Meno: Several points have been made that there are changes in the economic arena that are causing the crisis, the winner take all society and how the pain is born unevenly, and that this is an issue that we will have to confront together if we are to remain together as a society.
I think we should not only talk about the economic arena as a cause of crisis, I think we might look at it as a system that is itself very precarious and in crisis.
The business and financial system is a system that is experiencing a real ground shift that might be viewed as preceding a collapse;
Take the New York Times series on Downsizing last Spring. Add to that the idea of an imminent collapse, and I don't just mean the stock market, but the whole system, being masked because the economy and market seem to be doing well.
Put in the mix too what the younger generation is thinking about the inequities and precariousness of the current economic structure. What are people thinking?
Pythagoras: You might argue that most of us sitting here now, belong to an incredibly fortunate generation, and lavish, lucky in so many different ways.
Meno: Sort of riding a wave, weren't we?
Pythagoras: But, it would be very interesting when we pass off the scene to see what those who did experience what they thought were real inequities and abuse do when the come into power. What will be the results of that experience is by no means obvious -- that they would therefore see fit to change to be generous is not a certain thing. Those who have been abused up the ladder often times will turn right around and be abusive in turn. "On one so shameless, who prays for a boot to lick; many a sore bottom finds a sorer one to kick..." is the old British saying. Once you make your way up the ladder you forget about those difficulties.
So, it is an interesting problem as to what we will be producing in the next generation, given the luck that we had in our generation and the huge inequities that have developed, and whether the fortunate members of next generation really will see fit to re-design the structure.
Charmides: The group that holds the capital and that is controlling the decision-making in the corporations, controlling the stock price, is an alliance of the generations that you are speaking of. The "fortunate" older generation has through the defined benefit pension arrangements and things like indexed Social Security has been able to gain control of the reigns of economic power. But it holds this power through certain members of the younger generations yet to come along, in the financial communities. The control of capital wealth by the fortunate generation is indirect, it is held through large pension fund and mutual fund money managers. The economy is controlled in ways that would not be easily re-designed because no one feels responsibility for the way things are going.
Socrates: Well, in effect what you are saying, if you explore the marketplace, you see a curious kind of dissonance. There is a general feeling that certain market institutions are themselves transitory, uncertain, fragile, etc., And yet there are ever so many people who don't regard the financial market as such. The financial market has become a kind of a symbol of not only of permanence, but curiously, an integrity of it's own, a reliability beyond any question even though the institutions in which it invests appear increasingly precarious.
Plato: At least many of them, that's seems to be right.
Laches: This trend cannot continue it seems to me.
Plato: Do you really mean "it cannot" or do you mean that it should not? There is a difference.
Laches: Should not, must not, I guess I meant.
Plato: The same thing struck me in the comment of a Harvard Business School professor on the "winner take all" syndrome which, if I remember it right, went something like this " You can't see this trend go much further". But I think what he really meant by can't was we ought not allow it, in a moral sense.
Socrates: The question is can we talk about moral evaluation and change if the market is seen as a force not subject to human change. The laws of the financial marketplace seem to have taken the place of Marx's economic determinism, as iron laws of history. The market is not even viewed as an institution. It is kind of beyond institutionality, kind of permanent in the natural order of things. So, it is not something that is viewed as an institution nestled in and related to other institutions.
Plato: Iron laws and teflon coated- market.
Pythagoras: When you talk about the market it strikes me you are talking about a ghost---really invisible.
Gorgias: I think what is happening is that a lot of the slippage in the old market system is being squeezed out by a new kind of rationality. If you look at the decisions of companies which are downsizing, from one point of view, from a very rational point of view, they are doing things that could have been done 20 years ago. All the slippage, those employees or programs that don't necessarily pay off this week, next week or this month, the kind of things that people were willing to flow with in companies, formerly. Now the institutions have been subject to a very calculated, ruthless, effort to maximize, asking only what should we do with profits and the ledger sheet?
