What’s Wrong with the World

Would the Social Darwinist by chance be William Graham Sumner?
If so, a difficult man to paint as a primitive, were our noble Altruists to do the usual job.

Social Democrats of any sort would say that we have a moral obligation, that we ought to help take care of the less fortunate. But if no theology, transcendent morality, or 'spirit' is admitted, whence the "ought?"

I think it's pretty interesting that on this explanation (if I'm understanding correctly) what's coming out is that "social democrats" have to argue that we, individually, have a personal, positive obligation to _distant people_. I find this interesting given that at least "right-ish" folks who might be considered on this general view more of the "social Democrat" type used to give the impression that they were all about local-ness and special obligations to those nearby. Now suddenly they have to defend some sort of universal obligation which would, it seems to me at least in principle, support a one-world government redistributing wealth from hither to yon based on the brotherhood of all mankind and the obligation that I have, personally, to every penurious person in the entire world.

That's going to be a pretty hard sell, but more, it's going to make it impossible for a "social democrat" who argues in that way ever to go back to convincing people that he's all about little kingdoms, limited government, localism, and all the rest of it.

In particular, once the social democrat has thrown himself into this sort of argument, I don't know how he's going to have any credibility arguing for, say, immigration restriction on the poor of Mexico or keeping jobs in America. Some form of globalism would seem to be a much more reasonable outcome of the universalist obligation argument. Possibly even military interventionism, since if all men are brothers and this places obligations on me, it's difficult to see why this obligation should _not_ encompass an obligation to free far-away folks from tyranny, etc., by shedding the blood of my sons. Why should this universal obligation apply only to wealth? (Don't get me wrong--I'm not _endorsing_ this argument by any means!)

Social Democrats of any sort would say that we have a moral obligation, that we ought to help take care of the less fortunate. But if no theology, transcendent morality, or 'spirit' is admitted, whence the "ought?"

Even then, whose theology? The only thing the Bible actually clearly states is that God has placed a moral burden on the Church to help the less fortunate.

To be sure, there are ample Biblical texts enjoining Christians (and Jews) to receive with generosity and fellowship the strange in their midst. (Not to go off on too much of a tangent here, but one of the ways that the evangelical nature of the God of the Bible is most evident, even in the Old Testament, is this teaching on loving the stranger and alien in your midst. Thus the power of the story of the Good Samaritan.)

And we also have abundant texts in the prophets delivering harsh words of judgment against the complacent rich, the miserly, the ungenerous, etc.

The Social Democrat is going to have to bite the bullet and plumb the depths of these traditions if he is ever going to persuade the rest of us that these duties are properly discharged through massive national bureaucracies.

But, of course, once a man immerses himself in these texts and these traditions, he might discover that the category of "the least of these" is broader than even Social Democracy imagines. He might discover not only his obligation to the distant Californian in poverty but also the distant and unborn Californian about to come under the knife of the compassionate executioner. He might also discover the limits of his own, or even his government's, power to confront evil and misery. He might discover that prayer is more effective than voting for Social Democrats. He might discover that he can't do much for the Californians, but he sure as heck can do something for the sickly and disabled in the assisted living place across the street. He could take them to church, enrich their lives with the fellowship of the people of God. He can pray with and for them. He can help feed them, with his own hands.

He might discover, above all, that all these obligations fall underneath the first obligation to acknowledge that Christ is Lord.

By the way, with reference to the title of this post:

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/just-like-tom-thumbs-blues

Mr Cella, you are an optimist. A liberal would advocate that the Federal Government "go across the street" for the sickly and disabled. Further, that taxes be raised on all for those sickly & disabled, as well as the teachers unions, federal workers[ chronically underpaid] the infrastructure, always crumbling, the environment, poisoned by everybody except liberals, & the World, unable to take care of itself and needing a wealth transfer from whatever is left of America.
Meanwhile they will do God's work, sending e mails to the NY Times and pre-programming Keith Olberman on their 40 inch flat screens.

Times have changed & so have people.

"The Social Democrat must demonstrate that the successful man in Virginia is personally obliged by the penury of the unsuccessful man in California. In short, he must make a passionate and sophisticated moral argument, even a theological argument, for it's implied by the very concept of brotherhood that all men share a Father."

Which is a good argument which likely will persuade those who believe the underlying theology. However, your set up is designed to favor the inclinations of conservative politics and has built into it several dubious assumptions. In the end it has nothing to do with the underlying assumptions of Social Democracy.

