easily fanned into flame by special interests seeking to hide their pursuit of privileges under the cloak of meritocracy.  Affirmative action is the most common but not the only target. Consider for instance how corporate campaigns against unions play up supposed infringements on individual rights if workers are ‘forced’ to support unions in a closed shop, or how attacks on the Affordable Care Act often start with how the individual mandate violates fundamental freedoms.

In all these cases we are being asked to sacrifice some of our autonomy to achieve a collective good. Americans may claim to ask “What Would Jesus Do,” but often what they really want to know is “What Would John Wayne Do.” Scratch the average American male and you discover that they imagine themselves alone in the saddle, fighting off Injuns and horse-thieves with their trusty Winchester. When this manifests itself as self-reliance, it can be a source of strength and confidence; but it can easily slide into a self-destructive shame at accepting help or acknowledging weakness. When it manifests as winner-take-all selfishness, it corrodes bonds of community and country. The unrestrained love of “winners” leads to the despicable picture of candidate Trump daring to criticize John McCain because he was a ‘loser’ who allowed himself to be captured and made a prisoner of war.

The better image of America is not John Wayne riding off alone into the sunset, but the wagon train:  a community of regular folks working together, sharing, moving forward but leaving no one behind. It is the Statue of Liberty inviting to our shores the tired and poor. It is every Frank Capra movie.  It is rich successful people kneeling to draw attention to those left out of the American story.  There is no room in it for Newt Gingrich.

Dismiss the Past, Dismiss the Future

At church today the sermon was about how we link to the past, in particular our own ancestors. Our minister was eloquent in describing how she reconnected with the story of her grandmother. But we Americans are not especially ancestor-oriented, to put it mildly. Our history and our self-understanding tell us that we are new, that we are not constrained by the past, by what our great-grandparents did. We don’t care if they were poor nobodies. We don’t venerate the ancestral village. We make no offerings to the ancestral gods. Any reasonably self-aware American who spends time abroad—in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, almost anywhere else—quickly realizes that for most peoples, the past, in the form of family and culture, is powerful and alive in a way that it just isn’t for most Americans.

This can be a real source of strength. We absorb immigrants and newcomers readily; we re-invent ourselves and start anew; we are not imprisoned by old customs and fears and prejudices.

But there are some huge dangers as well. A people that doesn’t care to be molded by the past may end up ignorant of it, and molded without knowing. Today’s debates about race, for instance, suffer from a terrible ignorance and selective forgetting. “Why dredge all that stuff up?” is a common complaint, at least from those who would be made uncomfortable by remembering.

To care about your ancestors and the story of your family, your community, your country, is to make them no longer past but part of the present. It is to see yourself as part of something greater than the individual you, something that shaped you and that you have a responsibility to pass on. If this sense of connection is weak, it’s easy to believe that everything you are is your own doing. And it is hard to sustain a sense of responsibility for the people who will come after you.

A prickly individualism that denies the shaping power of outside forces easily denies the duty to give back. Debates today about taxes and public spending often pit those who see all such demands as suspect, as taking from successful people to give to the less deserving, against those who stress that no one is successful alone and we all depend on public institutions that work for the common good. When President Obama said “if you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” his point was not to denigrate individual effort but to remind entrepreneurs that they are embedded in a country and society that helped them succeed.

Maybe more importantly, this mindset makes it hard to feel responsible for the future. We pay lip service to thinking about our children and grandchildren. But public policy to meet longterm challenges, like climate change and failing infrastructure and marginalized minorities, suffers when we are not habituated to think of ourselves as part of this greater multi-generational enterprise. Our decisions have consequences beyond the next election cycle, the next up and down of the markets. The rational-choice framework that undergirds our individualism has a hard time offering good reasons why we should care about generations yet to come.

Tocqueville ends Democracy in America by telling us “I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes; as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man now wanders in obscurity.”  This is exhilarating but also frightening.  Two hundred years later, it is essential for us to connect more naturally and normally to the past.

Caring too much about the past can be dysfunctional. But an appropriate and measured regard for our past may be the only way that we humans can connect ourselves to the future. And that is not dysfunctional, it is vital and necessary.

Why I Miss Communism: The Great Leveler, Inequality, and The Need for Passionate Egalitarians

It seems clear that in discussing economic inequality, what needs explaining is not today’s high and rising levels of inequality, but the opposite: how could we ever expect to see a lengthy period of economic compression. Thomas Piketty is convincing when he argues that the mid-20th century’s 70 or so years of economic leveling, from roughly the end of World War I until the late 1970s, was due primarily to the effects of two unprecedented global wars that destroyed enormous amounts of accumulated wealth and made it politically acceptable to tax the rich. The lengthy period of peace that the major powers have enjoyed since World War II is re-creating the historical norm of large economic disparities.

If you want to get a sense of what any argument in favor of greater equality is up against, I recommend Walter Scheidel’s new book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality. Scheidel is a classical historian who specializes in Ancient Rome and Mediterranean civilizations. The Great Leveler, however, roams across history and the globe to give us a gloomy picture: since the invention of agriculture, in most civilizations a small predatory elite captured society’s wealth, and the vast majority were poor, often living close to the theoretical limits of biological survival. You can look at ancient Egypt, Rome and Sumer; China and Japan; medieval Europe and ancien regime France; Aztecs and Incas, and their Spanish conquerors; the American South and the Russian north. The picture is the same: “early societies tended to be about as unequal as they could possibly be.”

It hardly needs to be said that this economic inequality corresponds to, is in fact the same thing as, similar disparities in power. A tiny set of rulers and supportive elites (priests, merchants) monopolizes the state and the instruments of coercion, using them as the means to seize and keep wealth.