Laches: And that is now happening everywhere. In universities and hospitals as well as profit-making institutions and that does seem to me that it adds something else to the market. Maybe that makes the activities in the economic arena seem to be more of an iron law.
Parmenides: What you mean is that they formerly took a longer, larger view, taking into account the external effects of business decisions, the costs to the employees and to society of downsizing so they carried a larger staff and didn't layoff the number...
Gorgias: You kept people on and expected things to sort out eventually. And you kept long term employees even after their best years were over, and this department, or you keep this whole division of your company, even though you know in the next 4-5 years it is not going anywhere much. You may even have had some sentimentality toward it, appreciation of what they had done in the past. Those terms - have gone by the board totally. What needs to be happening is that we begin to look at what corporations are doing and institutions are doing that are doing this kind of calculation..
Parmenides: A colder and colder form of rational determination...
Socrates: Yes, but you have to take in to account here that enormous changes have been taking place, not only in attitudes, but going back to the point made earlier, in the enormous impact of the international market economy. In order to keep up, in order to stay competitive in the highest degree possible, many of these business people just tell you that they have no choice at this point. GM couldn't beat Japan in the automobile with the old paternalistic structure of GM. IBM, the same thing, it can't be done.
Gorgias: But the reason why they can't, it seems to me, is that a new standard that has emerged for being able to operate in the market. What was acceptable 20 years ago, the kind of moderation with respect to profit and return expectations has all disappeared; that is the reason that business people say that they can't possibly stay in business unless they forget about such things as sentimentality.
Plato: I think you are onto something here. All the companies around the world are competing for capital and holders of capital can demand their return. And the demands involve a much reduced share for the workers.
Pythagoras: This is the phenomenon that has introduced a new kind of precariousness and uncertainty to workers in the middle and professional group that they haven't experienced before.
And you mentioned Japan. It will be interesting to see how things develop there. Now that it appears that someone has blown us off the roads, and now they are facing the same sort of problem.
Plato: Exactly. It is a question of whether the tradition of lifetime job security will start to deteriorate in Japan.
Pythagoras: I think that context of international capital is important to keep in mind here. The rules of the game are now very different. In the Winner-Take-All society and the idea that a one or two firms might be doing very, very well in providing a return to their investors but that many others are slipping. And then the downsizing becomes part of survival in the fierce competition for capital among those who are unable to make it to the very top group.
This creates an insecurity on the part of many workers. But it is the unnoticed macro effect on the structure of the international economy, fewer and fewer, larger and larger corporations doing very well and very much in control. This degree of control is leading both to a feeling of the iron law of the markets and to the sense of precariousness.
Plato: Truly said. In the Winner-take-all society, although the competition is fierce paradoxically it is leading to a situation of fewer and fewer competitors. I think of the story about Jack Welch, head of General Electric. He use to say "If one of my divisions is not one, two or three, I sell it." And the comment was, "That was 10 to l5 years ago. Now if it is not number one or two, you better sell it; because number three is gone."
Parmenides: This is a very rational process if you count calculative rationality. Isn't the case with the Winner-Take-All idea that it is dependent on something irrational going on here. I mean the argument is that it is not purely the result of calculative rationality the fact that the upper winner really gets much more than the proportionate of the benefits.
Gorgias: The irrational is not applied to how the corporations are acting. The irrational or kind of mysterious part is the way that consumers want to buy from the "Winner". A particular company's name catches fire, so that you've not been making discriminating judgements anymore about, here is what this product does from this company, here's what this company's version does, let me choose between, but you simply foreshorten your choice according to who is the regnant corporations. Sometimes it is based on price but often not.
Parmenides: The consumers are irrational in that they go with winners and in the process are helping to create fewer competitors?
Socrates: Take this slant on what you are asking about rationality, irrationality, and non-rationality. If we assume that capitalism at a certain point in its l9th century developments really believed that it was undergirded or overreached, either way you want to take it, by a sort of theological notion, that an Invisible Hand operated behind to guide the markets.
This is not the Invisible Hand in Adam Smith's sense of term because in Adam Smith this is known as simply as competition in the free markets and there is nothing particularly theological about that and Adam Smith as a capable moral philosopher would have known what was theological and what was not.
