During the brief period in which corporations thought it would be a good idea to indulge the political sensibilities of their junior employees, it became fashionable to adopt “mission statements” that expressed the supposedly higher purpose sought by the firm in its branches and divisions. This attracted a certain measure of ridicule, such as the case of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which decided that its real purpose was not to produce mayonnaise, but rather to “reduce food waste” by transforming leftovers into “delicious meals.” The obvious objection to this, expressed in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, was the tacit assumption that the product itself could not be the purpose. This appeared to concede the essentially anti-capitalist idea that there was something unworthy or grubby about just making mayonnaise and selling it to people, which then created the need to identify a “higher,” non-pecuniary purpose in order to edify the entire operation.
The mayonnaise mission statement became the object of public controversy when a major shareholder in Unilever (the parent corporation) complained that “a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” I found this a bit uncharitable, since it’s not difficult to imagine why the company would have thought the mission statement to be not only good PR, but also good HR. For most people, sitting around at work every day thinking “I’m here to make money for Unilever” is less intrinsically motivating than “I’m on a mission to reduce food waste.”
I think about this episode sometimes as I’m driving to work. Technically my job is to teach courses in philosophy. Students pay tuition, the university pays me, everyone goes home happy. The product is the purpose. No one thanks me, that’s what the money is for. I am, however, sometimes tempted by the idea that my work might have a loftier objective. Pressed to put it in the form of a mission statement, I might go with something like this: “reproducing the foundations of Western civilization, one lecture at a time.” Like the junior employees at Unilever, I find this more elevated statement of my task to be a greater source of motivation.
Of course, as in the case of mayonnaise, some people might find my mission statement a bit too lofty. In my defence, I should note that I don’t see myself making any particular contribution to human civilization or improving it in a noticeable way. I gave up on that a long time ago. Now I’m just trying to do my part to keep the show on the road, to discourage people from throwing away the stuff that works. Unfortunately, this leads to a natural follow-up question, which is why anyone would think that the reproduction of civilization requires help from the likes of me. That is something I also think about while driving to work, so here is my best response.
Allow me to kick things off with an observation made by Pierre Manent in his very interesting history of liberalism:
A singular feature of the present historical situation is that political thought and political life are, in modern times, intimately linked. This is something new. The political history of Greece or Rome can be related without referring to “ideas” or “doctrines.” In his work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides does not devote a single page to what we would call the “intellectual” or “cultural” life of the period… This fact is all the more remarkable since Greece was the birthplace of philosophy, and in particular of political philosophy. It was from the experience of life in the Greek city-state the Plato and Aristotle elaborated their interpretations of human life, which constitute the matrix of all subsequent philosophy. But these interpretations emerged after the great cycle of Greek politics occurred. The case of modern political philosophy is completely different. One is tempted to say that it was conceived and chosen before being implemented.
There are two points that I would add to this. First, because the ideas preceded their institutional realization, the reproduction of these institutions also requires the reproduction of the ideas. A generalized loss of conviction in our inherited principles of political philosophy would constitute a functional challenge to our institutions. Second, the ideas are unobvious; they do not coincide with anyone’s untutored intuitions. As a result, they must be explained to each new generation in order to carry any persuasive force. This has two enormous consequences. Sociologically, it means that the formal education system becomes an essential component of the core institutional structure of our society. Culturally, it means that cognitive elites become essential social actors, since they are the ones who do the explaining. (This has certain unfortunate byproduct effects, with perhaps the most important being that those who do not make it very far in the formal education system wind up being more-or-less out of the loop, when it comes to the reproduction of civilization.)
What makes the reproduction of these ideas challenging is that the two sets of governing principles in our society – liberalism for the state and capitalism for the economy – are second-best arrangements. In other words, they do not coincide with most people’s sense of what an ideal world would look like. (Just to be clear, they are not second-best in the real-world sense. In the real world, they are the best that we can hope to attain, at least for the foreseeable future. The problem is that they are second-best with respect to most people’s personal values and moral ideals. They are not à la hauteur de nos espérances. This is why people got so annoyed at Francis Fukuyama for declaring the end of history. As Andrew Potter put it, “The suggestion that the endpoint of human development, the culmination of the ancient struggle for recognition, amounts to little more than the admixture of the Bill of Rights and Best Buy does not fill everyone’s heart with joy.”)
