Michael Steinberg's Open Salon Blog

In lieu of a post

Mon, 3 Jun 2013 16:06:32 -0400

Electoral democracy is more widespread than ever, yet at the same time our freely elected governments have shown themselves to be deaf to the needs of their citizens and even to the future habitability of the planet. This paradox makes it increasingly clear that the political triumphs of the past century and a half--the welfare state, environmental regulation, legal equality, and so on--were won not by the force of the ballot but by fear. They were payoffs, concessions made by the powerful to keep social tensions from exploding, and once the fear of unrest was gone the powerful no longer needed to buy anyone off. This was true when Bismarck introduced social insurance in nineteenth-century Germany, during the New Deal, and in the glory days of European social democracy. If it had not been for the Social Democratic Party in Bismarck's day, the fear of revolution, fascism, or total social breakdown during the Depression, and the threat of Communism in post-war Europe none of this would have come about. It is a straightforward case of supply and demand; when social peace appeared to be a scarce commodity it had a solid market value in the form of living wages, old age pensions, decent schooling, and health care. Now that there is a surplus of social peace in the industrialized world it has almost no market value at all, and so all of the concessions of past eras are being taken away.

Why values never win out over markets

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 10:10:59 -0400

We have values that ought to trump market imperatives. That is one of the overriding themes of popular Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy, and there can hardly be anyone who would want to live in a world where every detail of common life is driven by market forces.

And yet this battle seems already lost. The logic of the market has not swept all before it, but it has come close. Appeals to higher values ring true emotionally, but they almost always fall short in practice. The solution to every market failure is to retool and refine market mechanisms. Sandel himself has no real issue with markets in general.

This helplessness involves a deep irony. Many hope to restrain the excesses of the market by values drawn from spiritual traditions, yet market ideology could not have taken hold without the influence of Christianity. The individualism of the market-driven world descends from the unique Christian vision of the nature of humanity and of human society. That is one reason that it is so unassailable.

The big problem with markets is that they seem self-justifying. They appear to operate without presuppositions, doing nothing but adding up individual choices. This makes sense if those choices are made outside of the market itself. If there's no wall between self and other, though, markets merely reflect themselves. They become something like a huge Ouija board game, a common activity that is nonetheless unconscious and uncontrollable.

Market ideology rests on the belief in that wall. It assumes that individuals exist apart from their social life, that they are fundamentally independent beings who enter the world from the outside. This seems like a self-evident truth, but it is actually a deeply Christian idea. Most other religions fight against it; Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, insist that the individual self is a pernicious illusion. Christianity, on the other hand, took the individual self as its starting point. From the outset it rejected the deeply communitarian world of antiquity.

This individualism continued even after Christianity settled into its new role as the state religion of an empire. As historian Peter Brown has shown, the Christian emphasis on celibacy struck at the duty to bear children and perpetuate the “common city of gods and men”--the social ideal of Classical antiquity.

The result wasn't an anarchistic free-for-all, of course. The individual souls of the new Christian world were to be restrained by religious precepts and practices and organized by the invisible hand of providence as well as by the directions of the clergy. Long into the Middle Ages putting money out at interest was viewed as inherently evil, a view still held by Muslims today.

In the Middle Ages, then, the idea that free markets should shape the social world would have seemed like nonsense. But the Christian world bore the seeds of that idea, because once the belief in a divine order faded there was nothing left but the self-directed individual.

Many in the West, the new atheists among them, think that today's radical individualism is the universal human condition, finally disentangled from the illusions of belief. Instead, it is little more than a secularized Christianity. The modern individual is simply the isolated soul of Christian imagining adrift in a dechristianized world.

The logic of the market comes out of this post-Christian problematic. Mrs. Thatcher's “There is no such thing as society” is a dangerous policy statement, but it is an accurate description of the contemporary world. It is this vacuum that market mechanisms fill, and it is the belief that individuals exist in a social vacuum that justifies the supremacy of markets.