But, suppose it works something like this. What we see in this Winner-Take-All where no one remembers the guy who ran second the such and corporation that was competitive up to a point but has no disappeared. Suppose there is now an implicit notion that in a general scheme of things, I'm not talking just about economics, but in the general scheme of things that the outcome is governed by chance. So that the wunderkind of Microsoft admits in his book, "Sure, we build a better product, but the only reason we know that is the case is because we capture the market. Once we are in the market in this force, we are in a commanding position to dictate to the market to control it up to a point. This in effect to say it was just bloody luck that we captured the market in the first place, not a superior rationality, calculative or otherwise. So, don't speak of Rationality in terms of an overview guiding human affairs. The rationality is entirely internal to the operation once they are controlling the markets. The way you operate your business, that is where efficiency comes in, that is the rationality that .
Plato: I think that point about doing all right being a matter of luck and chance is right. It would lead me to say that it contributes to the point of loss of faith or precariousness and so on.
Socrates: If it is indeed based upon uncertainties and good fortune and so on, then that increases the apprehension of the participants . They come to believe that there is no way that they can control the thing and they may just as soon be among the winners as out of a job. Until then they participate in the irrationality of buying with the winners.
Let me just add this, what is striking to me therefore is the irrational reaction of the population which seems to say more and more de-regulation. I recall one rational response would be, well let's try to get the thing under some control such that some of these external implications and consequences of this sort of corporate behavior. But, that doesn't seem to be the response of the general working population. It seems to be more and more de-regulation and let chance (and the iron law of the market) have its way, and then more and more uncertainty and precariousness.
Plato: Regulators seem to seen as alien powers.
Laches: The government is King George III or something.
Parmenides: I know, it is amazing. If you really think through what we've just been saying, then one reasonable response to the growing size and concentration of corporate power might be the opposite, that is to support an effort to find a regulatory framework that will make people feel more secure.
Meno: Another international comparison might be useful at this point. Consider the situation in France in the strike of the transit workers. Paris was paralyzed because of some things the government was trying to do to the workers in France, cutting back wages, benefits, jobs, at any rate they were cutting back on some of the things the workers wanted.
It is hard to imagine that kind of thing happening anywhere in this country today. And why is that? Is the feeling of powerlessness and despair so strong? Is there still hope in each person -- in the U.S. it is managers and professionals not blue collar that is most affected by the layoffs and downsizing -- that it will still work for them so despite their despair they are unwilling to jeopardize what they have by joining in a worker style rebellion
Parmenides: Speaking of a lack of organized moral reaction what about the question of civic virtue that we talked about earlier. In the face of all the draconian or projected draconian cuts in the social economic support system of this country; where is the outrage from the youth?
All this is happening and although there are some registrations of outrage, they are not coming in a concerted way from the younger generation.
Gorgias: Or even from the middle generation.
Moynihan may be overstating when he said that, look out the window, and nobody is there. There are groups here and there but no movement for social justice.
Parmenides: They are almost all lobbying groups, they don't show up regularly, they have vested interests you might say.
Special interests, but no interest in economic justice or common core values.
Socrates: Is this a part of themoral crisis? Have we l;eft it to lobbyists to cater to our special interests, trusting them completely to bring off the good life for us so we don't organized come up with a vision of a common life that might be good for all of us?
Gorgias: There is another statistic that is very interesting in this connection. American executives now earn 250 times what the average worker earns in a corporation as opposed to only 30 times twenty years ago. This kind of disparity hasn't happened in Germany, Great Britain, or France. Their executives do earn more, but there seems to be a real qualitative difference in what is happening here in our corporations as opposed to what happens in the other developed countries. Yet our middle managers and laborers all those have taken this rise of the executive lying down. And why is that?
Why is it that we don't have some labor or middle management movement paralyzing our country, like the one in Paris? The situation is in some ways more dire in this country.
