Meno: How far, and this is reaching back to my undergraduate days in philosophy, would the categorical imperative take us here as a guide to action. If I recall, translating it to fit this situation it says "I don't undertake any action except that I would wish to see it universalized to everyone in the world including me."
Plato: This is Kant's "Kingdom of Ends" principle where every human is an end onto himself.
Parmenides: A sub-version to that is "Always treat people as ends, never as means."
Gorgias: Which may not be a sub- version.
Plato: Right.
Gorgias: It might be a different principle.
Plato: Whether you approached it like W.D. Ross or Kant, what you have described is in fact, the process or scenario in which one would hope that a liberal society that goes beyond a mere neutral-liberalism or procedural liberalism could evolve.
Socrates: Furthermore... there is an important consideration when we are looking at the emergence out of the l8th, l9th century, in Kant's case, the last of the 18th of a new argument for universalism, that is to say, a new idea of liberalism specifically in the moral life. And incidentally I'm wondering if Kant himself wouldn't think, as I do,...
Laches: Are you suggesting Kant ought to think that way?
Socrates: All modesty prevents me from saying so. Anyway, I believeit is Kant's idea that the argument between absolutism and relativism is a misplaced argument. The absolutist wants to set it up that there is no middle ground between absolutism and relativism and certainly conceptually speaking you would have to say, yes of course, that's true.
But, it seems to me the critical question as Kant saw it dealing with the whole notion of rationality (for which he doesn't produce any argument) is that there are either universal moral, ethical principles -- or there are not.
Well, can you possibly make the case for there being no principles, no universal moral principles? Well, if you are going to put it this way, then you will concentrate not on moral principles, but on moral actions. This is the reason for the emphasis that Kant and others put on practical reason
Say torture is always bad. Can you find the exceptions, instances of people doing things which show that they believe that torture is sometimes legitimate. Well, what principle would cover this? Is there an umbrella principle that covers this? What kind of a case could a person make, say torturing children is sometimes wrong, but it's necessary in the light of another good. Well, what is that other good? And, is that good such that you would be irrational, as well as immoral if you didn't honor it. There is an effort on thepart of Kant there to turn the argument away from the question of the "absolute", to the question of the "universal". This avoids for all practical purposes the dispute between absolute and relative which bogs down a lot of talk about morality.
Parmenides: Your point here is that the universal is "torturing children under normal circumstances is wrong," although there are exceptions, like necessity, say to save others but that only proves the rule... it doesn't defeat the rule.
The specific circumstances that override are so exceptional and so specifically defined from the moral point of view as not to represent any universal threat to the validity of the principle
Meno: The universal permits of these kinds of exceptions... very rarely, but the absolute does not.
Socrates: It isn't the universal that "permits" exceptions; it is the human situation that "permits", or perhaps better to say, "sometimes requires" exceptions to the universal.
In other words, there is no circumstance in which anybody could conceivably say torturing a child is a good thing. Under no circumstances could anybody say that. You might say in a given situation that it had to be done.
Parmenides: But this means that wherever it's done, it accrues guilt to the parties who had to do it. Which is, by the way, what Kant said.
He gives in the Metaphysics of Morals the story about the two sailors, in which his argument is, you might go ahead and do it, but you will have to bear the legal consequences of having done it.
Meno: I do agree that the real opposite of relativism is universalism. But it is interesting to take careful note of what is being said here in terms of the actual language used. When Parmenides states in absolute terms, the rule about torturing for political purposes, he doesn't say the same thing as Socrates is saying. Socrates says, there is no circumstance under which you can say that torturing a child is a good thing. Parmenides says, to torture a child for political reasons is wrong. He builds in a clause that stating a specific context that makes it possible to tighten it up...
Parmenides: I have so restricted the character of the act of torture, for certain specific objectives as to make it absolute. Now whether that is illicit philosophically I suppose is an interesting question. In other words, you said in effect, to do torture or life-taking of the sort that Hitler did, is always and everywhere wrong, because there is no, no competitive principle which would justify, even necessity couldn't justify.
Socrates: Be careful with justifications based on necessity. Necessity is not a principle: it is a recognition of a state of affairs.
When you say the human condition requires that something be done that is contrary to the moral good, you are not saying that a competing principle or a competing good has overridden the moral rule.
Gorgias: I am very sympathetic with what you are trying to do. I agree that this whole absolute/relativism issue is one that we have to short circuit, to do an end run around -- and we are trying to do that in some way here.
But your particular way of doing it, seems to me to fall back a bit too much onto the exceptionalist rule, trumped only by necessity which is not a moral good. I would prefer to see a competing moral good. If you're going to make an exception, you do it explicitly in terms of another moral good, not just necessity in a non-moral sense, but in order to avoid some even more terrible catastrophe morally, like your example, it may be to avoid an even greater torture of children...And there may be some other kinds of moral necessity.
Meno: I am thinking that the dirty hands issue applies even where you don't want to say we do it for some narrowly political goal. There is some other moral good and we are forced to do it... it's bad, but we are still held culpable for it.
Socrates: That's right, the guilt factor needs to be held on to.
Charmides: That might hold for Kant and others of similar persuasion but it doesn't hold for all schools of moral philosophy. I had an interesting discussion with Tom Beauchamp on this issue, and he's a utilitarian of course. I said, suppose you've got a situation of trade-offs like the ones we have been talking about and you've done the best that can be done under the circumstance... do you have any reason to have guilt feelings in this circumstance?
He said no.
This showed the degree to which utilitarianism is so relentlessly forward in the future. Whereas in W.D.Ross who is more of an Aristotelian, where you've got these pluralistic principles competing, you also have the retrospective problem in ethics, and that is duties of reparation. The utilitarian cannot conceive really of duties of reparation.
Gorgias: And, what we are talking about here, even though all this sounds pretty abstract and far from the real world problems this is the fundamental issue that society is wrestling with right now as the political vision which umbrella of Liberal falls apart and is dismantled.
Whether it is W.D. Ross in the 1930's or Martha Nussbaum or Amartya Sen, more contemporary Aristotleians, or whomever, the kind of pluralistic vision of the good in which all of these are dimensions that must be taken into consideration in practical reasoning about moral political action. And while some of these goods may almost always be applied, because there is a plurality of goods, there is always the possibility of outweighing one in favor of another.
Plato: One warning note, I am not sure that you want to tie the few absolutes you have, if you really want to call them that, to the great majority of things which are applied "in most those circumstances". Because you still want to avoid, even if you if want to admit a plurality of notions of goods, you still want to have some limits to the plurality.
Parmenides: I am wary of too talk about plurality of goods and so on, because it seems to open you to limitless possibilities morally speaking. And it seems to be the advance we've made by now would be with the human rights literature is precisely to constrain in a very, very important way the range within which goods may be adjusted to each other.
Gorgias: Absolutely! Can we say that here is one instance of where there is an absolute -- a limit to the plurality of goods that count as moral goods.
Laches: How do you define those limits; do you have a code of some sort?
Parmenides: In the Human Rights area we have the limits set within human rights documents. I mean there are certain absolute prohibitions like torture, like arbitrary killing, enslavement, etc., those are by now relatively well- institutionalized...