Consider this: It can be pointed out to the employed man in California and the employed man in Virginia (note the different starting point, this is important) that one day either one of them (or both, for that matter) might become unemployed. It might also pointed out that though both California and Virginia are wealthy states there is a business cycle and downturns are inevitable and the effects of any future downturns are unpredictable as to geography, severity, and duration. They would also be asked to consider that while their respective states are required by their constitutions to balance their budgets and that the several states must passively use the dollar as legal tender, the national government can run deficits and can actively manage the currency. And I would also point out that 300 million + as a base trumps some considerably smaller fraction of that number.

Rinse and repeat for matters concerning disability, retirement, and health care.

Paul, it seems to be a central problem that, what I see as social insurance, you see as welfare. Until you have clarity on what is being proposed, the underlying arguments seem irrelevant.

He must show the Social Darwinist that reason discloses obligations potentially compassing the whole nation or even all of mankind.

Rawls already did this for the context of a modern democracy. To the extent charity proceeds beyond national borders or citizenship, I would say it is more as an example to other nations of the benefits of modern democracy rather than a moral imperative (i.e. the City upon a hill).

Of course, leave it to johnt to refrain from bitter caricature. I'm sure he's interested in persuasion.

Paul, it seems to be a central problem that, what I see as social insurance, you see as welfare.

Of course the term has over time come to be used to mean forms of externally funded charity, understood as someone getting a service without paying even the average cost of that service into a pool; but that semantic alteration is just the usual Orwellian political agenda at work.

They would also be asked to consider that while their respective states are required by their constitutions to balance their budgets and that the several states must passively use the dollar as legal tender, the national government can run deficits and can actively manage the currency.

Ironic that you should tout the benefits of "actively managing the currency" at a time when gas prices are going up due to inflation (around here, in metropolitan DC, they've gone up nearly $0.20/gal in just a week).

The larger problem is that unemployment insurance makes sense, but most social programs do not. There is, after all, a stark difference between helping those who've recently lost their jobs and subsidizing whole groups of people "because they don't make enough." (It would also be beneficial to public policy if the public would acknowledge that a "national average" on income is meaningless. $50k for a family of four is solid middle class living in most of Virginia. In Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads it's right at the threshold between working class and the lowest part of the middle class. That is to say on $50k, around here, you'd never own your own home or drive anything other than an old used car unless you moved into a barrio.)

Personally, I favor abolishing the federal programs so that states like California can take care of their own. Virginia should not be receiving a windfall from California via the federal government, especially at a time when California is nearly insolvent and we are not.

It can be pointed out to the employed man in California and the employed man in Virginia (note the different starting point, this is important) that one day either one of them (or both, for that matter) might become unemployed.

And it can be answered that these possibilities have no rational connection. The relationship between the two men, Californian and Virginian, is too attenuated to supply the moral content of an obligation. They are not even, strictly speaking, strangers.

It might also pointed out that though both California and Virginia are wealthy states there is a business cycle and downturns are inevitable and the effects of any future downturns are unpredictable as to geography, severity, and duration ... [and] that while their respective states are required by their constitutions to balance their budgets and ... passively use the dollar as legal tender, the national government can run deficits and can actively manage the currency.

These practical matters cannot get you to obligation either. They merely suggest the usefulness, from one perspective, of certain devices of policy. And counterpoints could be made to each on them, purely on utility grounds. Those are arguments worth having, perhaps, but they are emphatically secondary to the matter of obligation or duty, which is still far from established.

And I would also point out that 300 million + as a base trumps some considerably smaller fraction of that number.

Why stop there? 6 billion is an even larger base. If utility supplies obligation, it would seem that world government is necessary.

Paul, it seems to be a central problem that, what I see as social insurance, you see as welfare.

I don't think that is central at all. In fact, I will happily consent to your semantic preference if that makes it easier for you. So then the question becomes, what can properly be said to oblige a man, under penalty of law, to enter into a lifelong national insurance scheme directed by a permanent national bureaucracy?

You cannot escape the moral question. Rawls' artifice of the veil of ignorance was an ingenious piece of secular abstraction from theological tradition -- "there but for the grace of God go I." But it is a pretty tenuous thing to allege that duty arises from an estimate of social sympathy, once all social facts are hypothetically withdrawn.