Can this ever change? Yes, according to Scheidel, but only as the result of enormous violence. Mass-mobilization warfare, civilizational collapse, plague, Leninist revolutions—all these can and do produce greater equality. But all manner of change and violence short of these Four Horsemen doesn’t succeed. Economic crises, with the partial exception of the Great Depression, do not reduce inequality—witness the failure of the recent Great Recession to reverse the rise of inequality in the US. And the effects are not lasting. Patterns of inequality reassert themselves.

But, you may say, that was then. In the modern world we have altered this heartless dynamic. Democracy has undermined the political monopoly of the few. Capitalism and technology have created economic abundance and growth, doing away with the zero-sum static agricultural economies of the past. In today’s developed societies we have some very rich people, yes, and some very poor people, but most live somewhere in the middle, nowhere near bare subsistence. Across the globe these forces are raising hundreds of millions in China and India out of abject poverty. Marx predicted that capitalism would replicate old patterns and impoverish the working class, but he was wrong.

Scheidel begs to differ. First, the expansion of the franchise for many democracies is closely tied to the needs of mass-mobilization war. States who needed to enlist all their citizens in war had to give them greater say in choosing their leaders. Second, studies do not show any clear relationship, positive or negative, between greater democracy and inequality. Inequality in many European countries dropped during and after WWI as governments raised taxes on the rich and coped with the disruptions of the war—so the real cause was arguably war and mass mobilization, not democracy per se.

As for economic development, inequality does not seem to be systematically related to rising levels of development: “Conventional measures of nominal inequality do not offer much support to the notion that at certain stages of development, economic advances predict an attenuation of inequality.” Scheidel largely dismisses the arguments of Simon Kuznets, who theorized that developing economies would initially become more unequal, but inequality would decline as the economy matured. Today, countries with very different levels of development all “cluster in an income Gini range of about 0.35 to 0.45.”

All this doesn’t mean, of course, that the standard of living of most people living in developed economies is not dramatically better than before. But the size of the gap between haves and have-lesses has not really changed. What has happened is that limits on the “extraction rate,” which for pre-modern societies averaged 77%, have risen because the extractors can gain by allowing most people to raise their incomes, become consumers, and help generate much greater overall productivity and wealth. The extraction rate for the United States today is around 40%, half of what it was as recently as the 1860s.

But democracy and a high level of development are no guarantee against exploitation. For the past 40 years, a small set of wealthy and super-wealthy individuals in the United States—and to a lesser extent in other developed countries–have captured almost all of the gains in productivity. Their wealth has skyrocketed, while the incomes of much of the middle class and working class have stagnated.

Still, if modern economic development has moved most people away from falling off the cliff of starvation and abject poverty, and given them a decent standard of living and some security against shocks and downturns, what difference does it make what the level of inequality is? Why does it matter if a few people are extremely rich, as long as their being rich no longer requires that I be extremely poor?

Scheidel doesn’t address this—his book is a straight history. But the history suggests part of an answer.

In the long and depressing story of economic exploitation, according to Scheidel, one case stands out as an exception: Ancient Greece, and especially Athens. Beginning with major political reforms in 600 BC that included some cancellation of debts, Athens began to expand the franchise while building up a naval power that depended on popular support and participation (the navy depended on mobilizing thousands of unskilled oarsmen, unlike the army, which relied on wealthier knights who could afford weapons, armor, and horses).

• In the wars with Persia in 480 and 490 BC, Athens mobilized most of its adult population; after victory, Athens used its new power to establish an empire that eventually included most of the Aegean.
• In the 5th century democratic governance expanded to the courts and Assembly. To make it feasible for citizens to take part in public affairs, Athens used its imperial wealth to introduce state pay for jury duty and carried out massive public works projects to provide employment.
• Later, when the Empire was gone, Athens heavily taxed the rich to maintain its navy.

As Scheidel summarizes, “The convergence of military mass mobilization, democracy, progressive taxation, a sizeable state share in GDP, substantial civilian spending, and limited inequality lends fourth-century BCE Athens, in particular, a curiously and precociously ‘modern’ appearance.” What was true of Athens was true, to a lesser degree, of other Greek cities during the same period.

There is no need to belabor the unparalleled achievements of ancient Athens and Greece. It is impossible not to suspect that Athenian equality—political, social, and economic, all intertwined—was inseparable from this burst of creativity.

Limiting the extractive pressure of the rich and powerful and allowing large numbers of people to live at multiples of subsistence has proven to be a tremendous source of energy, innovation, and freedom. It is critical among other things for enabling genuine political engagement that goes beyond a tiny elite. Scheidel and other scholars see an average income around five times subsistence as a critical point—a level achieved in Ancient Athens, in 16th century Holland, in England around 1700, in the US around 1830—and in China in 1985. It is one of the defining characteristics of what we think of as ‘modernity.’

I am not inclined to be as fatalistic as Scheidel. But what I take from his history is that keeping inequality within limits and making space for the many to participate in public life is not easy. It is swimming upstream. It requires very serious, very tough measures, not nibbling around the edges. Not a Leninist revolution, which in any case turned into another version of oligarchy, but a dedicated, powerful political and intellectual movement.

This movement does not exist today, although capitalists are chronically worried that the masses will turn on them and confiscate their wealth. Liberal Silicon Valley moguls and paleo-conservative Texas oil billionaires alike are buying up condos in abandoned missile silos designed to let them ride out the coming uprising.* Part of me hopes their fears are well-founded. Peasants with pitchforks have stormed castles in the past. But today’s resistance has grown feeble. Even in the wake of the Great Recession, we have not seen effective mass demands for real action to break up big banks and monopolies, or reduce corporate pay, or do something about rising income inequality.