We have names for the first-best arrangements – those that most people come into the world wanting and wondering why we cannot obtain. In the domain of politics, the ideal is normally some form of communitarianism. People want to live in culturally rich communities with shared values and a dense network of high-trust social relations. In the economic realm, the ideal that corresponds to our everyday moral intuitions is socialism. Since the division of labour that characterizes our economic life is, fundamentally, a system of cooperation, it seems only natural that it should be governed by norms that directly enjoin cooperative behaviour. We should all pitch in and do our part, selflessly devoting ourselves to the larger social project, sharing equally in the benefits.
And yet looking at the world we live in, what stands out most prominently are institutional arrangements that not only fail to promote these ideals, but in certain ways block their realization. In the political realm, we have a system of individual rights that recruits the power of the state to provide legal protection for self-evidently anti-social or self-destructive behavior. So we wind up living in a world of 4chan memes, Twitter Nazis, Russian trolls, Instagram thirst traps, mail-order drugs, etc. In the economic realm, instead of promoting cooperation, we instead strive to instill competition, creating winners and losers out of what should be a system of mutual benefit. And so we get a world marred by extreme inequality, environmental destruction, renegade billionaires, precarity for the young, etc.
When confronted by this spectacle, it is extremely natural to suspect that the profusion of anti-social behavior is elicited, to at least a large degree, by the legal protection that it is offered by our institutions. This leads many people to wonder why, instead of following this path, we do not use the power of the state to promote shared values or shared cooperative endeavours. Again, this is a perfectly natural thought. It is why, historically, the first pass at producing a political philosophy – whether it be in Plato or Confucius – came back with the same idea, that the law should be used to enforce morality and promote social cohesion, by rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked.
Furthermore, there are many small-scale societies in which this basic approach is quite successful. Unfortunately, there’s a reason that we talk about small close-knit communities, where everyone pitches in to help one another out; it’s that there are no big communities in which these norms prevail. That’s because these high-trust social formations are not scalable. The only way to extend the cooperative system to include more people, once it reaches a certain size, is to introduce formal authority, hierarchy, written laws, and specialized enforcement (i.e. the state). This leads immediately to the “good king” problem, which is that the system works well enough if those who occupy the new positions of authority happen to be motivated to promote the public good, but it can become calamitously bad when they are not.
As a result, the new institutional arrangements that allowed us to expand the scope of cooperation turned out to be incredibly dangerous when they fell into the wrong hands. The most successful response has been to handicap the authority structure in various ways, so that we get at least some of the benefits without the most serious drawbacks. This is big idea at the heart of liberalism. It gave rise to the institution of limited government, or the arrangement under which the state keeps its nose out of certain areas of social life. This is clearly a second-best arrangement, because it involves abjuring certain uses of state power that would be beneficial, or order to avoid abuses that are likely to be worse, based on the calculation that, over time and in general, the outcome of this restraint will be better for all.
The story about capitalism has certain broad similarities. Historically, the exchange of goods has always been moralized. Buying something from someone was considered an ordinary cooperative interaction, subject to all of the usual questions about fairness in the division of its benefits. Since the price at which goods are exchanged determines this division, prices have traditionally been subject to both moral and legal regulation. (Most of ancient and medieval economics, such as it was, focused on the question of the “just price,” i.e. how much one should be allowed to charge for things.) In time, however, it was discovered that if we let prices float, adjusting to whatever level the parties agree to, these market-determined prices are able to serve a coordinating function that vastly expands the cooperative system, generating the benefits of a more advanced division of labour. This only works, however, if markets are sufficiently competitive, and so societies find themselves in a somewhat odd position, where not only must they refuse to evaluate, from the standpoint of justice, an important class of cooperative interactions, but they wind up insisting that the parties adopt an entirely strategic, self-interested orientation toward one another. This strikes many observers as willfully perverse, and so again, the benefits of the arrangement must be (somewhat painstakingly) explained.