(Incidentally, isn't it interesting that there is more than a passing similarity between Adam Smith and John Rawls in their constructing a system of mutual obligation on the ground of the native sympathy of human beings for their fellows? In both cases it would seem that the brotherhood of man is presupposed: that natural sociality out of which arise theories of morality and justice.)

step2. I read Rawls, I don't think he quite made it.
If in fact I am wrong about the shoveling of money, say to the teachers unions, please feel free to substantively correct me, I will lay my corrosive bitterness aside as best I can.
If you turn your powers of observation away from my shriveled soul and on to the nation at large you will perhaps notice both the left at large and the president in particular wallowing in bitterness. The latter at the moment busily smearing and lying about the entire Chamber of Commerce. Oddly enough for something Democrats, and in particular Bill Clinton did so well.

There are you see, targets closer to home that might command your attention, as well the remnants of your morals.

Will you take my word for it that my post was done in good spirits, that I am reconciled to certain things, though not the efficacy of "stimulus packages" nor deficits bigger being better.
I did not attack anyone here, you did, who's bitter?
Now sit back and enjoy the continuing march, the logical and practical end point, the apotheosis of the welfare state, something you won't find in Rawls.
Something that happens when people submit their faith to a god called government.

Now if I could only gather the strength to address al? No, not today, not before breakfast.

"Ironic that you should tout the benefits of "actively managing the currency" at a time when gas prices are going up due to inflation (around here, in metropolitan DC, they've gone up nearly $0.20/gal in just a week)."

What is your evidence that inflation is the cause as opposed to some other factor?

"And it can be answered that these possibilities have no rational connection."

??? Really? And i would reply that "rational" and "individually meaningful" are two very different concepts driven by very different internal processes. Either Smith was right or sociopathy is just another way of relating. If we take empathy as normal and allow the same for the presence of a certain amount of self-interest then extending ones base of support from a score or so to a few hundred million and thereby include an entity capable of counter-cyclical intervention seems like a no-brainer.

Now, and perhaps Rob can relate to this, one of the things I used to marvel at was the willingness of some in the inner-city to join gangs and fight and die over such grave issues as who belongs on 98th Street as opposed to 114th. I could drive across these territories in about the time it takes me to ride the Metro from Silver Spring to Arlington.

Acknowledging that your kindness with food and prayer for your neighbor is morally different than the meanness of our gangbangers, tell us how that which drives your underlying senses of territory is any different?

We don't ask those who view their neighborhoods as merely a residence and a base for becoming productive members of the wider community to justify their perceiving wider interests and obligations - we celebrate it. We intuitively understand it in a way that the abandoned gang members can't.

We live in a time when I can fly to Virginia (or Georgia) in about the same time as I can drive to, oh say, Orland. It would seem to me that you need to first justify your insistence on the relevance of accidents of residence and the breath of your area of concern. That I may be less than a stranger to the chap who benefits from a national scheme and I from him is a feature of the process not a bug.

BTW, I notice that, as with our welfare queen, we now have had yet another conservative fallback dragged in - WORLD GOVERNMENT - oh noes, flee, flee, eek, eek!!!

Oh well, we live to serve - let me help. On the one hand we have a largely contiguous entity, under one language, government and set of laws, integrated economically with one currency, and extensively inter-connected by roads, rail, and air. On the other hand we have the rest of the world. Where we will be in relation to the rest of the planet in five hundred years is unknowable, where we are now should be obvious.

I keep seeing references to the dreaded federal bureaucracy. Viewed in perspective it becomes obvious that a continental nation of 300 million with a $14.5 T GDP is going to have bureaucracies, lots of them, public and private. The problem with much of the railing against these entities is that we too often forget that the Cossacks work for the Czar. T For example the problems with Medicare D have nothing to do with the folks who actually administer it. They actually do a good job, by and large. The problems are with the enabling legislation and the Congress and Administration that enacted it.

It seems to me that one can derive a sense of obligation to the same ends from any number of dispensations based on their internal considerations. That is nice and certainly helpful but hardly necessary. We have had an understanding from the beginning that hanging together is preferable to hanging separately. All the beautiful fantasies about small communities won't change that.

We should trust private bureaucracies, of course.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/business/fl-wrongful-foreclosure-0922-20100921,0,36776.story

Rawls' artifice of the veil of ignorance was an ingenious piece of secular abstraction from theological tradition -- "there but for the grace of God go I." But it is a pretty tenuous thing to allege that duty arises from an estimate of social sympathy, once all social facts are hypothetically withdrawn.