The difference now may be the absence of the communist threat. In the 19th century, capitalist ideology quickly generated a potent counter-ideology that mobilized workers and scared capitalists. Eventually it captured state power in Russia and sent capitalists and landowners to the firing squad. To avoid this fate, ruling elites in Europe and the US accepted reforms—the right to form unions, anti-trust laws, income taxes, social safety nets—that would otherwise have been scoffed at.

There is nothing comparable now. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Here in the US, market fundamentalists continue to scare us by loudly shouting that any restrictions on capitalism are the first step to a Marxist dystopia. These arguments have been effective. While workers a hundred years ago went on bitter strikes and risked their lives in violent confrontations with owners, many workers today have succumbed to the belief that the only way to create jobs is to give corporations tax breaks and lighten regulations. In America we have come to accept the right of wealthy individuals and corporations to use their money without limit to determine who gets elected and what laws they pass—in many cases laws designed to let the rich get richer and pass it on to their heirs. A new version of oligarchy has taken shape before our eyes.

Scheidel’s work is another shot in the intellectual war over the distinctiveness of modernity. How different really is the world today? A host of thinkers have argued that the combination of science, economic growth, technology, and liberal democracy represent an arrow of progress that separates today’s world from the past. At the dawn of the post-communist age, the estimable Frank Fukuyama crystallized this thinking in The End of History. But Fukuyama was not Panglossian about the implications. He worried that in this world without fundamental conflicts we would become complacent, morally and spiritually numb: Nietzsche’s Last Men. I think a lack of spirit, of intense concern for freedom and equality, is part of our problem.

Scheidel warns us that swirling around our historically recent and fragile Modern World are very deep currents, rooted in human biology and millennia of culture, that do not comport well with democracy and equality. There will be no democracy without democrats. It will not maintain itself because History makes it so.

No one wants to recreate communism. But we will get nowhere in fighting the growth of entrenched wealth and incipient oligarchy without a sharply defined alternative and people who are committed to it. As Scheidel so clearly tells us, a predatory ruling elite is the historic norm.

 

*”Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich

 

 

 

In Defense of Thucydides

Poor Thucydides! He is being dragged onto the public stage once again, with White House acolytes vying in the press to prove their devotion. Steve Bannon is a fan, but military intellectuals such as National Security Adviser McMaster and Secretary of Defense Mattis take a back seat to no one in their esteem for the Greek historian. The NSC’s dimwitted spokesman, Michael Anton, loves Thucydides too; especially, he has been careful to tell us, in the translation by Thomas Hobbes. Recently the most insider of all insiders, Graham Allison, has written a short book, Destined for War: Can American and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, all about how Thucydides should be our guide for dealing with China, that is apparently getting a close read from the Administration.

I am far from being an expert on Thucydides. My Greek, even at its best, was never up to translating Thucydides’ notoriously difficult prose. I have not scratched the surface of the commentaries and analyses done by generations of scholars. Of Donald Kagan’s magisterial four volumes on the Peloponnesian Wars, I have read only his one-volume summary.

On the other hand, I have enough acquaintance, and enough respect, that I feel a certain proprietary zeal. I read and discussed Thucydides at my alma mater, St. John’s College, and again in graduate school at the University of Chicago. Thucydides surfaced regularly when I studied International Relations at the Fletcher School, and over many years as a military and political analyst. When I taught recently at the Air War College, I held a seminar on Western political thought that started with reading generous excerpts from the Peloponnesian Wars.

All of which is to say that I feel qualified enough to express deep unease with the current Thucydides enthusiasm. Thucydides is especially invoked to support no-nonsense realism and tough-mindedness. Let’s cut to the chase, is the message, and agree that relations between states are only about power. A few choice quotes about how the real reason for the Peloponnesian War was Sparta’s fear of the rising power of Athens, and a brief reference to the Melian Dialogue to demonstrate that the right stance for Great Powers is amoral self-interest, and we have established our credentials as Serious Thinkers. This appears to more or less exhaust Thucydides’ usefulness for most of the current denizens of the White House.

Plenty of commentators have skewered the astonishingly narrow nationalism of Bannon, the self-destructive America firstism of McMaster and Cohn, and Michael Anton’s Straussian pretentiousness. Are there different lessons to learn from Thucydides, lessons that can both help us today and salvage Thucydides’ reputation? Several come to mind.

First, Thucydides is a subtle observer of democracies in their more populist form, a problem about which we could all use some insight. Democracy in Athens was largely unmediated by the various institutions and restrictions that hard-won experience has taught us are needed to keep democratic systems from going off the rails, things like constitutions and representative assemblies and a free press and a robust civil society. Athens and other Greek democracies are prey to sudden changes of mood often instigated by blunt-sounding demagogues like Cleon, or spoiled celebrities like Alcibiades. This is an important lesson at a time when these mediating institutions are under attack here at home by a President and assorted henchmen who see them as unwanted checks on their power.

Thucydides admires democratic Athens when it is largely run by its “First Citizen,” Pericles, who can channel the advantages of democracy—the incredible energy, the public-spiritedness, the diversity, the inventiveness—in a productive direction. Pericles, unlike those who come after, is able according to Thucydides to “lead them instead of being led by them.” Pericles is not a populist who gains support by flattery and spectacle. He has a long career of service and sacrifice that enables him to persuade his fellow citizens to do difficult things.