Meno: I suspect it might have to do with certain residuals that may be there just under the surface of the memory of those countries. What residuals that are built into the framework... the residuals that are represented for instance by the social support system in Germany that goes all the way back to Bismarck and is now pretty much standard in all European countries, France, Belgium, the Netherlands. Health, education As bad as things might be they don't let people fall between the cracks. The institutions that people take for granted, the ways of doing things with respect to what people can expect, what their normal range of expectations may be. The situation in Paris occurred because it was this very floor that was being threatened.
My point is that we don't seem to have the same expectations anywhere in the fabric of our country so people don't feel any outrage or reason to revolt when it is being taken away, just insecurity, fear and despair.
Plato: But didn't we have the support system until very recently. The FDR New Deal legacy was certainly effective.
Laches: Turning out to be a tan rather than a tattoo.
Gorgias: Maybe, but the basic idea behind the New Deal, and the Great Society for that matter, of a floor of economic equity did seem to last a long while. It's a surprising shift all of a sudden.
Plato: But in this respect, you might see the New Deal was a kind of barrier that kept capitalism safe for democracy.
Socrates: And now that the barrier is being dismantled, capitalism is no longer safe for democracy?
Gorgias: Absolutely. The moral crisis we feel - the crisis of faith in institutions -- is the encroachment of an unbridled capitalism, what some have called "savage capitalism", unleashed by international market forces that are subject to iron laws that no one controls and no one feels they can oppose.
I mean I don't know if this is the case but it fits.
Plato: And we don't have the residuals, the traditions of the European countries to protect in the transition period. We have not wanted to copy the European countries preferring to go our own way.
Meno: We've never had the state involved in the economy in this country to the extent that it has been involved in most European countries. Very large parastatals with state owned enterprise involved directly in productive activities; even though now there is privatization going on ; you are coming from that background. Also a there is a much higher degree of unionization, including in government. France, for example, is just one of a number of countries.
Parmenides: But even in our own country, say if you go back to the turn of the Century, you find somebody like the philosopher Josiah Royce notion that insurance may somehow be the way of resolving the dilemmas of a liberal democracy and providing something in the way of security that those who don't win. The Winner-Take-All society is qualified by the resources of the system in social insurance. That seems to be what is disappearing.
Gorgias: Part of the answer to your question about why people do not try to take charge is that people may be viewing or defining human beings in a different way -- including the ways they view and define themselves. We are defining human beings primarily as consumers, people who buy and sell to each other but with very little else in common, rather than as fellow citizens or participants in a common venture or something like that. If people accept that definition for themselves at some level, which is a good definition for those who feel a bit precarious or out of control and use buying and getting as ways to feel more in control. As consumers they are waiting for people to come to them or do something for them.
One is primarily viewed as a consumer as opposed to looking at other facets of his or her life, including as a worker and producer.
One of the articles even makes a point that it is your duty to spend. In fact the Gross Domestic Product measures and how it should be transformed into some other set of indicators.
Laches: Shopping is the great American pastime right now. It is the symbol of who the winner is.
Plato: Behind the duty to spend is the duty to borrow, and that seems to ....
Meno: .... gets us back to capital issues, right?
Plato: If you examine who makes money off the consumer binges you would have to say that a large share goes to those who provide the financing. Think of the number of credit cards and consumer finance companies like General Motors Credit, Sears which make it easy to buy their goods and when the profit is as much attributable to the financing as to the goods sold itself.
Parmenides: But is the willingness to use credit, to borrow to finance a lifestyle, a comment about American character generally or more recently? Because that would affect our own discussion.
Meno: Some indicate that this is something that has been building since the l930's.
Gorgias: In the Depression, I can remember people talking about the need to spend as a way of stimulating the economy.
Socrates: Well that call to spend was probably a minor note during the Depression because there are still a voice on the other side saying, "save it for a rainy day", which the response was, it is raining cats and dogs right now.
But it was still a good thing to save --- buy savings bonds at the post office if you could afford it. And not to waste.
