Rawls in Eden

John Rawl's postulation of an 'original position,' is a brilliant, but once made, startlingly obvious philosophical move. As I understand it, the 'original position' begins with a thought experiment -- that is to say, imagine a group of rational people trying to devise a government, or perhaps more precisely, to negotiate a contract which forms 'a more perfect union.' The trick, however, is this: those deliberating are kept behind a 'veil of ignorance.' They are devising a government, and they will be subject to all the legal and social and economic implicature that follow from just that government, but they do not know, during the process of deliberation, just how they will be subject. When they have finished their deliberations, so to speak, each will be more or less randomly assigned a place within the resulting society, and because they do not know their status in advance, we can make reasonable assumptions that reasonable people will make certain sorts of decisions (and not others). A system of slavery would be unlikely because, not knowing a priori whether one would be placed as master or slave, it would be contrary to the individual self-interest of each member of the group (and thereby irrational) to risk being assigned as a slave.
As a thought experiment, there is something very American about Rawl's 'original position' -- not only that it seems, inevitably, to result in a constitutional democracy similar to that found in the United States, but in its marriage of the wholly practical (despite Sen's assertions to the contrary) with the wholly speculative in a point of origin. The group is gathered together, not to theorize ideal justice, but to write the contract for a government that will subsequently shape the lives of people not unlike thee and me in a world not unlike our own. Within the 'original position,' the deliberations are contingent upon rationality, but it is, in the end, a rather mundane form of rationality, predicated on little more than a consciousness of self-interest and causal inference of the 'common-sensical' sort. It is, however, a self-interest divested of contingency, and therein lies the crux of the difficulty (and the core of Sen's objection). We are not at a pure point of origin. We have come belatedly into a world fraught with self-interest, and self-interested calculation, but it is a self-interest already implicated within the world such as it is. It is self-interest from a particular vantage relative to a world with an already determined history. Our progenitor's labor, that is, brings us forth into a world long since fallen from grace. Nevertheless, in part because postulates little of reason beyond an instrumental self-interest capable of getting by in the world, and in part because it has purified that same self-interest of contingency (postulates a self-interest sublimated within a social activity where 'selfishness,' seeking personal advantage of one sort or another, has lost its utility) the 'original position' is, in Kantian terms, the 'adequate to furnish categorical imperatives' that is to say, practical laws sufficient to serve as 'a principle of morality,' both in criticizing extant social contracts, but also as a 'point of departure' within which the human endeavor to form 'more perfect unions' might reasonably be situated.
Again, as a thought experiment, there is something very American about Rawls' 'original position.' It insists upon means, not ends, and in doing so reveals an almost visceral distrust of what he calls 'comprehensive doctrines,' those religious or political doctrines that rationalize themselves against a utopian eschatology. The result, as I've suggested above, will inevitably be something that resembles American constitutional democracy in its Manichaean struggle to maximize and reconcile two competing values -- liberty and justice. That liberty and justice are competing, not complementary, values, I and others have argued elsewhere, and I will not repeat the argument here, except to say that, in almost all respects, I think Rawls is correct too in assigning 'freedom' primacy -- that is to say, for those deliberating within the original position, if in doubt, choose freedom over justice. I and others have also argued elsewhere that liberty and justice are self-defeating values considered in isolation each from the other. Absolute freedom for all, without the mitigating effects of justice, ends in absolute freedom for one, the Promethean uber-mensch that makes best use of his freedom to secure from thee and me at our expense the means necessary to his freedom. It ends, that is, in the violence of totalitarianism. Absolute justice for all, on the other hand, ends in what Kant called 'mechanism,' the complete subordination of human agency and the human will to a redistributive system that would make demands on and subsequently act on behalf of all equally. It ends, that is, in the denial of our individual human agency as moral and ethical beings. If the former is the teleological failure of unfettered 'capitalism,' with the corporate CEO as promethean hero, the latter represents the teleological failure of unfettered 'socialism,' with the state bureaucracy functioning as moral agent, and between competing ends, the Manichaean conflict, the world-historical dialectic of the late 19th and 20th century played itself out to the apparent triumph of the former over the latter, although it should be little cause for celebration. As Judt reminds us:
the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation -- at home but especially abroad. And thus, as we lose sight of Communism ... the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.