Without Pericles, who dies of the plague in the war’s third year, Athens is unsure of its strategy and veers between over and under-confidence. The disastrous Sicilian War begins with the cocky promises of Alcibiades that victory will be swift, and ends with the dithering Nicias who allows himself to be paralyzed by bad omens. Alcibiades is guilty of whipping up the people into a war-frenzy, but he is a brilliant general who is nevertheless removed from command by those same people for the apparent crime of impiety and more generally for being an unabashed democracy-scorning elitist. His successor, Nicias, is well-liked and appropriately cautious—but having opposed war, he is a bad choice to lead the army.

This love-hate relation between the people and its democratic leaders has not gone away in our time. Like Athenians, Americans are habitually suspicious of their politicians, convinced that everyone who goes to Washington becomes corrupt and easily persuaded that some new ‘outsider’ will drain the swamp. Small violations of norms quickly balloon into career-wrecking scandals. Policy that rests on the findings of experts or professionals is suspect, and many reject all claims of knowledge or objectivity, if they are invoked in opposition to some popular sentiment.

Thucydides is no less insightful about the problems of oligarchy. Sparta has its own problems with authority and strategy. The Spartan equivalent of Pericles at the start of the war is Archidamus, an experienced king described by Thucydides as having a reputation for wisdom and moderation. When Sparta is deliberating whether to end the treaty and go to war with Athens, Archidamus counsels caution and outlines a multi-year strategy: find more allies who can remedy Sparta’s deficiencies in naval power and money, build up domestic strength, and shift the odds in Sparta’s favor so Athens will back down. He cloaks his advice in traditional Spartan virtues, such as the conservative maxim “never underestimate the enemy.” But Archidamus, despite being a king, cannot carry the day with his countrymen; he has less real authority than his democratic counterpart. Other Spartan leaders urge immediate action—in violation of Spartan norms and the treaty with Athens requiring arbitration—to defend Spartan honor. They carry the day. In Sparta power that is personalized and unmoored from legal and traditional bounds veers towards rashness.  We see this danger growing today in Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia.

The “Athens first” realpolitik that imbues the city is revealed by Thucydides to be destructive of Athenian interests, and an easy-to-don cloak for ambitious demagogues. Unnamed Athenian representatives in Sparta tell Athens’ enemies at the start of the conflict that Athens is only obeying “the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.” Athens’ mistake, according to these Athenians, has mainly been to treat its subjects too much like equals, which causes resentment when the underlying inequality comes to the fore. Justice doesn’t enter into it, since justice only matters between equals. The Athenians warn the Spartans with language that, with slight alteration, could be talking points for the US to use in a private meeting in Beijing: “If you were to succeed in overthrowing us and in taking our place, you would speedily lose the popularity with which fear of us has invested you, if your policy now were to be at all like the sample you gave during the brief period of your command against the Mede.  Not only is your life at home regulated by rules and institutions incompatible with those of others, but your citizens abroad act neither on these rules nor on those which are recognized by the rest of Hellas.”

As the war goes on, Athens doubles down on this mindset. At Melos, mid-way in the conflict, the Melians try to persuade the Athenians that a policy of naked self-interest is counterproductive because it will alienate potential allies. Who will trust you? Who will emulate you? In modern terms, they argue that Athens is undermining its ‘soft power’ and this will, in the long-run, do more damage than anything Athens stands to gain by crushing Melos. The Athenians are unmoved and destroy Melos utterly. But as the war continues and Athens’ demands grow, its subjects resist more, relationships that had a veneer of equality become more nakedly about power, and Athen’s resources are strained by the need to fight the Spartans while keeping forces at the ready to subdue unruly partners.

It is Pericles who admits candidly that the empire was acquired unjustly, but it is now too dangerous to let it go. To do so would ruin Athens and reduce it to slavery. Whether American pre-eminence today is entirely just can be debated–just as the Athenians defend their rule by pointing out their role in defeating the Persians in the last Great War, and organizing smaller states to hold the line for decades against the Empire, so we believe others owe us for winning World War II and the Cold War. Like Athenians we complain that allies don’t share all the burdens nor appreciate our leadership. But the advantages far outweigh the costs, and to push away loyal allies because of our resentment would be fatal, both to us and our allies.

Even worse is to start fighting with former friends. The Peloponnesian War resembles less a war between modern nation-states, and more a civil war between distinct but similar cities who speak the same language and share the same culture and religion. Civil war, as Thucydides tells us, is the worst type of war. At the end Greece is devastated, and it is the Persians who are the real winners, having stoked the conflict and become the patrons of the Spartan victors. American leaders who bash our historic democratic friends and heap praise on dictators are inviting new civil wars.

Pericles’ broader advice to Athens is what should resonate today: the real danger comes from within. Even in dark times, after a devastating plague and repeated Spartan incursions, Pericles rallies the people by reminding them of the city’s underlying strengths and longterm prospects for victory. Athens has wealth, naval power, and depths of ingenuity and energy—fueled by its openness to immigrants and the outside world–that its opponents cannot match. If it stays united and mindful of its strengths, it will win. Unlike less talented successors he does not set faction against faction; he does not paint a picture of gloom and carnage to set himself up as the city’s savior; and he warns against foolish expeditions against secondary enemies that will squander resources and give openings to genuine threats. (America’s endless obsession with terrorism is the contemporary case in point, and the Iraq War our Sicilian Expedition). The people are ambivalent; they fine Pericles, but then re-elect him as their general.