The real buildup in the use of debt goes back only to the late 50's, or maybe the early 60's. There was something in the wind in the change in advertising. The message became. "Now don't postpone. You are entitled to that Cadillac. Buy it now...don't postpone it now that you are a senior level person."
Now that was an excellent ad from which from which to preach. We could say from the pulpit, there is something wrong about this. America was built on delayed gratifications. This was true in sex in marriage, and it was certainly true in terms of private savings.
Meno: This threw aside, you see, the ethic of inner-worldly ascetism, of postponed gratification, which was certainly part of the Calvinist heritage. The wheels of industry turned on the savings and investment of the private citizen. This was Gospel for a long time.
Plato: This disappearance of delayed gratification shows up in a macro sense in the very low saving rate in this country for instance. Gone to hell in a handbasket.
Laches: Are the savings rates way down from previous periods?
Plato: Yes, Can't cite exact figures but it is less than 3% now, but they have been historically higher, above 10%.
Gorgias: There is a lot of cynicism about this. I have a friend whose favorite saying was, he who dies in debt dies ahead.
Parmenides: This is an interesting turn. In political economic theory the moral legitimacy of earning interest on capital was based on the fact that the capital holder was abstaining from the immediate gratification. Abstinence was actually a term used, for instance, the economic writings of John Stuart Mill. So, you wouldn't have a right to earn money off of your capital unless you could show them that you were abstaining from gratification.
It depends on the unwillingness to postpone gratification. So we have this odd system where you have one class of people who hold capital, maybe 20% of the population, who derive the interest on the basis of delayed gratification. And we think that this is a good thing. On the other hand, the other 80% is encouraged to borrow to consume -- the message is don't delay gratification. Two distinct classes of people, capital holders and consumers.
Laches: Maybe it would be good to get the capital holders to spend more so that the remaining 80% would be able to sell things, have jobs, make money etc. so that they could pay for their purchases without borrowing.
I am saying this half as a joke but really if those who are wealthier would stop saving so much and buy more goods or services from those who are not so well off then both might be better off.
Sort of a consumer Keynesianism.
Pythagoras: There is a problem here as we are beginning to bash consumerism. Maybe we need to be careful that we don't fall into a trap that gets us thinking that, in some sense, all consumption is bad.
We might be in danger of swinging from one extreme to another. "All consumption is good", we were told by Neoclassical economics and by certain captains of industry and the proponents of the American way.
But now there is a certain environmental outlook, where you could get the idea that any buying and any consuming is in some way bad. This is a kind of a politically correct environmentalism. I don't know how much to generalize, but I have a sense that people are tired of swaying back and forth between doctrinaire extremes.
The average person's position is, "let's avoid these extremes." And instead adapt some notion of moderation, which one can also find in Calvin' writings, some notion of disciplined buying, some delayed gratification, but sometimes enjoyment now is good too.
Some of the current debate on consumption for example is simply too polarizing.
Parmenides: I think one reason people are a little cynical of the political options and have a crisis of faith in institutions is that there seems to be little room for public compromise, for working out new alternatives, for looking for ways in which private sector and the government institutions can work together. A lot of passion on each side. It is either, you do it my way or you don't count, nothing in-between.
Plato: I think one of the main reasons for this extended conversation is to search for ways to overcome this polarization.
Maybe one of the points here is that we are trying to think of some solutions on the other side before getting straight on what the crisis is. What is needed is some kind of imaginative re-thinking of these basic dichotomies and issues in what everyone sees to be a new ball game, in a new situation in which the old hand holds simply don't work.
Socrates: Clearly we all want to stay away from polarizing language and out of the old dichotomies. It is interesting that as we attempted to diagnose the moral crisis and talked about the situation in the international economy, most of us tended to make what might be taken to be overly one-sided polarizing anti-market type statements.
The facts themselves seem to call for the strong rhetoric. Is it possible that the facts are so strong in this regard, that is that they are so overwhelming that it is impossible to talk about it without being critical. The facts themselves imply moral criticism. I mean, what else do you have to say other than CEO salaries are averaging in the millions and middle managers are being laid off.