Gorgias: And we Aristotelians want to link those rights to certain features of human well-being or good living... which those rights are designed to protect and nurture...
Parmenides: Features of human well being which, of course, the rights will not themselves supply. I certainly agree with that. Because just observing these rights will not solve all the moral problems.
Plato: You would agree with this general sketch of things... wouldn't you? That there is a fundamental set of universal principles, of non- derogable rights attached to notions of certain goods, that must be assumed by any good society -- you would agree wouldn't you that these are non-variable? Because I would have thought the Lockean tradition that some assumptions of that kind are very, very important and those are the things that one could espouse and say look, these are assumptions which you can't take or leave as you see fit, they are assumptions of any good society, and so forth.
Socrates: Yes, it seems to me that something like this is crucial. Parmenides: How about the idea of freedom as a basic good? People must think of themselves as free in order to act morally.
Meno: Which means that the whole thing about liberalism, even neutral liberalism, at bottom relies upon some kind of background belief about what the self is like, isn't that the case?
Laches: And does this notion of a free self rest on a notion of God and immortality so that Kant's other two requirements come back in here?
Socrates: Yes, probably, but Laches, let's hold your point to one side for a moment. The whole notion of the self is an issue we haven't talked about, either head on or obliquely. Namely, the imperial role in human life of the image of self as distinguished from a doctrine or a theory of theself. It is entirely possible that the image or representations of the self in what we call liberalism is fundamentally different from the image of the self in the middle of 19th century when the political economic ideas we live under evolved.
Parmenides: You mean Jeremy Bentham? Whom do you include in there Mill?
Socrates: I am referring to the playing out of liberalism in Britain, the history of the Liberal party in Britain.
Gorgias: Philosophically, T.H. Green and Hobhouse.
Socrates: Well, as critics of the liberal party
Gorgias: As critics trying to move to a more socialist position.
Socrates: For example, an economics writer in the Post recently saying we have to recapture and regain the true meaning of Liberalism with a rededication to Laissez-Faire. But this is only one form of Liberalism it doesn't go back to Locke or anyone who is associated.
Meno: Manchester Liberalism?
Socrates: Yes. It doesn't even track back to Adam Smith.
Protagoras: I look at it in a metaphorical way, that the Liberal tradition grew out of a certain moral substrata or moral soil made up of moral individuals -- at least individuals who knew what being being moral was even if they didn't always live up to it -- and that if that moral soil is not refurbished, than the liberal tradition will not continue to blossom. And, we have all reaped wonderful benefits from the liberal tradition, wonderful fruits. But, that's a product of the moral substrate, of the moral soil that has to be regenerated. Liberalism is failing in recreating the moral subsoil.
Meno: And you say moral individuals can not be regenerated through the liberal tradition?
Protagoras: I am not saying they can't. Individuals can be regenerated through liberalism, I am saying they haven't been. The liberal tradition has got to figure out a new way to generate a moral substratum, a moral soil.
Gorgias: It is not a matter of focusing either on individuals or on institutions. Liberal institutions are necessary but not sufficient. You need moral individuals to make the institutions work.
Parmenides: I wouldn't disagree.
Protagoras: Society has to concentrate on what is a proper moral substrate for moral individuals. I don't think institutional arrangements of any kind are going to make individuals more or less moral unless the individual allows that to happen. Whether it is welfare institutions or new managed care rules for doctors, whether or not institutions dictate morality depends on factors such as parental love, a decent educational environment for nurturing and educating children. These are the kinds of issues that liberal tradition has got to address. The basic moral issues, what is the moral substrate for moral individuals?
Meno: How do you form the moral substratum for the Liberal tradition?
Socrates: We know how that was formulated at one point in our personal history and not just our public histories. And it involves a linguistic turn of a sort from the discussion we have been having. We have been focusing on "goods" and a plurality of goods. But up until recently we were never told about a plurality of goods. We were told about, I don't want to say a system, we were told about our duties. So, clashes with the moral question for many of us came up in the questions "What must I do?" In other words what is my duty? "Is there an overriding duty which settles the question of conflicts among duties?" We were never told about goods.
And when we were children, there was no hard and fast line drawn at all, between morals and manners. People got angry when we used, to cite a trivial example, when we used the wrong fork at the dinner table. But this was different sort of anger than when we failed to come clean with the truth. So, even when we were very young, we were aware that there was a difference between good manners and being morally good. Because the penalties, the sanctions were so different. People would get irritated with you for bad manners. But when those bad manners involved showing disrespect for someone you ought to respect, no one had to say that this is a moral question. When the moral language came into play upon us we realized in terms of the sanctions involved, that breaking a moral rule is a more serious matter than the breaking of any other rule. So, plurality of goods wouldn't have made much sense to us. But, morality of duties and conflicts among duties would have made sense.
On other hand, we had an optimistic reading of this situation, in that there are no real conflicts of duties, once you understand the nature and source of duty.
Protagoras: A good Kantian at this point?
Socrates: Yes, exactly. Although as children, or for that matter our parents, wouldn't necessarily have had the slightest notion of who Kant was, or cared. But his ideas seem to fit for what passed as common sense.
Parmenides: That is what Kant himself claimed, that is, that his system was just common moral sense.
Socrates: The idea of the self is that there is some built in sense of duty which defines your very being, this is what Kant was talking about, the image of the self free to recognize ones duties, self-determining in relation to the right and the good. Adam Smith might have been saying something similar about the moral self with his ideas of the moral sentiments. That's a very different notion of the self from what the Washington Post writer would call liberalism. For him the liberal, in terms of the image of the self, is a human being dominated by his appetites and instincts, not free, but a slave to emotions and instincts, particularly, in this age of consumerism, to the instincts of acquisitiveness.
Protagoras: A rational actor in the modern economic sense.
Socrates: Well, the whole idea of human reason at this point obviously is in the economic sense of pure instrumental reason.
Parmenides: Of course. The whole idea of rationality changed from the one that used to prevail.
Gorgias: In our economic liberal tradition itself, in Adam Smith and in the political economists of the 18th century, before utilitarian thinking took hold, you get a much richer view of the self as a being with notions of duty and moral sentiments, not just instincts and passions. It's been lost. By the way, Stephen Holmes' book on liberalism here goes back to show that the kind of liberalism that laissez faire enthusiasts are nostalgic for never existed. And, so that's a kind of 20th century construction that loses the richness that of even an Adam Smith.
Meno: Keynes was very much aware of this point too. In the 1920's he saw where Liberalism was being hijacked by economic utilitarian thinking and saw how the business and finance people could then carry out the program. He was very worried about that. But he had great confidence in the moral and intellectual forces in both the Conservative and Liberal parties to prevent this from coming about. But how do you stop it now if you have intellectual and moral bankruptcy in our political leadership? Even if the political leaders were to try to do something how can you introduce these ideas into market institutions and into business and financial decision making when so much is based on quantitative thinking and on computer programs?
Thrasymachus: There is something else that has come in here that we haven't discussed either. And that is the enormous impact in this country, perhaps rather more than in Europe and Britain, certainly enormously powerful in this country, of the concept of Darwinian evolution and its application to the social sphere in Social Darwinism. And so with the impoverished notion of the self and utilitarian thinking you get present day laissez faire liberalism with its celebration and adoration of the free market.