Twentieth century Communism, as it played out across Russia and central Europe, clearly had its many abuses horrors, and as Judt implies, neither would it do well for us to 'forget' that the Marxist teleology was compelling for so many, despite the horrors of its state bureaucracy and the gulag, because it gave a philosophical structure and vocabulary to our altogether human concerns with justice.
The fundamental question before us, one that has perhaps always been before us, is this: if not within some form of refurbished Marxism, how then do we speak of justice? A number of things should be clear enough. There is a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and insofar as wealth translates easily enough into the more efficacious forms of political influence, I suspect the recent quibbling over the terms of trade between the US and China, although reminiscent of the cold-war ideological struggles, is at fundament a struggle between competing oligarchies. That it is reminiscent of ideological struggles past, however, might serve to remind us on the one hand, that there is no necessary connection between capitalism, as such, and the sorts of distracted and placated representative democracies we have in the West, and on the other hand, that the sand castle of the nation-state has not completely dissolved under the rising tide of globalism. On the one hand, although we taut our form representative democracy for its protection of freedom, those most vociferously on the side of unfettered freedom are those who possess the greatest capability for efficacious action. It is the oligarch's (not the people's) freedom that must be protected, and the recent demise of Mubarik in Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale. It is less a tale about freedom, per se, more a tale about the oligarth's one compelling obligation -- to keep the people distracted and placated -- if not bread and circuses proper, then McDonald's and iPads, both of which are, in the end, anodyne sources of profit. On the other hand, I suspect Mubarik's real mistake, his structural mistake, was the conflation of the oligarchy with the nation state in a single person, in a kleptocracy. Increasingly the role of the national government is to protect the oligarch, and our own government's hesitancy to embrace the popular uprising against autocracy might also serve as a cautionary tale. It is less a tale about ideological alignment with an emergent 'free government,' per se, more a tale about role confusion.
Sen is perhaps correct when he asserts hat famine is less possible in representative democracies, insofar as the people must be violently repressed to tolerate a famine, particularly when free speech rights make it clear top the broader populace that the famine is merely a matter of food distribution. And there are, after a tipping point of difference, all sorts of relative famine as the 'visible disparities in wealth increase,' providing what Veblen called the invidious comparison. And it is perhaps the invidious comparison that toppled Mubarek, not a yearning to be free, as such, but a clear apprehension of having 'less' and wanting 'more' -- not an endorsement of western style capitalism, much less an endorsement of American style capitalism, as such, but a demand for 'justice,' a more equitable redistribution of wealth. Our own government was torn between its obligation to support what was, to all appearances, a popular uprising demanding the sorts of human rights implicit to western democracy and its competing obligation to protect what might be called an accumulated capability, the actual freedom of the oligarch captured in the rights to property. It was as though the hissing serpent of redistributive justice had raised its head to beguile us with the stuff of capitalist dogma, its reflexive defense of freedom for all, which in actuality is freedom for the few, those with the accumulated means, the accumulated capability, to act with some assurance in the world. It was heresy against one of the deepest and most formative of American mythologies It was heresy because the party so reflexively attuned to American freedom has also been the party of choice for our most fundamentalist Christianity mythology and the revolution at hand, of course, is a Muslim revolution. When ideologies fail, mythologies fill the vacuum left behind, and it is perhaps not surprising, with the lapsing of the great ideological conflicts between Marxism and Capital, that the intramural and extramural conflicts within our politics have taken on a mythological tone. The connection between 'free marketers' and the religious right is perhaps less abstruse than it might at first appear. One can suffer any number of indignities, one can lose one's job, one's home, one's possibility of support into a comforted old age, all of which reveal one's political and economic haplessness in this world, such as it is, with the rejoinder, 'well at least I know I'm free.'