In such a world the attempt to maintain human values in the face of market forces is an uphill and probably losing battle. Like so much in today's culture, it is a struggle to find secular solutions to the problems that were left to us by Christianity. Sandel has his heart in the right place, but he and most of the rest of us are all too likely to be whistling in the wind—unless, of course, we commit ourselves to an unsparing critique of our world and our selves that opens the path towards a different world entirely.

When religion is all that remains

Wed, 3 Oct 2012 11:10:22 -0400

Nothing excuses mob violence, of course, but it is still important to ask where it might come from, especially when it seems so disproportionate to the cause. What do you take from someone when you mock their religion? It's a question worth serious thought right now, as rioting continues against the film Innocence of Muslims, as European magazines publish their own provocations, and as new studies show what many have suspected: that both religious commitment and religious violence are rising around the world.

There are plenty of explanations available. The most persuasive, perhaps, are that the surprising return of religion is a protest or response to modernization or to orientalist stereotyping, an assertion of identity, and a rejection of Western individualism and materialism.

All these may be true, but I suspect that there is something else going on that makes the response that much more intense. In much of the Muslim world, any challenge to Islam comes across as an assault on the one realm where it is still possible to see oneself as a human being. It eats away at the only kind of power that people have left.

As the philosopher Fichte recognized two hundred years ago, self-consciousness depends on a sense of agency. To be human is to change the world. Whether or not we as individuals really have such agency is almost beside the point. What counts is the experience of making something happen outside of ourselves.

This is in part what religions offer. They do more than explain and console; they prescribe and justify actions. To beseech a deity or speak a sacred name, to go on pilgrimage, to offer sacrifices into a sacred fire, even to meditate--all these, for the worshiper, are ways of altering the world. Even when they focus on self-transformation, these acts invoke ties with the universe as a whole. That is the source of their apparent power, and if that power is recognized by others they reaffirm our sense of being human beings living human lives.

In traditional communities there were additional ways of exercising social power. Village life was narrow and hard, but it was always essentially familiar and the product of human agency. It was a human world and power in that world wore a human face; it could be appealed to, borrowed, often even exercised in small ways with one's fellows.

All that has been torn away. Marx and Engels got it right in the Communist Manifesto; globalized capitalism "put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations." Power is now everywhere and nowhere, diffused through an impenetrable system that is even more unpredictable than the weather.

Those mobbing the streets in Benghazi, Cairo, Karachi, and elsewhere are what we all are today: individuals, isolated and basically powerless units. All of us have surrendered our common power to shape the world; everything is now left to the forces of the market, even where there are long traditions of responsible government. What is different in countries like Egypt and Pakistan is that the deprivation there is more recent, more overt, less buffered by institutions of democracy, and less soothed by the emollient of material wealth.

Political utility and the feelings of others are no grounds for curbing free speech. From the perspective of much of the Muslim world, though, the mockery of the prophet Mohammad is likely to seem worse than an instance of insensitivity and disrespect. Over the past two centuries colonialism and globalized capitalism have stripped away every bit of power that many Muslims had over their lives. That process has left them nothing but their religion, and any attack on that last citadel of humanity cannot but appear as an existential threat. In a real sense it is exactly that.

Mitt Romney vs. Brigham Young

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:09:50 -0400

It's not proper for me to reproduce it here, but a piece of mine contrasting Mitt Romney's social vision with the communitarian ethos of nineteenth-century Mormonism is on the Guardian website.

Where are the other modernities?

Sun, 2 Sep 2012 14:09:23 -0400

I am looking forward to the American publication of Pankaj Mishra's new book, From the Ruins of Empire, which has already attracted a good deal of attention in Britain and in Mishra's native India. Focused on the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, and looking at several of the most thoughtful Asian critics of the West, Mishra is said to give a detailed and nuanced picture of the impact of Western modernity on the world's oldest (and for most of history richest) civilizations. More importantly, his book gives voice to some Asian counter perspectives on modernization, thinkers who neither retreated to the security of their own traditions nor bought into those of the triumphant imperialists. Drawing from both and yet critical of them at the same time, thinkers like Rabindranath Tagore and Sun Yat-Sen sought other ways of being modern.