Plato: Competition as a paradigm for explaining "chance" in the universe.
Socrates: Our society is just inches away from late 19th century Social Darwinism. The readiness of some Republican policy makers at this point, whatever they say, that they're not going to sacrifice the children, or the poor, etc. I think the substratum that you talk about is at risk. This is the conviction: "there are people, the poor, who do not deserve to be taken care of." And, that's an excrescence of the view, that the human condition as such is that there are some people who are born to be losers, and you know that from the simple fact that they lose.
Gorgias: And it's not just the New York Jets that are losers?
Parmenides: Winner takes all... Loser's take nothing...
Socrates: So, something happened in moral education in this country unquestionably. Here you've got the notion, the utilitarian notion, that the choices are always a question of preferences. And, so social policy must be based on the idea of a human as having preferences, not duties, and it is okay if some people lose out because it is in the order of things that they were bound to lose.
Gorgias: I want to return to one thing as we are looking at the roots of economic liberalism. Is it possible to try to reinvigorate the economic liberal tradition, maybe make it a more a "purposive liberalism" rather than the more neutral liberalism? Or do we have to junk it altogether?
My question relates to Charmides' worry about international context. We've got an explosion of interest in something called liberalism that is occurring around the world. In taking different forms, usually a political movement trying to throw off a totalitarian oppressive structure, whether it be Poland, Chile or Guatemala, for which liberalism and civil society is opening all sorts of exciting doors particularly on the political front, some kind of democracy, certainly a commitment to human rights - a good liberalism.
This isn't a cultural issue, in any obvious kind of sense at least. And, you've got to be aware of the genetic fallacy and aware of the easy criticism of cultural imperialism. We've got strong Democratic liberals that are existing in each of these countries. I think Parmenide's responses were useful in that we want to recognize that the proponents of good liberalism exist around the world.
But, on the other hand, we also have a great worry that something else that flies under the banner of liberalism is completely inadequate for what these countries are looking for. This explosion of liberalism usually also involves some kind of laissez faire economic liberalism, a free market which is introducing some bad things in these countries, growing social dislocation for the vast majority of the population and great wealth for small numbers. For example, my Russian students say, we don't want liberalism if that means an unfettered free market.
Charmides: They may not want it, but they may get it anyway.
Gorgias: They are afraid it will tear apart their society. So, they are, in a way, participating in their version of the debate that we are having here. We do not want to ignore the critics of good liberalism around the world because they are basing their criticisms on the bad effects of the laissez faire economic liberalism.
Meno: Even though they don't always use the same kind of language,
there are these same tendencies in South Korea, and in Thailand, the little Tigers that are celebrated as such great economic success stories.
Gorgias: Well, you're turning away from the normative into the descriptive and to the forces that are at work. You've got very massive forces both international and national that want to reject the good kind of liberalism that we are talking about, the respect for civil and political rights and pushing for an economic revolution. And some people, I got this on the Internet from a former Pakistani student yesterday saying, "I'm sorry folks, but in order to get to what Chile's got now, they had to go through Pinochet and that's going to be the path of blood that we are all going to have to go through it... we don't want that as an end, but that is going to be an indispensable means."
Charmides: The ill effects of the unfettered free market are not just limited to developing countries. There is considerable social dislocation in the developed countries. And what worries me is the declining power of labor and the inability of workers, workers generally, and in many cases the middle class, to be effective in any way in countering these trends.
Things are happening to them at such a fast pace and they no longer seem to be able to make rational decisions about their lives. And this, it seems to me, is a great danger to liberal societies, to the liberal project as a whole. The liberal project depends upon all the members of the community having a certain amount of power, of economic power, over their own lives. The independent yeoman of Locke and the independent small farmer of Jefferson are examples of this thinking.
People no longer have control over their own economic lives because of the degree to which they as workers have become the same and interchangeable, in Mexico, Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, the United States... To that degree there can be this vicious combination of Social Darwinism and rational calculation among those who control capital. That, it seems to is the real danger.
You say it is still only descriptive, and that is probably right, describing a state of affairs, but certain normative conclusions fall into place rather quickly. Something must be done in controlling this trend of international control of capital if anything like liberal principles as we have known them are to have any future.
Meno: Here I think we are coming back to a central point, how are we to define the thicker theory of the good? A thicker definition of the goods that society holds dear would act as a check on the tendencies of economic liberalism run amok, a check on an unfettered free market. I think we are agreed on individual human rights political and civil, as say, enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights. Of course, further dialogue has extended the notion to economic rights, social rights, collective rights, etc. Whether they are called rights or goods at this point is not a matter of great importance. We need to have a list of things that the individuals that make up society hold to be of utmost importance in protecting themselves and others from the encroachment of the institutions of society.
And the duties that Socrates mentioned come in here as our mutual pledge to each other as human beings to help insure that these goods are available in some measure to all.
Does that become part of the matrix... part of the definition of the goods that we're talking about here?
Charmides: You bet.
Protagoras: Yes, I think so. I think much of this coming together is already foreshadowed in the Human Rights debates. I think we see in Cairo, as much as anything, a kind of international consensus forming, at Cairo about population and in Rio on the environment.
Even as much as these are purely documentary and in some sense fragile and almost powerless against some of the empirical forces of internationalization of capital that we have identified, I think they do indicate a mobilizing of international opinion...
Parmenides: But, they are not entirely powerless and I think here you have to identify some good stories.
Meno: I think you would find if you assessed the situation carefully, you get a very large consensus around a narrower definition of human rights. As you expand it, the job becomes harder.
Parmenides: It breaks down between the countries that want to confine the human rights debate to political/civil rights and those that emphasize economic and social rights. In many ways the people themselves in all countries are caught in between, they need both. More debate will be required to force the political leaders in both types of countries to come to terms.
Gorgias: And that is where the debate is going.
Meno: Come back to the point that common wisdom says that getting civil/political rights, what we know as political liberalism, to travel internationally, in a way rests on economic power, on economic growth, to a certain extent. Throw in the Pakistani student who says the developing countries are going to have to their own version of Pinochet make it to the point where we can instantiate a liberal policy, you have to have an economic efficiency of a certain level. Throw in the idea that Social Darwinism, sort of the dark underside of laissez faire liberalism, is necessary to achieve that economic efficiency and a certain kind of liberalism. We are back, aren't we, and talking about the identification of certain groups of people that are inefficient and surplus in one way or another, and genocide as a vehicle means to liberalism. This is polite way of allowing to happen what happened in Rwanda which the West describes as so savage. But our sort of winner take all, economic darwinism looks pretty brutal and savage to the developing countries and it isn't surprising that they want no part of it.
Parmenides: The only way to stop it is to continue bringing up the question, What are the human costs of the economic efficiency route to liberalism? And that's where you've got to challenge individuals like the Pakistani student.
Thrasymachus: Using history as a teacher here. Consider the number of histories written on Franco's Spain, which say "we needed it, Franco kept the Communists out and moved us toward the Golden Age.