Our most fundamental (and fundamentalist Christian) American mythology is centered in Eden. All are, or so I would hope, familiar with the narrative arch of the Christian creation tale, so I need not repeat it here, but there are a few features of the story that bear pointing out. First, and perhaps foremost, it is contingent upon choice, free choice. The tale would have been meaningless had God simply created the world, placed Adam and Eve in paradise, and kept the tree of the knowledge of good and evil well outside the gates of Eden. Second, along that line, the moral imperative -- to avoid knowledge of good and evil -- to maintain innocence -- does not emerge from or within choice, but exists prior to choice and is the imposition of of the divine. One can, that is, choose obedience or disobedience, but one cannot chose the moral imperative itself. Third, the enjoined choice is negative. One must say, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not,' but unlike Bartleby, it is not a preference emergent from experiential knowledge, but for Adam and Eve a preference that must be maintained behind a veil of ignorance that, of innocence that, once lost, is lost forever. Most undergraduates recognize that the innocence of ignorance is a poor defense against the importunities of Satan. Implicit to the narrative arch is a sense of post-lapsarian resentment for those choices, not necessarily one's own, that have precipitated the fall from grace the obverse side of which is an sense of nostalgia for more innocent times. Here again, choice is crucial to the possibility of salvation. One must choose the mediating grace of Christ -- a choice at once positive and negative. It is positive insofar as one chooses to accept (or not) God's grace, negative insofar as the choice itself entails conformity within a form of life, one that would have been puzzling to the historical Christ, but one that that is deeply American in the redeeming value of the punishment levied upon Adam and Eve for their original disobedience -- that is to say, the redeeming value ascribed to labor and the rewards of the same.
I should probably point out that there is nothing of the ideological in what I am describing, nor is there much of the theological, if by ideological or theological we mean the rhetorical appeal to a consistent set of reasoned ideas. Indeed, at least some of the contentiousness of contemporary political discourse emerges from the liberal appeal to logos -- if not a 'refurbished version of Marxism,' then at least 'the moral appeal' of a pragmatic ideology consistent with those failed ideologies of the recent past that aimed at something resembling ideal justice -- while the conservatives appeal to a mythos and a form of life more consistent with a post-modernist, a post-structuralist, post-ideological world. Timothy Beal, writing on Jon Shields in a summary article on American evangelical churches, notes, for example, that the Christian right leaders
have successfully mobilized conservative evangelical Christians not by appealing to a commonly shared ideology but by inculcating the very 'deliberative norms' that are idealized by political activists across the spectrum, including the New Left. Those norms, which include the practice of civility, the cultivation of dialogue, the use of moral reasoning, and the rejection of appeals to theology, enable the Christian right movement to maintain a degree of effective unity despite the many theological and political differences among its adherents.
Here we might note, however, that the practice of civility reserved for those who have made the 'right' choice and subordinated their moral authority to what I called in passing 'a form of life.' I use Wittgenstein's locution with some trepidation, in part because Wittgenstein was not explicitly concerned with ethical philosophy, nor the questions that trouble me here, and in part because, as I would understand it, a 'form of life' is not merely conventional, but exists before convention and organizes convention. A 'form of life' provides an ethical core, what it means to be a human being of a certain sort, of the right sort, and while a form of life can be learned, and demands that its attitudinal conventions be accepted (attitudes relative to the so called litmus test issues, like abortion,among them) it cannot be learned solely through the conventions, but is more akin to being accepted into a tribe. Free choice remains central to the moral being, but in as much as moral authority already resides within the 'form of life,' the choice is neatly divided between conformity and apostasy. Moreover, it is a choice that must be reaffirmed. The cultivation of dialogue is important as a means of reinforcing forms of life, playing down ideological differences and, as Beal also remarks, fencing 'the table, so to speak, from those who could not conform,' or more to my point, fencing Eden from the apostates. Dialogue is not dialectic, however, and the use of moral reasoning strikes an academic more as moral rationalization precisely because it lacks a frame of reference, a theory or ideology, that makes it cohere into a consistent 'moral view' or 'world view' against which one aligns instrumental means against predetermined moral and ethical ends. Dialogue is rather an idealized process, 'deliberative norms' within which one affirms and reaffirms one's moral autonomy and authority to make the 'right' choices, and the pun on 'right' is more or less deliberate.