Human civilization is built on institutional kluges. Indeed, a civilization can be defined as a society that possesses an institutional structure that extends cooperation beyond the scope of what its members could sustain through their onboard behavioural dispositions and proclivities. This is why they are always in danger of fragmenting into smaller-scale but psychologically more intuitive social formations. This is also why civilizations must be actively defended, first and foremost against the large segments of their own populations who have never really bought into these arrangements. The lack of public buy-in is particularly easy to demonstrate in the case of liberal democracy, where it has long been known that these systems are not sustained by the prevalence of either liberal or democratic values in the public at large. (The fact that democratic institutions are essentially imposed upon the people by elites was referred to, famously, by Thomas Dye and Harmon Ziegler as The Irony of Democracy.) To the extent that the system is successfully reproduced, it is by retaining the allegiance of these elites.
Within elite circles, there are three major groups who pose a challenge to the successful reproduction of our civilization. First there are the idealists. These are people who simply cannot see or don’t accept the need to settle for second-best. Their arguments have a certain wearisome familiarity. They begin by eliciting moral intuitions that arise in small-scale interactions or cooperative enterprises – the small town, the local parish, the little league team, the volunteer fire brigade, the farmer’s market, a camping trip, etc. They then point to the absence of these values in the large-scale institutions of the state and market, suggest that this absence gives rise to the major pathologies of modern life, then propose that the institutions be reformed in such a way as to honour or entrench more robust values. There are both left-wing and right-wing versions of this, although they sometimes appear more different than they are, because the left typically imagines itself striving toward a future utopia, in which its values will be more fully realized, whereas the right often presents itself as striving to restore a past condition, in which its values were more fully realized. Since, the past in question is largely fictitious, in practice the two views amount to just different flavours of utopianism.
The standard objection to liberalism is that it provides only a formula for promoting cooperation and avoiding conflict among groups of individuals who subscribe to strong but incompatible value-commitments. Liberalism itself, however, does not generate strong value-commitments, and sociologically it does not generate the type of communities that are able to inculcate such values in the young, as a result of which it gradually erodes it own cultural foundations (generating a crisis of meaning, anomie, etc.) Liberalism is, in this respect, parasitical upon non-liberal traditions. (For the most recent iteration of this argument, see Patrick Deneen’s work, which seems to me just a dyspeptic recitation of ideas that were stated with greater humanity in the previous generation by Alisdair Macintyre.) All of this could be true, of course, and it would still not undermine the basic liberal response, which is to observe that the thicker the value-commitments, the more controversial they become, and so the use of state power to promote them is just a recipe for violence, conflict, and oppression.
As far as capitalism is concerned, the idealistic view inevitably rests on the suggestion that we should organize the economy in accordance with norms that are familiar to us from everyday experience of cooperative or group effort. This typically involves a failure to appreciate the vast scale of the cooperative system that is currently institutionalized through markets, and the complexity of the calculations that would be involved in reproducing it through a system of direct cooperation. Contemplation of these difficulties leads most socialists who have thought through the implications of their position to follow Oskar Lange in retaining markets as the primary economic coordination device in their vision of socialism. In defending this position, Lange made the somewhat cheeky observation that the major virtue of capitalism is that “competition forces entrepreneurs to act exactly as they would have to act were they managers of production in a socialist system.” This observation, made in 1937, was intended as faint praise, but subsequent experience quickly showed that it was incredibly difficult to get managers of production in a socialist system to act the way they should, and so taking entrepreneurs and subjecting them to the discipline of competition turned out to generate better results. Yet from the moral point of view this is clearly a second-best arrangement.