Parmenides: Well, I think someone needs to look squarely at all of the costs of economic development. I realize this isn't a novel idea but it is so hard to . I mean, take a case like Korea. I was at a conference recently where a young sociologist, a Korean, was arguing that there was way too much unnecessary, corruption and suppression and oppression for the kind of economic growth that has taken place. He was challenging the sort of standard line that if you want to get economic growth, you'll have to pay the price in social disruption human lives, in worker rights. He was really challenging that very forcefully.
I don't know if the recent developments in regards to the treatment of these former officials in South Korea is any confirmation of a sort of backlash against the economic , you'd have to look at that. These former leaders, heroes of the economic miracle, are being indicted and are going to be tried for the kind of oppression. That would seem to indicate that the at least the judicial system is not saying, oh well, we really needed them, like Spain needed Franco, they were required for our economic development, so we'll overlook and forgive their miscreancies. The Koreans are not overlooking them.
Charmides: But, Parmenides, it does seem to me that you and Gorgias have been taking what might be construed as somewhat of an optimistic line for the last few minutes here with respect to this question. As if debate and a mobilizing of international opinion has a reasonable chance of having any effect.
Think in this connection about the analysis that we started out at one point with disparity in income levels in the United States. We remarked and deplored the upward trend in executive salaries and the flattening of the salaries of the middle and decline at the lower levels. But we didn't know what we could do about.
This growing disparity has to do with where we are in the international scene relative to wage levels in the developing countries. That is, the competitive situation of the average American worker is so much worse and will probably continue to worsen, if in fact, economic development continues in the developing world. The hard core manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. What you see here is a mushrooming of essentially low paying service job, service entry jobs and with information technology, technical jobs.
What can we do about all this? Or to put it another way, it seems like the workers in this country can't do anything about this trend. And they, and we. have much of the capital under our jurisdiction so to speak. In fact the pension funds of the workers control a significant amount of the capital that we are talking about.
What I am asking is if they can't really do anything, how will international opinion have any effect? I am just asking an open question, I don't have any answers.
Meno: Things will get worse in the American political scene before things get better. Maybe that is something that hasn't happened since the Depression. It does seem to portend a period of greater general dissatisfaction which as we've seen translates into dissatisfaction of the processes of government and of institutions, as well as.... I mean, everybody is clear-headed about the fact people are not saying to themselves, oh well, people in other parts of the world are developing, and they have better jobs than they had, so therefore I should feel better about losing my job or not having better pay raises. Americans are not likely, in their present perception of things, to be very philosophical about this trend.
Parmenides: In fact, the people overseas themselves don't really come out with a better jobs. That is one of the conclusions of the human rights reports regarding workers conditions in Asia, for example. Employment conditions in most situations are getting worse, not better. Precisely because of the foreign investment in a way. In other words, people pick these places because their working conditions are poor and the wages are low and they can get a better profit out of that, so they are exploiting, you could say quite strictly, bad labor situations. That is happening in China and that is certainly happening in Thailand to a degree. So, that is one of the problems. The workers are not better off anywhere. The question is really, who is better off?
The American workers can't be expected to bear the costs of international development if capital holders derive the benefit. They might be willing to bear a share of the burden if capital stepped up to its own responsibilities. How will that be brought about and I suppose that is the thrust of your question Charmides.
My own response... I just don't see too many options. You have got to get a handle this internationally, and begin to impose restraints. Michael Lind has some ideas about social tariffs which would be internationalized and so on. And whether those are good solutions are not, I don't know. But it seems to me your general response has got to be in the form of international restraining responses to market forces, in one way or another, which will then have impacts all around. You can't just do it here in America. You're going to have do it over there as well so, you can impact the situation here. You are going to have approach it in some kind of internationally restrictive way through international institutions... There are certain world trade organizations, world banking organizations but there are already beginning to be international restrictions on the kinds of investments and so on that one could engage in. Now, I would think the only way to go is to enforce those, to broaden them, to intensify them. In some fashion or another.
Plato: Charmides' question as I understand it, bears also on the situation of the American labor force and looking at the political leadership of this country and the direction that it is going in. Obviously, the workers in Detroit or wherever know that even with their lower paying jobs, in comparison with the workers in Mexico or in Asia they are infinitely better off. Is the worker better off in relation to the German labor force? The unemployment is less here than there.
I think the American worker, typically, even if he is a college graduate, is likely to say that he is not so much concerned about the situation of workers in other countries. He wants to know why with two of them working in their families, they are so much worse off than the previous generation.
Laches: Two working. By the way, a very important point on the question of social problems and problems in the schools. Two working, nobody home.
Socrates: The question on the minds of most is what can be done about my situation? Resentment seems growing fast. I am reminded of the basis of the distinction in Hume between envy and resentment. Envy is purely self-regarding. As a political force, it's negligible. But, resentment isn't simply self-regarding. It is formed in comparison with the others. The workers see the disparities growing and no one in the political sphere, except Pat Buchanan, is saying or doing very much about it. The workers resent what's happening to others. And, resentment is an enormous pool for social change. It's out of resentment that some revolutions come.
Laches: Is it the general sense that resentment is growing now?
Meno: The question is in looking around, how could it not be growing?
Protagoras: The election of 1994 would seem to be an indicator of resentment expressed in the direction of the political institutions.
Thrasymachus: The problem with resentment as a political force is that it is strong enough to throw the rascals out, but very hard to sustain in politics.
Charmenides: And produce solutions and put together positive programs, because it doesn't have a positive ideology. Because, it is inherently unstable, volatile.
Plato: And you can't just solve the domestic political problem because that leaves seething broil in the developing countries, of subsistence economies, a terrible toll in human life.
Parmenides: That was my point with suggesting international response. You can't address the American problem by looking only at America.
Charmides: But isn't this optimistic? This presumes a sort of liberal outlook on the part of the many countries involved and that is based here with respect to the kind of liberal society and liberal polity that we have here in the United States and some presumption that we will lead the way and sacrifices will be made.
So, what if that polity goes all to hell, as it seems to be doing under the pressure of current economic circumstances. That is why I said it sound somewhat optimistic.
Parmenides: Well, Charmenides you were asking for a solution. It may seem optimistic, but what possible solutions could there be. I am giving you a preliminary sketch of the way I would think, cutting to the chase, the problem would have to be solved. In order to protect all of the things that we hold dear.
Meno: But Parmenides, in order to see Charmides point, suppose we come at the optimism question in another way. Suppose, a consensus would gather and say, okay, international constraints sound like a good way to go. But clearly there would be a significant impact on capital holders in the United States. Now think about the domestic pain index that goes along with it.
Parmenides: Well, we would have to look at that, I agree.
Plato: When we talk about pain index, we think in relation to workers. Right from the start, we think of workers in assembly lines. But this problems involves all classes of workers, managers, even senior managers of nice sized companies that are doing all right. They live in "fear and despair", in a sense, that their jobs could be gone next month. So, the problem does not have to do so much with a single class of employee anymore.
Meno: What you are talking about entails, ultimately a Brazilianization of our society. That our metropolitan areas will become, even more than they are now, places around which there is an invisible fence in which certainly no upper class people live, they live in the satellite cities. So, an inner city in which the population is consigned to large scale unemployment relying on welfare benefits that are increasingly held back and in which there is urban warfare going on... That's okay, as long as they don't spill out. The question becomes, can we hire enough police and build enough prisons to prevent this spilling out?