In this context, the leap to the political is not particularly difficult, and it is perhaps useful to differentiate mainstream from more militant or eccentric strains of Evangelical Christianity. The latter, insofar as they derive their moral authority from a single issue (abortion or racial supremacy) or a single charismatic leader (Jonestown or Waco) are not easily assimilated to what has become the formative elements in the evangelical form of life, the moral authority residing in an idealized nostalgia for the middle-class suburban nuclear family. It is not Revolutionary Road, but Happy Days, though the unmasking of the psycho-sexual stress implicit in maintaining the pretensions of the idealized suburban life, the lapses of faith that result in alienation from one's work and the distractions of alcoholism and adultery that one finds in Revolutionary Road in its way simply affirms the moral authority of the prevailing form of life. Though the film would send an alternative message, it is clear enough that much of the protagonists' misery, the couples disaffection each with the other and their internal expulsion from their Edenic suburban surround, stems from their their loss of faith, their indulgence in a much more sophisticated view of life, but ultimately an indulgence less conducive to the happiness then the Cunningham's Happy Days as an embodiment of American Christian virtue in all its good humored and nostalgic innocence. Although no doubt not exactly what Jefferson had in mind when he set out 'the pursuit of happiness' as an inalienable right, yet the happiness of Happy Days is the vision of happiness that ought to be pursued, and the vision of happiness that the body politic ought to facilitate against the beguiling but antagonistic pressures of contemporary life.
Insofar as the democratic process resembles the practice of affirmation and reaffirmation of norms through deliberation, and insofar as one can maintain the undergirding assumption that the US was founded as a Christian nation, the constitution and the constitutionally guaranteed rights are afforded the same status as the Bible. If the left, however, values 'deliberative norms' as the occasion for an analytic -- and by analytic one means a deeper understanding of or a more thorough-going knowledge of the formal elements in a form of life, not for its affirmation, but its amendment relative to a vision of greater 'justice for all' -- the right values 'deliberative norms' as the occasion for sponsorship -- and by sponsorship one means affirmation and reaffirmation of the formative elements in the form of life already afforded moral authority, not for a greater understanding, but to support and prevent one from slipping into one or another of the forms of apostasy. The implied analogy to the alcoholics anonymous sponsor is intended, and reflects a post-lapsarian vision of collective and individual human nature that is already addicted to its own self-destructive behavior, to the various forms of governmental largess that undermine the redemptive engagement in labor, and the body politic, if it is functioning as it should, acts as in loco parentis, not to make choices for individuals and divest them of moral autonomy and authority, nor to protect individuals from the debilitating consequence of bad choices should they pursue their addictions individually or collectively, but to affirm and reaffirm the redemptive value of labor (both reproductive and economic) within a form of life that embodies an edenic vision of Christian virtue without the complicating and conflicting need for either the textual ideologies that emerge from careful Biblical exegesis or the coherent understanding of 'church' and its role in the body politic as the embodiment of a particular theology, a form of life that is uniquely American.
Labor is god's retribution. Acquiescence to the conditions of labor is the path to redemption. The recovery of a pre-lapsarian paradise, or a version of it both spiritually and materially, if one accepts the condition of guilt and the expiation of guilt in labor. One wants to argue the difference between redemption and reward, particularly economic reward, but conflation is a hallmark of conservative evangelical thinking. As Weber and others have long noted, the rewards one reaps, particularly the economic rewards, signal the depth and breadth of god's redemptive grace. It is, perhaps, important to note that the mythos of redemption and reward is, first and foremost, individual and familial, not social in the proper sense of the sense of the word -- that is to say, I work hard for myself and my family, and if you work hard for yourself and your family, the social will, as it were, take care of itself. The difficulty, of course, in pragmatic terms, is that labor is not equally available, nor is it equally "redemptive" when it is available. Bob Herbert captures the sentiment in a recent Times editorial (2.22.11) when he quotes the wife of an unemployed contractor -- "all we want to do is work hard and pay our bills. We're not sure that part of the American Dream is still possible anymore." From a conservative evangelical perspective, centered on the moral autonomy and consequent culpability of the individual, there is something wrong with the man if he finds himself "now suddenly thrust into the lower middle class." Attitudinally, that "something wrong" justifies not only continued exclusion from the sorts of social safety net benefits that go to encourage moral turpitude, but even the possibility of future employment. Herbert goes on to note that,
according to the National Employment Law Project, a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available. Among examples offered by the project were a phone manufacturer that posted a job announcement with the message: 'No Unemployed Candidate Will Be Considered At All" and a Texas electronics company that announced online that it would 'not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.'