A powerful asymmetry is evident in the Greek civil war: there is a strong oligarchical faction in Athens (which surfaces especially towards the end, when Athens is on the ropes) but no real democratic faction in Sparta. Sparta and Persia can appeal to Athenian elites behind the backs of the people. Throughout the Peloponnesian war, cities are torn apart by contending oligarchical and democratic factions. Until recently most observers would have judged that there is a strong potential democratic faction in China, and no corresponding oligarchical/authoritarian faction in the US. This may no longer be true. Elements of the American right have become enamored of strong leaders overseas, especially Putin. Steve Bannon admires Sparta, not Athens. Sparta after all was the winner, which for some is apparently all that counts.

Of course, a lot depends on what is meant by ‘winning.’ Comparing Athens and Sparta at the start of his story, Thucydides offers a prescient and melancholy observation. If centuries from now someone looked for the remains of the two cities to understand their greatness, they would inevitably judge the power of Athens to be greater than it was, and Sparta’s less. Future archeologists would find impressive ruins at Athens—great temples, statues, public buildings—while at Sparta there would be next to nothing. Thucydides doesn’t mention them, but the picture would be similar if you looked at science, poetry, drama, history; all raised to new heights in Athens, and never encouraged in Sparta.

Thucydides may be taking a swipe at Athenian pride—real power comes from steady discipline, not outward show. But maybe not. I expect Thucydides knows that if either Sparta or Athens are remembered in the future, it will be because of his book and the work of others like him. The heroes of Troy are known because Homer wrote about them, not because they were the most worthy of remembrance, and Thucydides is very clear that he sees his history as supplanting Homer. The democracy-fueled arts of Athens will in the end decide who and what gains the eternal fame that the Greeks desire. Sparta wins this battle, but Athens wins the war.

How should we understand the argument at the heart of the “Thucydides Trap”analogy that Allison and others want to apply to today’s China-US rivalry? The underlying question is whether Thucydides presents his particular story as one of inevitability—rising powers always end up fighting with established ones—or contingency—on this occasion and these circumstances, the actors chose war, but might not have. Are there points where we see decisions that made war more or less likely? Or where conflict, once started, could have been ended or damped down? Why were those particular decisions made or not made, and by whom? For Thucydides to spend time compiling his detailed and meticulous account would make no sense if human actions were entirely determined by impersonal forces or structural conditions or internal drives. The rising power of Athens and its effect on Sparta is a necessary but not sufficient condition for war—war would not occur without it, but is not fated.

Allison’s judgment rests on his Thucydides Project, which has examined sixteen historic cases and tries to draw meaningful patterns. This political science approach is not Thucydides. Still, the broad picture that Allison draws is, I think, consistent with Thucydides: the rising vs. established power dynamic often leads to war, but not always. War can be averted; if it breaks out, it can be limited

After the fact, all actions tend to look determined. I think the point of Thucydides’ famous speeches, the arguments that his principal actors make to persuade other leaders and citizens what course to take, is to shake this fiction of determinacy. He shows convincingly that before major decisions there are frequently moments of deliberation where people argue for and against different paths. The reader is thrown in the midst of the debate, and is often perplexed—each argument has its merits, each has its risks. Listening is hard. Choosing is hard.

Thucydides shows these debates occurring all over Greece; not only in democracies like Athens, where we would expect them, but in Sparta and other oligarchies. This may tell us something about the common character of the Greeks—would there be similar speeches in Persia? Under an absolute emperor or Great King? Spartan decisionmaking is still a deliberative process with a variety of voices. We know that one of the common weaknesses of dictators is that they don’t allow debate and don’t receive alternative views. States with personalized autocrats are the most unpredictable, dangerous, and impulsive. Today Russia and North Korea are more dangerous than China, which has habits of collective leadership; if these erode under Xi, China will be harder to deal with.

Genuine debate is one of the great strengths of democracy, but it can be stifled there too. Leaders who value loyalty over honesty, see opposing views as lies or disinformation, and mistake a single election for an absolute mandate, throw away what makes democracy work.

I think reducing Thucydides to short maxims misses and distorts his purpose. It is by reading and living with his book that he seeks to affect the reader. In this he is similar to his fellow Athenians Socrates and Plato, Aeschylus and Sophocles. None are reducible to bullet takeaways; all try to carry the attentive reader or listener into the midst of thinking, judging, choosing. Like Thucydides they are frequently critical of democracy and its impulsiveness, shallowness, and poor judgment. But without democracy they would not exist. I like to think Thucydides would respect our modern modifications, many of them invented by close readers who learned about democracy’s strengths and weaknesses from the Peloponnesian Wars. And he would warn us—do not take your position of strength for granted. Debate. Listen. Listen again. Choose carefully.

 

 

Meritocratic vs. Egalitarian Visions of Freedom

There are two competing visions about the value of freedom and what the life of a free human being should be like.  I think understanding what these are, who holds them, and why, is the key to understanding our political divide.

In one vision, which we can call ‘meritocracy,’ the real value of freedom is that it allows the excellent and exceptional few to thrive. When these individuals can exercise their talents to the fullest they will make scientific breakthroughs, invent new products, build great companies, make marvelous movies. The rest of us will benefit as we make use of their inventions, get jobs in their enterprises, enjoy the fruits of their creativity and hard work—as their efforts trickle down.

In this vision, the greatest sin is getting in the way of the talented few. We need to have systems of education and training that identify these people, let them emerge, and then channel them into the best experiences, schools, and opportunities to thrive. We want secondary schools with strong programs for gifted students, lots of testing and competition, and high standards. We want elite colleges and universities that look closely at test results and other achievements and pick the cream of the crop. We want a free enterprise system that lets people take risks and win big or lose big without too much interference from high taxes or regulation or other constraints.