The second major group that must be defended against are those who can be thought of, for want of a better term, as the normies. These are the people who simply like the Bill of Rights and Best Buy, and don’t really understand what could motivate anyone to want more. From their perspective, liberalism and/or capitalism are the ideal arrangements – they directly satisfy our highest aspirations. There’s no need to invoke the crooked timber of humanity in defence of these systems, one can just point to the values that they realize. The problem with this group is that, even though they are nominally on the correct side of the argument, the way they set things up creates easy pickings for the idealists. Indeed, it encourages the idealists, by reinforcing their view that those who oppose them must suffer from either stunted imagination or moral depravity. With friends like this, who needs enemies? (For an example of a normie history of liberalism, see Alan Ryan’s On Politics.) This puts the defender of civilization in the odd position of agreeing with the idealists, when it comes to the dispute over first-best principles, but then having to advance a much more complex argument in defence of existing arrangements.
Which brings us finally to the third group. There’s an old saying among sociologists, that civilization is subject to constant invasion by barbarians, in the form of children. In order for an institution to persist over time, the incoming cohort of young people must be persuaded to reproduce it. This can be especially challenging in cases where the institutions in question are the product of an historical learning process. Young people naturally gravitate toward idealistic views, for the same reason that everyone has always gravitated toward such views – they represent an intuitive extension of everyday moral intuitions about how social life should be organized. The argument against these positions, by contrast, requires knowledge of history, which can only be acquired through education. And yet history is rife with contingency, and so it will always be possible to tell a “but for” story, to explain away the failure of past generations to successfully realize certain ideals. Because of this, in addition to acquiring some knowledge of history, young people must also be willing to trust older generations, when they claim to have made good-faith efforts to realize those ideals.
It is the latter assurance that has become particularly difficult to establish in modern conditions. It has often been noted that the cohort that came of age during the 1960s in the West is the first to have developed a distinctively generational consciousness. This is often attributed to advances in communications technology, which for the first time permitted extensive horizontal communication between members of the same cohort. This has only intensified over time, to the point where the volume of intragenerational communication now easily eclipses that of intergenerational communication. The pace of technological change has also diminished the authority of older generations, by putting them in a position where a great deal of their life experience no longer holds useful lessons for the young, leaving them with no particular wisdom to offer on many subjects. The effects of this were articulated, during the 1960s, as an explicit injunction: “don’t trust anyone over 30.” Since then, this distrust has evolved in the direction of more diffuse contempt for older generations (based on their supposed inability to open pdfs and so forth). This is often combined with the view that the inability of previous generations to realize more ideal outcomes in our institutions is due to some moral infirmity, from which younger people are miraculously exempt. (The fact that every generation has held the exact same view, all the way back to the 1960s, and that every one of them has been proven wrong, does not seem to diminish its attractions for the young.) This poses a particular challenge when it comes to communicating the virtues of second-best institutional arrangements, because it leaves one vulnerable to the (eternal) suspicion of having “sold out,” or simply not having put enough effort into it.
Puzzling over these difficulties has led me to better understand an annoying habit that my father used to have. He was a medieval historian – he wrote a thesis on the teaching of logic and grammar in 13th century German monasteries. He did not have many occasions to put this knowledge to use, especially after he quit university teaching. One important exception though was during my somewhat lengthy phase of student radicalism (back when I was full of shit), as I cycled through the popular left-wing ideas of the day. Whenever I would describe to him the latest utopian scheme that I had become fervently committed to, he would never disagree with me or offer any sort of criticism. Instead, he would do something vastly more irritating, which was to describe some monastic order that had been committed to more-or-less the same ideal, centuries ago (e.g. “That’s an interesting idea. The Franciscan Third Order tried something very much along those lines in the 14th century” or “The Encratites were committed to that view in the 2nd century”). No matter how radical the proposal, he could always come up with some long dead, nearly forgotten group of monks (or nuns) that had spent the better part of a century trying to make it work. At the time I had no idea why he kept bringing this stuff up, but in retrospect, of course, I can see the point he was trying to make.