If this is the case, that is there is a new form of capitalism that is causing uncertainty, it would not be the polarizing rhetoric that the community is tired of, but a clearer diagnosis of the moral crisis that they are waiting to hear about. If there is to be an organized reaction it needs some clear moral thinking.
Socrates: This might give be giving us a sense of the battle lines of the moral crisis. The huge separation between groups. The apparent fear and despair on the one side and winners and near winners on the other side.
Maybe we ought to focus more on defining the specific features of the effects of the market institutions, especially the international.
Gorgias: I'd like to mention in this connection Michael Lind's point of view in "The Next American Nation", in which he assesses our ills in regards to the increasing of a "White Overclass", as he calls it. That is, in the United States, the top l/5th is disconnecting economically with the lower 4/5. A process he calls Brazilianization is taking place in the own way of life of the top 1/5 especially the top few %, that is, they are moving off and living essentially in fortress communities and having their own schools eventually and having their own secure self-contained universe. And all this while the rest of the society effectively goes to hell, the inner cities much more than that. This is unusual criticism for Lind who is a Conservative and former editor for Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol. I would think that is something that should throw in the hope conquer all in the sense of frustration that the people in the 4/5 would feel about evolving conditions.
Meno: This is not just a criticism by a former pro business person. There is at least one former top corporate person writing on this subject. He was a senior executive at a Fortune 20 company on the Board for a while. He is very worried about the direction of market capitalism in general and the growing power of the private corporations in particular. He is very worried. He said of this conference, "I hope you hold to the point that it a moral and spiritual crisis... it is a moral crisis.
Plato: How does he define it? Why is he worried?
Meno: In terms of the two basic groups, he is in the group that sees the growing disparity in incomes and wealth as the root of the moral crisis -- basically the Brazilianization problem. He makes the point that the top l% controls 40% of the wealth in this country. And in England it is only l8%. And he sees the disparity playing out in each community. The major metropolitan areas are hollowing out and there is no tax base for their support. He said that the independent governmental units are no match for market forces and corporations who come in and play one community off against the other off against. They desperately compete against each other for the jobs and the tax base.
Pythagoras: In terms of Brazilianization, one wonders what will keep that from happening in the US. What is there in American culture that we would inhibit that; is it a kind of ethos that would come to the rescue ultimately in sources, in religious traditions, and so on, the kinds of things that many people think that a back to a Biblical or back to Republican civic virtue that we will hit a point where people will come to their senses. My concern is that these are not adequate resources and that it is conceivable that you could go right on to a true Brazilianization stratification where you have a society where you really do have people with absolutely nothing.
Plato: We already have that taking shape.
Gorgias: And it is happening with breath taking speed.
Take the number of these "secure" communities that have sprung up over the last 5 or 10 years. These little self-enclosed enclaves with their own private police forces, recreational facilities, schools have just mushroomed.
They have their own shops...they can live their lives and ignore the rest of the society.
Meno: So they are not compelled to appear anywhere?
Pythagoras: This is exactly my concern. So, actually are there, what is there that we have in our society that would check this move in that direction. Or, those sort of thinking is a pretty good thing, a la Newt ??, and then able to commandeer, to kidnap, to hijack the ideologies we've got, the sort of spiritualities we've had. So, there is no way to check that.
Gorgias: But, one way to check traditionally is with a system of law that is impartial and even-handed treating the haves and have nots with equal justice. This is something that the United States has traditionally had and many Latin American countries have lacked. And I think the O.J. Simpson case raises the question of whether money can buy justice in the U.S..
Take the Brazilianization case, or in my experience, Guatemala, both are great examples of sequestered communities behind walls of glass with machine guns at the corners, a very tiny group of people disconnected from the 5/6th of the community that is desperately poor. The feeling among the poor in those countries has always been that you could buy justice. The structure of law and order is one that has, by in large, been at the beck and call of this small ruling class. And, there has never been a member of the armed forces or of the Presidential structure that has ever been found guilty of any crime. And, when charges have been brought, sometimes the judges are removed and are killed. So, this is the extreme.