Many meritocrats call for public policy to focus on a level playing field. Exceptional talent can come from anywhere, not just from particular races or classes or genders. The best results for society as a whole will come from making sure everyone gets a fair chance to compete. But it’s critical that in doing this, standards aren’t lowered, and affirmative action and political correctness don’t undermine the basics of merit-based advancement. Because the underlying human reality is that we are not equal, certainly not in the characteristics that count for real achievement. Don’t coddle people; let them compete ferociously and see who wins. There is a ‘natural aristocracy’ of the smartest, toughest, hardest-working, most ambitious.

If your heart melted at 18 when you read Atlas Shrugged, you were responding to this vision. Of course, it is a given that when you were melting, you were identifying yourself with the elect few. You weren’t thinking that maybe you were one of the poor shmoes who didn’t have what it takes to rise to the top.

But if you did, you might have a different view of what freedom is about.

In this alternative, freedom is good not primarily as the way to let a few people do exceptional things, but as the condition that allows ordinary people to live decent lives, without being abused by the aristocrats—whether natural or artificial. Let’s call these freedom-lovers ‘egalitarians.’

Egalitarians are wary of meritocratic arguments because it is very difficult to keep a ‘natural aristocracy’ from morphing into an old-fashioned oligarchy of birth and inherited advantage. People who get rich and powerful try hard to stay that way and pass their privileges on to their children. They don’t want a level playing field anymore; if their kids are born on 3rd base, they want them to advance from there, not return to the batter’s box. It is human nature to convince yourself that your money and status come from your individual excellence, not any advantages of birth and fortune. Hence the embarrassing contortions from the Mitt Romneys and Donald Trumps to try and persuade us that they earned their way to the top.

Like oligarchs throughout history, oligarchs in our democracy have found ways to protect and perpetuate their position. Much of this is done by using wealth and access to elected officials to gain privileges in the tax code and elsewhere. Many self-defined meritocrats, such as today’s libertarian titans of Silicon Valley and the Texas oil fields, have little use for democracy, which they see as a threat to their freedom. Hence their advocacy for ways to limit popular power by allowing unrestricted flows of money into politics, limiting voting rights for the poor, and supporting media and messaging designed to confuse the public and discredit democratic institutions. Preferring weak and easily manipulated government, they are happy when people don’t trust elected officials and think politics is corrupt or rigged. (Here their interests overlap in dangerous ways with those of Putin and other enemies of the United States.)

Egalitarians on the other hand tend to favor strong and effective government as the only way to counter the oligarchs. They want rules and laws that constrain the power of the rich, and programs that help everyone make it to the middle class and stay there. Tax policy should be steeply progressive and designed to break up inherited fortunes. Politicians need to be insulated from the temptations of deep-pocketed lobbyists and rich contributors.

Clearly these competing visions are both present in today’s America, and often in the same person. Who doesn’t believe in the American Dream of rising by individual effort and talent? Many Americans, including many of the poor and disadvantaged, admire the country’s flamboyant billionaires and hope devoutly that one of them will set up a distribution warehouse in their neighborhood. But who doesn’t also believe that somebody needs to keep a watch on Wall Street and make sure we all have a decent education and—increasingly—decent health care? Many Americans are scared of rising inequality and the gap between a few insanely rich and powerful individuals and the decaying middle class.

Navigating this divide is not new—it has been at the heart of the American experiment from the beginning. Here’s what Madison has to tell us in the famous 10th Federalist as part of his argument for how the new Constitution will reduce the effects of ‘faction’:

• The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. [emphasis mine] From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

Here Madison is acknowledging the meritocratic contention, that people are different with regard to their different capacity to succeed and become rich (“acquire property”). And government’s responsibility, in fact its greatest responsibility, is to allow these faculties to realize themselves. Human progress depends on individual initiative.

But if we accept this, it will lead to a division of society into those who have property—the successful winners of the merit-based competition—and those without. Freedom does not produce an egalitarian utopia.

• But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Inequality is the inevitable result of freedom, and with inequality comes factions and clashes of interest. Democratic government has the great task of ‘regulating’ these interests. It must act for egalitarian interests by mediating between the haves and have-nots to prevent the permanent victory of one class over another. It must stand for the common good and not be captured by one faction.

However, while Madison admirably and succinctly describes the challenge, it is hard to agree that Federalist 10 gives an adequate solution. Madison is focused on the dangers of a ‘majority faction’, meaning a majority that has an interest that is not consistent with the common good. For this the extent and diversity of the country are a check. But the danger of oligarchy or rule by those “with property” is a threat posed by a minority. Madison says unconvincingly that the majoritarian principle prevents this; a minority faction will simply be voted down. Rich and powerful minorities, however, have many ways of influencing elected officials—and electorates– that outweigh the ballot box. Outright bribing and vote-buying are only the most egregious methods. Today campaign contributions, lobbying, and media manipulation are preferred and effective tools.

In 1789 the size of the United States was a real obstacle to forming a cohesive minority faction with national clout, but advances in communications and transportation changed the situation a long time ago and continue apace. Oligarchical interests find it easy to coordinate national-level campaigns, and their smaller size and focus gives them an advantage compared to the mass mobilization needed by egalitarians. Dedicated libertarian meritocrats like the Koch Brothers and the Mercer family have outsized influence on our politics because they and a coalition of like-minded oligarchs have worked over many years to shape the rules of the game to maximize the impact of wealth, block transparency, and weaken the power of egalitarian institutions like labor unions.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Tipping Point, has a podcast (“My Little Hundred Million,” part of his Revisionist History series) where he contrasts how wealthy philanthropists donate to higher education. Some have used money to expand opportunities for poor students, like Hank Rowan who gave $100 million to start an engineering school at Glassboro State College in New Jersey. Rowan, however, is the exception. More common are people like hedge fund manager John Paulson, who gave $400 million to Harvard. Why these huge donations to schools that already have massive endowments and few needs? In effect, they are giving money to perpetuate oligarchy. (All of this at taxpayer expense, since these acts of charity are tax-deductible).