Okay, so what do you think duty arises from? It seems a little strange that an ineffable, formless Creator can impose permanent moral obligations under threat of hellfire, yet imagining a person without most inherent social identifiers is a tenuous abstraction from which it is near impossible to infer moral obligations. If you decide to abandon abstraction altogether and just go for the blood and soil formula of ethics, then you wind up with pure tribalism, which has worked out so well for countless nations ruined by ethnic violence.

In both cases it would seem that the brotherhood of man is presupposed: that natural sociality out of which arise theories of morality and justice.

Since I was dismissive of the Decalogue up above, I'll say something in its favor here. For that time period in that area of the world, the Ten Commandments were more egalitarian than laws in surrounding communities, by virtue of the fact that they applied equally to every member of the group, instead of a tiered punishment by caste. So from the beginning, the ideal of justice has been and continues to be a framework for egalitarian morality.

johnt,
Show me on the doll where the IRS agent touched you, because you have this victim complex down to an art form.

Germane to this discussion, and worth your time to click through the links, is this delightful blog post:

http://profmondo.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/sally-strutherss-government/

Professor Mondo is good!

If you would, Al, please point to some example in my responses where I recommended either trusting (a) business corporations or (b) banks.

Now then, perhaps you missed my comment upthread precisely compassing the question of how obligation works, in my philosophical system, when the stranger comes into our presence in need? This whole point about modern mobility and transience would seem to have be dealt with, no? Because I can fly to California tomorrow really has no bearing on the fact of my negligence of my actual neighbors. Indeed, my travel schedule may form the perfect stumbling block for me, by presenting a ready-made rationale for excusing myself from ever doing squat for the needy folks all around me. In my moral system this negligence is a sin and the internal gestures about "not having any time" are mere self-delusion.

In your system neglect of one's neighbors is -- what? A sign of enlightened emancipation from tribal forms? When the single mom down the street asks for your help, you can content yourself with politely declining on account of her older son, who deals drugs when she is at work and probably runs with gangbangers? It really starts to resemble a Randian indifference. Just replace "gangbanger" with "looter" and you've got it.

We don't ask those who view their neighborhoods as merely a residence and a base for becoming productive members of the wider community to justify their perceiving wider interests and obligations - we celebrate it. We intuitively understand it in a way that the abandoned gang members can't.

You may celebrate it. I regard it as manifestly included in the process of "perceiving [their] wider interests and obligations" that the obligation to the neighborhood would become clear. Analogically you might think it as the maturation from boys to men.

The guy who can live his whole life in a place without ever giving a second thought to the old folks in assisted living down the street is not a guy who has matured. We may hope that he will one day. It is indeed my happy experience that most liberals have a very powerful intuitive sense of neighborliness. Thus I have not the least bit of trouble being neighbors to them, which entails a binding obligation that I acknowledge and proclaim and try (though often fail) to discharge. But in any case, I would sooner count on the mutual assistance, comradeship, loyalty in stress -- in a word, neighborly love -- of a liberal who intentionally takes up residence in a place to make it for him more than a mere residence, than I would from the libertarian globalist who really does think the world is a playground for his ambition and all these local accretions mere antiquities from the deary past. It is this latter, in fact, for whom the local is a mere prop for "being productive."

It its quite amazing to me that you would so fiercely denigrate local obligations while upholding the distant and abstract ones. When I can burn a liberal with a J. J. Rousseau quote, the liberal has done something wrong: "the cosmopolitan is a man who claims to love humanity in order to avoid having to tolerate his neighbors."

NOTE: For emphasis sake (because my original presentation was probably inarticulate) I do not count myself either a Social Democrat or a Social Darwinist. I sternly critique both schools, and mean here only to facilitate communication and clarity between them and among them and me.

"If you would, Al, please point to some example in my responses where I recommended either trusting (a) business corporations or (b) banks."

Didn't intend that inference at all. I was merely supplementing my comment just above as to the inevitability of bureaucracies of all sorts in a modern nation. It was intended for the denizens of these parts who reflexively see government as bad and anything markety as good. That, of course, doesn't include you.

Fair enough. The convergence of state and corporate bureaucracy in despotic forms is something we can all reproach then.

What is your evidence that inflation is the cause as opposed to some other factor?

The fact that the news has been reporting that the price of gas has been going up despite no meaningful increase in demand or decrease in supply.

If you want me to dig into this as a full time research project, you can expect everyone here to treat everything you argue the same way.

Step2, take your mind off my body, you can't have me.

So a shill for corporate hegemony thinks I'm trying to tempt him by the magical power of my mind.

On bookshelves soon - The seduction of johnt: the price was right.