You say, what stops a move to Brazilianization? I think we do have a tradition of law and impartial justice. But I think as our culture dichotomizes the legal system favors the over class in Lind's terms. This is part of the "crisis of faith in institutions" Especially as the under class is increasingly under threat. Maybe part of our citizens wonder now about an institution -- the legal system -- that we thought that we could count on. It is no longer one that we have confidence in,
Plato: Especially when at the same time in the contract with America we seem to be trying to abandon the social support understructure that protects the poor.
Gorgias: Now you are asking what the resources there are in our system to avoid Brazilianization. In one of those Winner-Take-All articles in the Washington Post, Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School who has become very concerned about the de-humanization of the market and corporate processes said that "You can't project this trend much farther." But, it seems that we don't have the governing resources, or maybe it is that we don't want the government to oppose these trends, with programs like universal health care, welfare, etc. supported by progressive taxation schemes.
Meno: Is it spiritual resources and not financial resources that you are speaking about? When you say we don't want government to do it seems that you mean we lack the will power to do it, which I would take to be more a matter of lack of a spiritual resource.
Gorgias: Well, resources in the sense the European countries have a resource. The point was that there were certain traditions in the European governing systems- habits of creation maybe -- where the government had a tradition of providing broad based social support systems.
Maybe for the United States the resources are religious or theological. One thing that did show up in the Dutchman's study of moral decline was that the USA is very religious country if you measure this by counting those who have a belief in a God and believe that God plays an important role in one's life.
Pythagoras: Compared to European countries, especially Western European, there is a great difference. Where it is 60 percent in the US it is 20% in Europe. I mean I hadn't thought about it, but maybe this spiritual resource is the resource that we have to rely upon to check the current trends.
Socrates: You have to take a long look at that... if the US is to be the prime example of a religious nation. It seems to me in appealing to the religious as a conceivable source of rescue from this swamp.
I think you have to ask how has religion characteristically functioned? There are significant differences here. Americans almost always recognized that the people at the top of the economic pile were going to live their lives their own way - no matter what. I think there was a general attitude to hell with .... So back in Sioux Falls . The owner of the Morell Packing House, one of the biggest short of the Swifts, well the morals of the second and third generation, they are a bunch of jerks. If the administration of the company hasn't passed through other hands the place would have fallen apart because they were pretty mixed up characters. People didn't say, oh my God, the world is going to hell because look what happened to the Morells, No. It has always been so. Those people live lives, let them go. Just let them go. They do not furnish a clue to the meaning of the American life.
But, now the backing of religion in a situation like that was quite different. And, keep in mind that when Marx in his philosophical writings really referred to religion as the opiate of the people. He wasn't being cynical. What the oppressed masses conceivably look for to make the morning sun something to be welcomed rather than cursed, well some hope for a better life in a better world beyond this place.
This is what's kept them in place. And, I think up to the fairly recent past, the experience of the Black community which has now passed largely from the scene in terms of its efficacy, the kind of spirituality represented in the slave world. Now, in one way you can say, it effectively throttled a revolution. Haiti had a revolution, the only slave revolution in the Western hemisphere, that was a revolution! But, the South was scared, but it never came off. Well, somehow, I think it is very unlikely that people are going to say in looking at the enormous concentrations of power, and whatever that means in terms of influence in crafting the political process which is very considerable, people aren't likely to say, that is the poor aren't very likely to say, well in Heaven there is a better life and a better world. So, don't worry about the and the raw injustices imposed by enormous concentrations and inequities of wealth.
Because the reinforcement of religion there was on a person-to-person basis and it's subjective in nature, "the world goes to hell but Jesus loves me". And the rapid growth in this country and elsewhere of Pentecostalism, the assurance that I am safe everlasting, no matter what horrors I have to live through in this life, I think very little of this is really potent in the white middle class.
Meno: You don't think it is potent?
Socrates: No, I don't. That is to say, in furnishing any leverage in the situation for social change, in providing a resource for checking the trend to Brazilianization.