Thrasymachus: Well, I am sobered by the willingness of American people not to be troubled by the immense real walls, not the imaginary walls that we are building in our isolated communities, but the real prison walls, the growth of the prison population. It's extraordinary. Just think what we are doing, what we've been doing in the way of investment in prison systems. Not shooting them but carting them off to places they will kept. The highest rates of incarceration per capita in the world.
Meno: This is where the pain index doesn't just mean, in an abstract way, okay some people are going to suffer, some will have dislocation and so on. But in terms of defining certain people as out for a variety of social Darwinism, people, if you want to use that term become surplus. If you want to talk about the elimination of certain populations, already all de-humanized then in certain ways.
Thrasymachus: What does that do then to liberalism as a political institution.
Parmenides: I think that is a profound question.
Laches: And all those people who do not end up in the prison systems, you may have to pay them welfare but you still will not have a job for them.
Parmenides: I understand. And you can't just solve this problem in one country. Protecting the workers of in California or Detroit , I allow is to happen in Mexico City, Seoul or Rio, what I just described as happening to America's cities.
Michael Lind has it that the only way you can really handle full employment, that is meaningful employment, is by getting a handle on these differential labor markets all over the world. Until you've raised everybody, so to speak, across the world to roughly the same standards so there won't be the temptation to leave Detroit and go to Seoul Korea or something. And that will only be changed when you get regulations of international sort that protect workers all over the place...
Plato: On the international front, this trend we are on has terrorism increasing as peoples who have nothing left to lose become disenchanted with liberalism and try to figure out how to bring the whole system down hoping that after the break-up they might find a piece lying around for them.
Can controllers of capital enjoy their privileged positions in a world such as this? I would like to think that a general concern for society will motivate some but if not, fear of these scenarios may begin to motivate the capital holders to make the necessary economic adjustments?
Meno: If they don't do it out of a sense of duty or fairness, they may do it out of fear, you are right.
Plato: The question has focused on who is to blame for the current situation. Since politicians have been claiming credit for the economy, which is a questionable claim, the blame and resentment have been focused mostly on the politicians and the beneficiaries of political structures they set up, welfare, affirmative action, etc..
The question is now moving to who is benefitting from the current situation and this is where resentment will increasingly be focused. The Pat Buchanan candidacy showed that.
Well, who is benefitting? The answer is people who hold, control or move capital. but this is a relatively small group of people so they cannot for very long control democratic processes. Thesituation has to become less democratic for them to hold power and it is in fact doing that. As we were saying earlier, to some extent this capital holding group is a disproportionately older group, those who are locked into pension plans and indexed social security payments. This group has got to be persuaded that the current institutions which benefit them disproportionately both in comparison to their fellow citizens and the rest of the world are a relic of an economic circumstance that has now disappeared. In that they hold the benefits, they must bear a part of the burden and help support the economic adjustments that have to take place.
Parmenides: I agree...that this will have to be taken into account. Something like this will have to be undertaken, rationally and thoughtfully and all... if you are going to get a handle on the questions that face us.
Plato: And given what is happening in the rest of the world, and what needs to happen to bring everyone up to the standards of a decent life which fits the liberal notion of a human being, the American workers and managers are also going to have to scale back significantly.
The solution may be to appeal to them on the political level of a common sacrifice. I would say shared sacrifice but I want to be careful to stay away from Perot terms because I have in mind something very different in scope. It certainly will not be as politically appealing as "we can give you a nice home of your own, two cars in your driveway and a decent amount of leisure" as in past times. But it might be something like "we will relieve this sense of precariousness of the institutions and restore some sense of trust. Put a little bit of economic security back."
The hope is that you can appeal to the American electorate on that basis.
Meno: And how would you do that Plato? Along the lines of stating the facts of the current situation, show how everybody is in this together and describe how such a transition might take place with the promise that people would begin to feel more secure about their lives even though they have less?
Plato: That would be the general approach. Partisan politics is a barrier to the sort of careful appeals that have to be made.
Laches: Well, the politicians that say these things better take a close look at the Walter Mondale Presidential candidacy in 1984. There is little question in hindsight that he was right, but he misgauged the capacity of the American electorate to accept the truth. Hopefully, reality has taught some lessons but the importance of preparing and educating the electorate for a tough message cannot be overestimated.
Plato: I think a candid appeal to the electorate is only part of the solution. Taking the economist's rather than a politicians' viewpoint on this, It seems to me that we may be talking ultimately about restrictions on the mobility of capital implemented above the heads, so to speak, of electoral politics. These are difficult concepts for experts to fathom, let alone for political candidates to educate the general electorate on.
Part of the problem is that the people no longer trust the political experts to make these judgments for them. By coming clean with the facts at least, the politicians begin to regain credibility and restore some confidence in the institutions so they can begin to do what they think is right even when it can't be explained in soundbytes.
Parmenides: Yes, that's exactly right.
Meno: Whether it's through worker ownerships, social tariffs, or other forms of social policy, restructuring of GATT, making sure NAFTA works the way it is supposed to, using protectionism if necessary.
Laches: You have to deal with entrenched interests, a formidable force to try deal with.
Plato: The problem at the center though, making it very hard for individual governments to respond, is the mobility of capital.
Parmenides: There you are.
Gorgias: But, I think one of the things that we need to say is that there is no one solution.. What I hear Parmenides saying is that the international context is so important that we've got to look for solutions there. And yet what I hear Meno saying is that whatever kind of politics, new liberalism whatever if it is going to work, it's got to take into account the pain involved. We need to kind of work on both sides of the problem at once.
And we have to take advantage of current trends.
I'd like to pick up on the points about underclass unemployment, temptation of crime kind of issue here and return to the crisis metaphor, as representing both opportunity and danger together at the same time.
We want to seize the opportunity and avoid the danger. There may be an opportunity that is coming that we may be able to seize and we may not be able to seize with the privatization, getting the government out of all of this stuff. and maybe we can take advantage of 20 years of international development experience at this point, community-based cooperative movements. Organizing themselves in such a way that they deal with their local problems with some kinds of outside support but not totally reliant leaving them open to questions of long range sustainability and all. And, we have today a new project right now in Baltimore which is trying to apply some of the international lessons about community based development projects. My sense is that there is an awful lot of criticism, much of it justified, of the "dependency creating" welfare programs that we've had in the past. They primarily operate on a one-to-one or family basis and require a huge bureaucracy, rather than in a sense of generating some of the resources of the village or of the community or of the neighborhood.
And, churches right now and other community groups are going to be called upon as never before because government is pulling out of a lot of stuff to help in this project of job generation, training, literacy campaigns, teenage pregnancy issues. Now, here is civil society, the good part of it concerned for the well-being of the community. Is there going to be an opportunity in the next few years where government is retrenching and is out of the situation where churches and other voluntary associations, sometimes working together, sometimes at odds with each other, to fill the void. One of the problems is in funding to keep these efforts supported at some level presumably the needs would be well below current levels.
Charmides: And, another problem is coverage. Because it will be spotty. You've something neat going on over here in one part of the town, but the rest of the city is going to the dogs.
Pythagroras: The other problem is time. I am not so optimistic about what might happen when we leave these to voluntary organizations.