Gladwell says the Paulsons are playing basketball, a game that depends on one or two top stars. The Rowans are playing soccer, which depends on having a lot of good players. Basketball is a strong-link game, soccer is weak link.

The strong-linkers, the meritocrats, think the best use of resources is to make the top even higher. Give more to the Ivy League. Reduce taxes on corporations and the rich. Define money as a type of speech to make it easier for wealth to influence the political system.  (And to be fair, today’s meritocrats are not found only on the right or in the billionaire-class.  The top 20% who fight to get in the right neighborhoods with the right schools that get you in the right colleges have also bought into the meritocratic narrative).

Most American meritocrats believe in democracy but favor limits on popular sovereignty.  And among growing pockets, democracy is not so secretly disdained in favor of ‘strong leaders’ like Putin or top-down systems like China. China understands itself increasingly as the world’s real meritocracy, drawing on its tradition of hierarchy and exam-based leadership.*

The weak-linkers, the egalitarians, want to broaden the base. Make college education affordable for everyone. Tax the rich more to pay for this and other uplift programs. Limit private spending on political campaigns. Most American egalitarians believe in a market system but want stronger government action to help people succeed in a modern economy, and to constrain what they see as the dangerous power of modern oligarchs. Many look to wealthy social democracies in Europe as offering better models for the United States.

This is not the only fault-line in America, but it is one of the deepest. Two sides, both dedicated to freedom but understanding it in different ways. Neither one is unambiguously right, but ask yourself: are we threatened more today by too much egalitarianism, or too much oligarchy? Look at the trends in economic inequality. Look at the political strength of wealthy special interests. Look at the arguments for unregulated free markets that were behind the financial crisis. Look at who we elected president.

The marchers we just watched in Charlottesville should be anathema to both sides and to any side that espouses freedom. But they emerge from the extreme fringes of the meritocratic vision.  They feel themselves to be the rightful winners in a racial competition who are not getting their due. They want to re-establish a hierarchy they think is ordained by nature and God, and validated by struggle and violence.  They hate a government that they think is assaulting their racial and cultural hegemony with “affirmative action” and “political correctness.” It is vital to stand up to them and to their many intellectual and moral cousins who want us to think that the only meaning of “freedom” is freedom from government. Government that is genuinely of, by and for the people remains the only means of preventing today’s meritocrats from having their way with our country.

*For an explanation and defense of China’s self-understanding, see The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, by Daniel Bell.

 

Making Baseball Great Again

Last night, a Friday, my wife Gale and I went to a Washington Nationals game against the Cincinnati Reds. We are big Nats fans, we have season tickets, and we go to 12-15 games a year. We were enthused because the Nats are in first place and have a very strong team (OK, other than the league’s worst bullpen). Weekday games involve fighting awful traffic and parking a mile from the stadium to avoid $20 parking fees, but we’re used to that.  The threatening rain held off and the evening turned out to be balmy and dry.

It was a pretty good game. The Nats went behind early when Strasburg gave up 4 runs in the first, but the Nats sluggers kept pecking away with solo home runs. They tied the game, the bullpen came through and kept the Reds in check, and they went into extra innings tied 5-5. Then in the 10th, Bryce Harper hit a dramatic walk-off single to score Trea Turner from 3rd and win the game. Huge excitement, Harper being chased around the field and drenched in ice water, fans high-fiving their neighbors.

Only we missed it. We left for home at the end of the 9th, at that point 3.5 hours after the scheduled 7:05 start time. We were tired, we had no idea how much longer the game would go, and above all we were worn out with modern baseball’s excruciating approach to pitching. Specifically, the constant use of relief pitchers. In this 10 inning contest, the Reds used 8 pitchers, the Nationals 5—13 pitchers in all. The real sin here falls on the Reds, who made 4 of those changes in the middle of innings, stopping the momentum of the game and forcing everyone to endure minute after minute of players and coaches huddling around the pitcher, the new pitcher jogging in from the outfield, and then throwing 8 warmup pitches, since for some reason the extensive warmup in the bullpen is assumed to evaporate in the time it takes to get to the mound.

Everyone knows the use of relievers has been on the rise for decades. In 1980 teams used an average of 1.5 relievers a game; today that number has doubled, to almost 3 per game. The number of innings thrown by relievers has only risen a bit, from 2.5 to about 3. More relievers throwing about the same number of innings=more pitching changes.

In addition to making games longer, reliever mania has changed the game in other ways, mostly for the worse. Super relief specialists who throw 100 mph or have one unhittable pitch help keep down hitting and scoring, preventing the time-honored and natural offensive damage that deserves to be inflicted on tiring starters. Super-relievers strive for strikouts, which take longer and mean fewer balls are put in play, making the game less interesting. Pitchers who throw less can be pushed to throw harder and harder, meaning they are more likely to get hurt. This is happening at younger and younger ages.

Enough. Baseball keeps grappling with ways to speed the game up, and Commissioner Manfred is on the warpath to reduce the time between pitches, keep batters from calling time, and lower the number of mound visits. He succeeded this year in—finally—letting teams issue intentional walks without actually throwing four balls. Thank you. But it’s not working; the average game time is still going up. A much more aggressive approach is needed. Here is my solution.