They failed. Though they were honored and even revered, their more challenging and profound ideas went unheard. This is part of the great tragedy of our age. It is that there has come to be only one way of being modern--the way of individualism, capitalism, marketization and unconstrained economic growth.

For there really is only one modernity in today's world. Everything else seems like primitivism or nostalgia. The great civilizations of the world outside Europe and its settler colonies have effectively been read out of history. All that they are allowed to contribute is the occasional dash of local color to a social and economic order that originated elsewhere.

The Japanese met the challenge of the West by borrowing European institutions; as distinctly Japanese as the result was, its operation as an economic system is indistinguishable from that of any other advanced industrial economy. Capitalism in China, India, Nigeria, or Brazil is in all essentials identical to capitalism in the Netherlands, Poland, or the United States. Cities may vary--they carry their pasts with them--but their shopping malls are the same and so is their mode of commerce. Every government (with the exception of Sikkim, perhaps) wants to increase GDP. Everything is wagered on perpetual growth. Every citizen exists as an isolated producer and consumer, and the state inevitably finds itself at the mercy of the logic of the market.

It must be admitted that vast numbers of people in India, China, Nigeria, Brazil, and elsewhere are eager participants in this movement. It is hard to blame them, though. There is no other system available that even claims to produce enough in the way of goods to support large populations.

But there might have been. Western civilization is unique, but there is little or no evidence that it was uniquely capable of developing large scale production or harnessing technological innovation. Europeans have come up with all kinds of theories that depict capitalism and modernity as the inevitable product of specifically European institutions or intellectual or spiritual traditions, but just about every one of these factors was also present in the great commercial and industrial centers of Gujarat in India and the Pearl River delta in Southern China, among other centers. The rise of Europe to world domination seems likely to have come about thanks to a combination of dumb luck and the looted wealth of the Americas and Africa.

If the "great divergence," as historian Kenneth Pomeranz calls it, had not happened, the modern world might have emerged in Asia, or several modernities might have emerged in different places. An Asian modernity would certainly have been less individualistic than our own, it might have moved more consciously and deliberately, and it might have been more paternalistic or more grounded in community life. We will never know. But an India or China which had found its own way to rising standards of living and technologically advanced industries would have offered a counterpoint to the European model and an alternative source of ideas and institutions. That is what we so desperately need today.

One of the factors that is supposed to account for the European origins of modernity is that Europe was made up of many small, competing states that offered a variety of social and economic possibilities. This incorrectly suggests that the non-European world was monolithic. But if social, cultural, and economic diversity is valuable, it is ironic that the supposed product of such diversity has become an agent of homogenization. Colonialism and imperialism destroyed any indigenous movement towards Asian modernities, and the logic of a globalized capitalism seals off the possibility of any return to non-western roots.

So there is no alternative, as Mrs. Thatcher liked to say. There is only one game in town, and our struggle is to control or change it as it relentlessly destroys our world and simultaneously holds out promises of universal prosperity and growth that it cannot possibly fulfill without a few more planets' worth of resources.

One often hears in defense of the modern world that nothing else has raised so many millions out of poverty and that no such numbers of people have ever lived in comparable comfort, health, and security. All of this is true, and I do not want to suggest right now that these achievements are outweighed by the intellectual and spiritual costs that we seem to be paying. But we have not yet received the bill for the other costs. If a few centuries of modestly distributed wealth turns out to come at the expense of the human future, if thousands or millions of generations will have to live limited or impoverished lives because we have plundered the planet and deranged its climate, then modernity will turn out to have been a very bad bargain indeed. The destruction of any movement towards other ways of being modern will then turn out to have been the greatest historical tragedy of the mall.