You have both family members working and traditionally the churches depend upon the woman to annex the whole family and if the woman is exhausted, then you've got a real problem. You know, Oscar Wilde's old line the trouble about socialism, well it may apply to current forms of capitalism "that there are no free evenings" there is no time to do this kind of voluntary stuff.
You need time as well as money.
Gorgias: But I think we may need to make a virtue of necessity at this point and recognize that privatization and governmental retrenchment is the spirit of the time and , whether it likes it or not, it's going to have an awful lot of challenge and how do we go about doing some of these things.
Meno: That's good, might there be a role for church hierarchy or leadership?
Gorgias: I am not sure... my inclination here is to think that the best of these has a strong grass roots basis. On the other hand, certainly seeing the role of the outside facilitator, innovator, funder, but having to be set up in such a way that dependency is avoided. I think this is an area of social experimentation... we have got a lot of things that had been on the scene for many years, some have worked, some have not worked.
Meno: I guess I was thinking then about the institutions taking advantage of grass roots initiative, but at the same time, the role for leading and nurturing from the top to encourage local congregations.
Laches: But with all due respect to the hierarchy, I think I would want to quote Shakespeare out of context and say "let us begin by hanging the bishops."
Meno: Let's pursue that point, Laches. I thought we were seeking religious sources. Is the risk of trying to get the Bishops engaged in this effort that they could stifle it?
Laches: Oh well, the Bishops would be interested in proclamations of one sort of another. Very high sounding reports of commissions, etc., etc. And, it pains me to think they allow this stuff on microfiche but it is almost totally irrelevant.
Charmides: Well it does strike me too, that it is interesting that when we start talking about churches as one example of a mid-level or intermediating association. But then, you have to acknowledge in the case of some of the churches at least, some of the Protestant denominations that have sustained liberalism, throughout this century in the United States... are best characterized by that
Doonesbury's cartoon, you know where the minister is up there preaching away and he says, "it's an important moment for those of us in the ecumenical Protestant churches because people are tired of the nihilism of one side and the over-aggressive claims of the other side. Now, it's time for our message that the Kingdom of God and the fellowship of all people is at hand. Brothers and sisters," he says, "our time has come". And to go to the pew and there is one voice coming up here saying, "thank goodness it's now". There is only one person sitting in the entire church-
I mean those mainstream Protestant institutions are suffering for lack of a followership.
Parmenides: For this and other reasons I don't think we want to give in too quickly on the de-valuation of the governmental role in solving these problems. If they are due to global and macro economic forces, community based activities might be no match.
Gorgias: I think last point is important because if you are going to identify efforts in the civil society as stopgap measures, you don't want to see them as the final answers. The reform of the governing paradigm is still something to be worked on for the ultimate solution. It is just that right now politically, ideas like privatization are in vogue, and strategically it's important to work on this angle.
And, also on the use of the market forces. I mean you've got to find ways in which these community groups can be generating employment, opportunities from within the community, some incentives for corporations.
Parmenides: I agree with that.
Charmides: I am not sure that optimism is warranted in regards to taking advantage of current initiatives like privatization and solve problems by providing incentives to corporations.
Take the funding, coverage and time issues mentioned above. Capital controls all three. Capital chooses carefully, it puts funds into situations where the return it wants is there. If you put in subsidies to get capital into difficult situations then capital will get its return, but will anything have changed. Look at the misuse of tax-exempt municipal bonds. Originally intended to encourage manufacturing, by the time Congress finally restricted their usage law firms were using for expansion of their offices.
The time availability issue is controlled by capital as well, two working parents, longer days and workweeks. Juliet Schor's work shows how capital increasingly controls, our free time, our energy.
Protagoras: I agree with you, a terrific problem, not simply the money that the capital controls, but the fact is that the system demands so much of those in middle management levels particularly in time, I mean part of the winnowing down of staff is to increase the work load.
Laches: Doing more with less is not just a saying in government.
Charmides: The diminishment of social capital that corporations formerly provided for the community is part of the control of capital over time. For example, banks use to encourage employees to give 10% and more of their work time to civic and philanthropic activities. Giving back to the community.
Parmenides: The whole idea is gone.
Protagoras: When you are working from 8:30 until 9:30 at night; no time to invest in the community.
Parmenides: Very interesting that everything seems to come back to capital control.
Laches: So, capital hasn't changed? Is it the reaction of the individuals to the current situation?
Gorgias: Not necessarily... Even the CEO's who you hear then in various groups talk about their social policy, their ethics, plans and so on... They don't recognize what is happening might be a result of their activities, I don't think.
Meno: They think they are socially responsible.
Gorgias: At least the ones I was recently in a meeting with a great many CEO's and most of them are very well spoken. They seem to be sensitive to many questions having to do with social responsibility. But I don't think it is in their hands, either.
Charmides: That's the point.. that's the idea. Where the cost of their capital determines how they operate their company, the people who control decision making are those that set the cost of capital. And that is the investment banking, securities sales and research activities on Wall Street. They are in control of the capital markets right now.
Plato: And if capital is at the bottom of the problem, then capital with a conscience or capital with some sense of responsibility may be the only solution if we are going to keep the system of capitalism.
Thrasymachus: I think Herbert Reed in the "Grass Roots of Art" said the regarding the stages of Egyptian civilization and the construction of pyramids. "You have two types of art. One, the large scale, formal, geometrical art of the pyramid, at the same time you've got the naturalistic, lyrical small scale artists at work. Two very differing types.
Maybe something like that is needed right now, Both large scale and small scale responses to the problems at hand. Reforming the paradigm and policies of government is one angle of attack. Changing the attitudes of individuals on Wall Street is another, working on community development under the sponsorship of small scale institution and non-governmental organizations, churches and so forth.
Those who argue that you need some counter point to the bureaucracies and not just public bureaucracies, but also where large corporations are concerned are acknowledging the usefulness of public bureaucracies.
Protagoras: Socrates, do you see as relatively consistent the notion that chance is God? Now we talked about Social Darwinism today. That is a little different. It's a kind of soothing, rationale for my success and one tends to underestimate the chance side of it. I think Texas was forced to rejoin the human race at the point that oil prices dropped. They always assumed it was the superior entrepreneurial spirit in Texas that produced Texas as an exception not only to the nation, but to the world. And suddenly, they had to revisit, in a sense Machiavellian point, that it is not just "virtu," it's also "fortuna".
To return again to the underlying convictions, which is what you were after when we talked about "chance" and this Darwinian understanding of nature and history.
Would political leadership and moral leadership today have to sort out what underlies the resentment in order to mobilize us in ways that would restore health to the society. Because, beneath the resentment is the sense that, nature isn't simply driven by chance. There is also a sense that their human nature is being violated by the actions of other humans. It may be an act of natural and economic forces for oil prices to fall, but it is another for only some to bear the entire burden of this drop.
Likewise with the current situation. Some are doing quite well. And on the other side both parents have to work full throttle, they are scared about what the kids are up to, they are not even sure that full throttle will lead to a secure future, because the company will disappear and all the rest.