While it might be a bit glib to suggest the parallel between the populist uprisings in the Middle East and the union protests in the Mid West -- there are, after all, many differences that would need to be taken fully into account -- the basic structural dissatisfactions are the same, the on-going appropriation of wealth from the many to the few and the growing sense of betrayal and alienation of those who see their position within the social compact eroded. Both Bush and Obama are a ways from the comic book villains of a Mubarek or a Quadaffi. While we might disagree, even vehemently, with their public agendas, it is not quite clear that their over-throw would have much appreciable effect. One difference is the political process itself, and the practiced art of "orderly overthrow" that we have mastered within our electoral process, one that insists we focus on "issues" and the abstraction of villains. The unions have been the traditional voice of equity between labor and its redemptive rewards, a check to the balance sheets of the corporate giants, but "collective bargaining" has long since lost any moral authority, in part because they have succumbed to their own forms of corruption, but also in part because they are "collective" and coercively so. In their constitution, and in their protection of individuals with little regard to their contribution or culpability, they violate individual autonomy and moral accountability -- justice conceived as "rendering to each his due." The emergent voice of conservative evangelicalism in secular guise, the so-called tea party, with its anti-union, anti-regulatory, and anti-taxation message, a visceral reaction against government appropriation of the redemptive reward due their labor and its distribution to others, is the voice of individual autonomy and moral authority. Unfortunately, they are also the voice of corporate autonomy and moral authority, insofar as those collective business entities are defined under the law as "individuals." Although corporate autonomy is unlikely to be what the tea-party has in mind -- thinking perhaps of individuals as individual human actors -- don't tread on me and my family -- it is most likely the reason those same corporate individuals are funneling money through non-profits to those political candidates channeling their message. They will contribute in their own way to the transfer of wealth, not through appropriation and redistribution, but through the steady erosion of their labor's value. It has bought, and will buy, less and less redemption.
I am suggesting that the ideological conflicts that shaped the twentieth century -- those pitting free market capitalism against the left and right hand versions of the totalitarian state, with the apparent triumph of the former, a triumph repeating itself belatedly in the middle east as I write -- did not portend the end of history as some suggested. In Rawls' terms, it settled only one issue -- the primacy of individual freedom -- though not exactly as Rawls himself might have conceptualized individual freedom. It has not so much signaled the triumph of the individual human actor as moral agent, but the corporate individual. Here too, we should be cautious not to mistake the corporate individual for what our 18th century forebears might have called "we the people" acting concertedly as moral agents within a rational -- that is to say, self-consciously articulated -- social compact that serves to promulgate justice within the state. The corporate individual exists, for the most part, outside the state. The rebellions throughout the middle east mimic our own American Revolution, popular uprisings against corrupt and confiscatory states, but they will differ in two respects. First, however successful they might be in creating a new state in Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, they have left largely unscathed those "corporate individuals" that exist outside and above the state. They are no longer colonized by one or another European state, but they continue to be colonized by the interests of corporate oil, individual players in the panoply of individual corporate players. If the individual human being, acting as an autonomous moral agent, acts in deference to other individual human beings -- that is to say, behaves justly -- the corporate individual, acting as an autonomous moral agent, acts in deference to other corporate individuals. The genius of Rawls' formulation of the "original position," its persuasiveness, lies not only in its theoretical simplicity, but the way in which it positions autonomous self-interest as deference to others, establishes justice within deliberative norms without a necessary appeal to an a priori (and arbitrary) ideological or theological moral authority. Nevertheless, and this brings me to the second difference. Rawls' formulation is persuasive in part because it appeals to a particularly protestant, and a particularly American mythos. It conflates a version of our constitutional congress with an idealized (and unrealized) version of its result, suggesting that we can, to one degree or another, recapture an American Eden of justice for all. Although I find Sen's critique more or less irrelevant to Rawls' motivating concerns, his insistence on the pragmatic difficulties of creating justice in the world we know does point hint at a concern. Even setting aside the idealism of the 'original position,' it is easy enough to imagine how autonomous human individuals might act in deference to others, and it is also easy enough to imagine how the autonomous corporate individuals might act in deference to one another, it is much more difficult to imagine how the former can be aligned with the latter, and that disjuncture may well be the 'original sin' of the emergent American future. The difficulties are post-lapsarian. It is easy enough to imagine how autonomous human individuals might submit to and achieve redemption through labor, how one might make the right choices to "work hard and pay one's bills," somewhat more difficult to imagine how autonomous corporate individuals might submit to and achieve redemption through labor, but virtually impossible to imagine how one might achieve equity between the former and the latter.