1. No pitching changes will be allowed other than at the beginning of an inning or half-inning, with the following exceptions.
a. Each team is allowed one (1) within-inning pitching change every 9 innings. This allows a team an additional change for extra-inning games.
b. After using their one allowed within-inning pitching change, any additional changes can only be made because of injury. Therefore, any pitcher relieved under these circumstances will automatically be placed on the 15-day disabled list, effective immediately upon removal from the game.

I think this rule change would sharply reduce the number of within-inning pitching changes, and the number of changes overall. The game will speed up, offense will improve, and we can all stay for those great extra-inning comebacks. Let the hate mail begin.

 

I came across this paragraph the other day while reading Susan Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason. Jacoby, almost 10 years ago, was trying to understand why Americans seemed to be losing their respect for facts and reason.

“I read The Agony and the Ecstasy when I was fifteen and was so fascinated by Stone’s descriptions of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Michelangelo’s sculptures that I sought out reproductions in an art book in a library for the first time. That kind of connection between popular middlebrow culture and high culture is so obvious that it is almost impossible to understand why the idea of a reader’s actually learning something important from such works was dismissed so contemptuously by highbrow critics of the thirties, forties, and fifties. How did Virginia Woolf think a girl in museumless Okemos, Michigan, was supposed to acquire an inkling of what great sculpture might look like? I could not, after all, take the Tube to the British Museum to see the frieze that Lord Elgin swiped from the Parthenon.”

Her description made me smile, because I too read The Agony and the Ecstasy when I was growing up, and it had much the same effect. I was even younger, just 10, and our family was planning to move to Italy for a year. We were immersing ourselves in all things Italian and I stumbled on Irving Stone’s novel, a fat, dense piece of history crammed with information that Stone got from years of research, which he supplemented by working in a marble quarry, to get the details just right. I certainly didn’t understand half of what I read but what definitely came through was respect, awe and admiration for Michelangelo and the tremendous work he put into his art. Great art and artists were worthy of our adoration. As a 10 year old I couldn’t fully respond to most of Michelangelo’s works, but knowing his story made his art familiar and beloved. As we traveled around Italy I would always be excited to see his work, because of the book, which I must have read three or four times.

I’m pretty sure The Agony and the Ecstasy is not a great book—I haven’t re-read it, and don’t intend to; I prefer to see it through my 10-year old eyes. But Jacoby’s insight is on target, I think. It’s a good example of the kind of mid-20th century, middlebrow cultural product that was seen as appropriate for educated people, not only good but Good for You. It upheld the right values and was backed by impeccable research. Jacoby is irritated that real artists and high-brow intellectuals, like Virginia Woolf, held it up to ridicule. They wanted to pull up the drawbridge against the invasion of the masses; but in America, the masses for most of the 20th century wanted to scale the castle walls, and Irving Stone and his like were the ladders they used.

For many decades, Jacoby argues, upwardly-aspiring Americans took for granted that becoming middle class meant valuing the ‘higher things,’ not just classical music and Italian art and Russian novels, but the latest historical discoveries and scientific achievements. A whole industry grew up to help American strivers: the Book of the Month club, the Britannica Great Books, thick tomes like H.G. Wells’ History of the World and Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, lecture series, and magazines like Life that mixed pictorials about European artists and accounts of new scientific wonders with stories about fashion and Hollywood.

I grew up in this era, and feel the loss in part because my beloved undergraduate college, St. John’s, was a product of the period which has improbably survived more or less intact into our present, very different, times.  The St. John’s College Great Books, seminar-based program was designed—is designed—to make the highest, most elite parts of Western culture available to all. Its founders were convinced that anyone who wanted to could, if they put in the effort, read and understand and benefit from the very best products of civilization. Their idea of how democracy should work was not to dumb down, not to deny the existence of a hierarchy of arts and sciences, but to de-mystify it and open up access to all.

St. John’s got started in the late 1930s, and by the time it found its footing in the 50s, it didn’t stand out as something so strange. Pretty much every college had some kind of introductory sequence to introduce young Americans to the high points of (mostly Western) civilization. St. John’s just took the idea farther.

This whole edifice and the assumptions behind it have largely disappeared. Nothing has really replaced it, and so it is not clear anymore what it means, culturally, to be lower or middle or upper class. Everyone is free to assemble their own pastiche of influences, mixing together all manner of pop culture, classics, and material from around the world. Most intellectuals no longer accept that there is any valid distinction between high and low, better and worse. There is no reason to expect that any college graduate now will have read or come into contact with any of the once-iconic ‘great’ authors or artists, or, unless they are STEM majors, with any scientific discipline.

There were certainly drawbacks to the old standards, which could be impossibly stuffy and rigid, but having no standards at all is not necessarily an improvement. Jacoby underscores how this has contributed to the denial of scientific expertise and willingness to accept lies and falsehoods that seems to characterize large chunks  of contemporary American society:

“The old middlebrow outlines, by contrast, were unabashed in their proselytizing for the scientific and the rational; while Wells did not tell people they had to abandon religion in order to accept evolution, he did tell them that they had to abandon the idea that the Bible was a factual historical record. Because middlebrow culture placed a high value on scientific discoveries and progress, its degeneration has played an important role in the melding of anti-intellectualism with the fundamentalist war on science during the past three decades.”

Vacuums are abhorred. The loss of confidence in a secular High Culture has made it hard to push back against fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, and junk science.