This experience of world and what some would see as Darwinian competition goes against what people sense at the same time as the world of their personal lives. After all, it seems to me, one on the distinguishing features of our humanity is not only the capacity to hold tools, but also to form relationships. There are a variety of ways in which one could work with the notion that in nature itself supports enduring ties, enduring commitments, and so forth. It is not just a competitive jungle.
And, there is a sense that my very nature is being outraged which leads to the resentment, the exasperation, the sense of being under pressures that are almost intolerable.
Somehow it seems to me that one has to dig down into the underlying problems that have generated resentment, including this false theology of a chance universe determined by competition. One has to convert the resentment and begin to develop sustained emotions, perceptions and interpretations that can sustain our common political life.
Socrates: I agree with almost all of that. It seems to me that we have to probe deeply. I am not simply speaking about the political activities in American society but about the larger situation.
A major part of what the underlying problem has to do with a what I would see as a theological pathology, and I really think it is theological. It would go roughly as follows, there are considerable differences in the attitude of the village and of the city about Pre-destination. I am not referring to any classical definition of this. Social Darwinism was the last gasp of one form of secular pre-destination, that is, that the powerful class was meant to rule. Not just in an economic order, but in a political order. This was the heritage of the powerful class. Well, it was a very crude business, but how did they know that this was their heritage? Because of the simple fact... here it is... this is ours, we are reaping the proper heritage of making America look big and powerful. The hero worship was right across the board of the captains of industries in the l9th century. These guys were the makers of history, and they were often regarded that way across political party lines. They were what made America.
And so, they were the instruments of a pre-destination at this point. But, see the underside of that was that the loser must have been made to lose. This also is pre-destined. How do we know this? Because they have lost out. The fact that it happened meant that it was meant to happen, again a very crude business.
I started out with distinction between the village and the city. Chance in the village in those years was a ponderable reality. This was real agriculture. You could be wiped out in l0 minutes in August by a hail storm. So, some took out hail insurance. There was a point at which they offered hail insurance as a public instrument sold through the state. Well, they were crowded out by private insurance companies. But, see just in l0 minutes, your year's work could be wiped out. I asked one of the big apple growers in Virginia once what he considered a fair break on the elements in terms of apple and peach crop. He said, three crops out of five, I would consider that a real break on the part of the forces of chance.
Now, bring this a down to our situation and I think you get this kind of a picture. The theological underside, the substratum of the Liberalism we want to applaud is the theology or metaphysics of the open universe. The universe may be tilted to the realization of the good for all. It may be, we can't be certain.
Laches: Not stacked in favor of the good for all?
Socrates: Not stacked. So, no one is playing with a stacked deck in his favor. we are playing by fair rules so far as the universe is concerned. And that is the best, the most that we can ask. A notion that one group is favored among others, that's a human corruption. Where in terms of God, He is no respecter of persons; he sends his showers on the just as well as the unjust, as the good book says.
So, that's the best we can offer is a fair chance. You see, now we come back to the notion of resentment. People are saying, what was once considered a fair chance in the village notion is no longer true. Look at the steel workers in Gary, Indiana, these men, you see, who were sustained not only by a very good wage and in fellowship of the union, there was a community and the church.
They were sustained by the prospect that their sons would do even better. Now, this was a marginal item in an agriculture community, if you were lucky you might be able to hand on a better farm or maybe in case of one man I knew who came as a peasant from Sweden, an awfully good farmer, he acquired enough farms to hand on a farm apiece to six of his children in his lifetime. Okay, so the notion of a stacked deck -- I think Oscar Schultz would say I thank God for what happened. But, he probably also would have said, you know the old joke, God is in control of all things, but you should have seen this place when only God was taking care of it. So it was God and Oscar.
But you see, the feeling of the young people now is that even with both members of the family working, they know that there will be nothing to hand on to their children, I mean, in terms of an inheritance. Furthermore, they know that those institutions which have made their lives significant, both in business and government, are now precarious. So, it isn't simply that they won't have any personal estate to hand on to an instrument of last will and testament. But, they wonder about the state of America. What is this inheritance that they have to pass on. And in which they believe they have been good and faithful stewards.
Gorgias: You know, there is a different kind of theological pathology in this country still and it is also very deep in Latin America as well that could be emerging at this point to keep political coalitions from forming. It is a form of fatalistic piety.
It runs this way. Even though things are really bad in the ways that we've described with respect to the prospects for my family and the future, they would say "my plight as in some unknown way, God's will. And, my Latin American friends often would say that you've got an inheritance of a view of Divine Providence and of Divine Activity which results in passivity. And, we've got to fight it. It's a kind of Other Worldliness that is bothersome. Oh well, God must know what he is doing. Somehow we will be provided for, or there will be a better to... I think your affirmation on the kind of open universe is very important corrective in this kind of thing. God does not foreordain losers, or winners.
I still hear this in this country, I think one of the attractions of fundamentalist revival, conservative revival in some way is to find a sanctification of our present ills. But, we've got very deep sources that come out of the Hispanic fatalist tradition in Latin America that reinforces this thinking even more. That was one of the difficulties in Latin America for the theology of liberation to go against that. Because the Liberation theologians want to say God is on the side of the poor and of those that are struggling for justice in the world and is opposed to your resignation and wants you to resist. That's a hard message to get across to a lot of people, and then the Pentacostalism and fundamentalism of a Protestant or Catholic Version has just mushroomed throughout Latin America as another escape from the struggle of daily life.
Socrates: But, you know, Pentacostalism is a deadly auxiliary in the problem of passivity in relation to the social order. Pentacostalism with it's insistence on the interior life of the Holy Spirit. I can have Jesus in my heart. Whatever happens to the world. The state of the world doesn't matter. It may matter negatively. Here is sin. I have Jesus here. Now to call this passivity is simply to call attention to the attitudes to the social order.
We have pretty much lived through this in this country, although it is still a very important form of America life, the idea is that we can change the world, Jesus is model and guide to change. Here we have Pat Robertson saying you have Jesus in your heart, but in the meantime, we also have this assignment from heaven to take over control of the civil state. But, we're not talking about that way I bet in South America. The Pentacostals are not saying, we are called upon to rule the world. Quite the contrary. We have Jesus in our hearts now and we will be with Jesus in the world to come. That's an enormously persuasive thing in people who in fact see no way out...
Parmenides: An understandable response to the description you gave earlier, now that the open universe appears to them to be closed down.
Gorgias: But, it's not the Robertson approach. You're quite right about that. He is taking a very different option. A very activist, aggressive approach.
Protagoras: But, I wonder if you don't have still another kind of theological pathology that might come out of this. I am thinking now of some Islamic examples. You can date the beginnings of the Islamic revival a number of places. But, back in the l890's, a well known Muslim scholar went around to the leading centers and made big impact several different places with his favorite slogan being the verse from the Koran being "God never changes the people until they change themselves."
And, there are a variety of ways you can trace that... the use of that slogan and the way he talked about the necessity of activism in terms of a return to the sources of Islam and a kind of reinstantiation of authentic Islam in a modern setting. You can trace the relationship of that to the popular slogan that came about, that got widespread after the Iranian revolution. "Islam is the solution. Put Muslims in the government, get acknowledgment of Islamic norms as the values by which society ought to be guided, instantiate laws that create an environment that encourage traditional Islamic practices, then the economy, the medical system, the educational system will take care of themselves. Beulah land delivered in this-worldly terms.
And, I would say now that many Muslims are beginning to get discouraged over this approach. Because it obviously doesn't work. It's not that simple. So here, you have had a this-worldly, very social activist approach, but it obviously seems to be promising more than it in itself can deliver.
Plato: Just add one more theological pathology. Much of the great appeal from some conservative religious voices is that "you can do it too, you can be at the top as well; you can make it", with the implication that somehow being religious is a prerequisite or guarantor of worldly success. And, so they're completely taken by the winner take all culture.
And, on the other hand most people know they can't really make it big because as you said. --
But it is an escape to watch and talk about, and maybe this is the non-rational side of that. Whose winning... how much money is this or that back Deion Sanders making? This is a working out of a form of Envy.
Laches: Well, the winner takes all and my place is in the bleachers watching; that's entertainment.
Plato: One of Dante's great images is envy being punished in Hell by people having their eyes sewn shut so they can't look at the beauty of others.
Thrasymachus: Envy is a sin of the eyes.
Plato: The envious person has just enough light so that you can see who the enemy is, who the other is. I find that the step between resentment and envy is so small that almost to the point that envious people are not really passive. Being envious is a stage on the road to resentfulness. They are envious when they are not being resentful of the plight they find themselves in.
Laches: Protagoras, recalling Socrates' statement of the open universe, can that be translated to mean the same thing as the Islamic thing of change in the people, that is in the universe, being dependent on change by the people.
Protagoras: It's not exactly an open universe in Islam. There are established limits and recognizing those limits and acting within them is a prerequisite to success both in this worldly and other worldly terms. If you live by the rules you succeed and if you don't, you lose, but you bear the responsibility for living up to the rules. In Islam, I think, the rules are more specific and explicit and ramified.
Parmenides: Maybe, but that is an interesting question. It may actually be that in practice the rules are no more explicit and worked out. What it means to say "Islam is the solution" is to follow the Islamic rule.
Protagoras: Yes, yes, it means to set up in one sense a pattern by which the rules are acknowledged. But, you founder then on the rocks of the practical difficulties of saying whose rules count in setting the Islamic rule. Say for example, you're supposed to create an Islamic system of taxes. But, nobody can agree on what it is. Or are you supposed to create an Islamic system of medicine, but nobody knows what it is.
Parmenides: Good answer. Probably, actually if you look at it, there is similarity in the ideas of the open universe.
Meno: Aren't they both predicated on the concept that living up to these designated rules is involved in the sanctifiability of the human being and the moral responsibility of the individual.
Socrates: And, with some reasonable assurance that as you are interpreting the game in this world, the game will go over to righteousness.
Parmenides: Now that applies to the dominant conception in Christian thinking too, doesn't it? If you play by the rules, you will win.
Socrates: Oh, yes. It may be said the universe has a slight tilt in favor of the righteous. You had that assumption once that but that seems to have been lost.
Plato: I took your notion of the open universe to be that we weren't quite sure if it was tilted in favor of the righteous.
Socrates: I would say that liberal theology always held that human nature was perfectible. You might not reach it, but this is what history is about. So in one sense, yes. There is a tilt in the universe.
Laches: Does this mean the Divinity of Man, or simply the perfectibility, that individuals are sanctifiable, that individuals have some potential for Godness in them.
Socrates: Sanctifiability, perfectibility, potential for Godness would all be all right as descriptions of the situation of human being. But I think in the church people would be reluctant to say Divine. That reluctance may not have been entirely consistent, but this would have to do with the Christological question, the Person and Power of Jesus Christ. But, it wasn't put in the books as Divine but as "essentially good." So, corruption appear but the corruptions do not conceivably eat out the substance. The word is "corruptible" and I suppose that most of us would agree that we have rich empirical data for that. Just look around the room. But yet I think you could say we have the potential for perfection.
Thrasymachus: Does the universe also gives you some sense of what human nature is and human flourishing or are you are rejecting that?
Socrates: Certainly, to say an open universe isn't to say that are committed to the notion that human nature is infinitely pliable, plastic.
Let's substitute different terminology here to do justice to the liberal sensibility at this point, "Progress, towards perfection." We will put it in MacIntosh's terms, one of the important theologians in the first 40 years of the century. You don't have to say in assessing human nature, I vote for the optimists or I vote for the pessimists because there is important middle ground -- ameliorism. The condition admits of improvement and this admission, so to speak, is inexhaustible. There are no limits placed on the improvement of the human condition. So, yes in one sense, this welshes on a completely open universe. But, it is close to what William James was after, in between the blocked universe and an open universe, we'll vote for the open universe because that is one in which if there is a God, we can be his junior partners, not so much in the realization of goods, but in the creation of good.
Parmenides: In on creation, that's different from the Islamic case.
Socrates: This is the call. You see, we are in on the creation of good. I was quoting what John Dewey said about the development of axiology, the branch of philosophy in the first part of the century, having to do with values. Treatise upon treatise, theory upon theory about values. John Dewey said once, "The only problem about values is getting more of them."
Gorgias: More and better values.
Protagoras: A lot of these types of issues about the nature of man apply in Islam as well. Humans have a special place in the universe, but when you're talking about creating things you have special theological problems. You never want to call human beings "a creator of deeds," this involved an ontological reality. You want to talk about human beings as" doers of deeds." There was thought to me to be an important difference there. The overall sense of the way you would say it is that you have been obedient in observing the limits set by God.
Gorgias: This discussion over the difference between Islamic and Christian thinking in the view of humans brings raises the kind of issue that we brought up about whether you have to go way back to ultimate premises to forge a common language that cuts across some of the different belief systems.
Let me tell you an anecdote about a Pakistani student of mine several years ago. We were talking about a passage in Martha Nussbaum's article on Amartya Sen's Indian rationalism and economic development. She talked about Aristotelian internalism in contrast to Platonic externalism. And she said the Aristotelian works within the community trying to clarify and improve the human conceptions of the good as they emerge in the human enterprise. While with the Platonic externalist impulse the philosopher and the thinker ascends to the edge of the universe and looks down and identifies the good and the right and then imposes that on the world.
The Pakistani student raised his hand and he said, you know, Mohammed ascended to the edge of the universe. And you could just hear the rest of the class say, "Oh, my Gosh!" And the Pakistani continued the clocked stopped while he went out and got the truth and then came down to tell it. And nobody in the class knew what to say.
And, so I broke the silence, "Do you think that Mohammed's vision should be become part of our public development vision? And he said, "well of course not. He said this is what I believe, but you can find other sources from the same idea of a kind of way of living that's important." So, on the one hand, we thought he was going to nail us, and on the other hand he completely backed away from it.
Socrates: This is the Islamic idea, that you are welcome to believe.
Gorgias: This comes out of the Koran, the notion of tolerance to world religions and the recognition that there are different ways and paths to finding the one God, so to speak.
Protagoras: At least, a tolerance within limits. It is specifically aimed at the peoples who have a scriptural text for which there has been a legitimate prophet, "people of the book" Christianity and Judaism. And then the Muslims really got into debates when they moved out of the Mediterranean context and into religions with no Scriptural texts. But that is a topic for another discussion.
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