Plato: That Pentecostal strand would not have provided much leverage for social change.
Parmenides: But it seems to me that you may want to remember another strand in the American tradition manifested in the Social Gospel. Certainly there would be other precedents which would have been much more socially critical. All would have used language that would galvanize a moral response, a movement against the current trends.
I was just thinking as we talk, we don't hear terms like plutocrat, a wonderful term. But, let's say in the 20's and so on, Social Gospel adherents used it in terms to describe the 'Overclass". They thought they were blood suckers and should be, in some way, restricted. There is a different strand that would have a different kind of attitude towards the inequalities in societies.
But my impression is that this critical stance on the part of religion has now dried up or is drastically reduced. It was part of a kind of attitude that if government could take over we could correct these things. I think there has been a loss of faith in the capacity of public institutions to correct the discrepancies and the inequalities.
Gorgias: You might have had the word plutocrat to criticize the top dogs in the 1920"s. Now, you have the Forbes list of billionaires these people are cultural heros.. With Gates at the top.
Parmenides: It is the Winner Take All syndrome isn't it?. The average person feels, We can't do anything to correct the deal, so we might as well esteem them even if we can't share what they have. I mean there is a kind of loss of criticism, no movement to join, because there is no longer anything like the Social Gospel message.
Socrates: But we have to be careful about using the Social Gospel as a model. The vicarious Social Gospel was much more a matter of the seminary and the pulpit than it was of the pew. And, something like a geological shift occurred then. Social Gospel was on its way in the period between World War I. But then a lot of social criticism was drained off. A part of it went to the Pacifist movement in the late 1930's. A part went after World War II in the direction of Civil Rights. But that is a very sharply focused business. No one in the Social Gospel movement was saying that the plight of the oppressed in this country, for God's sake, is systemic. Now the problem looks to be systemic.
Parmenides: Martin Luther King at the end was saying the problem was systemic. This was part of his despondency, because he wasn't at all clear how you would address that. So, he faced up to that but then didn't really have much of a solution.
Gorgias: Isn't changing the system what needs to be done? But, here we need to be very aware that once we start giving a kind of systemic diagnosis of the problem, we have to get clear on just what the roots of that amount to, and then what kind of prognosis and what kind of cure there might be for it because we talked this way in the 60's too. We saw systemic problems of national and international injustice and we thought that some kind of Democratic socialism was a solution. When we start kind of leaping forward now to solutions, here is where I think we all have to be honest that none of us have much of a clue as to what a systemic alternative might mean - either domestically or internationally.
So, I think we are going to have to think long and hard about systemic alternative because a lot of the platitudes to this alternative don't seem to hold much...
Plato: No, though your middle ground like that being tried in the Latin American countries that you were referring to would be something like what you would propose, I suppose. Is that right?
Gorgias: One of the things I think it means is that you identify some things we simply cannot afford to let go and I alluded to one of those earlier in talking about the rule of law. One cannot underestimate the importance of the way in which government under law, under the kind of law that we've had in this country. And, it has made a difference. And that has been undergirded partly by religion.
Meno: Yes, there is a very strong religious sense, a religious sensibility at work under the Constitution in what people had supposed that they were living with.
Parmenides: There is a religious sensibility that is different from the specific religious or spiritual movements.
Pythagoras: Putting it this way raises the important question. What is the source and nature of this crisis in relation to religion.
I was thinking about two things. One, the social action tradition in American religion that you were talking about. The communities that support and fostered that had become basically circles of mysticism in Troeltche' frameworks. You know, I pursue this association as long as it helps me with my plan for spiritual growth. I mean, if it doesn't work anymore than I can go somewhere else and so on.
But then another thing strikes me...one of the most impressive images in those readings we had, I thought, was of the problem of the moral crisis that you have Republicans and now Democrats, calling for family values, individual responsibility, all those are resources in one sense in the American ethos that could help you maybe address certain problems that we are talking about. At the same timsome of those same people are are celebrating the potential to have 500 cable channels available to every home, and the problem of children watching TV... what did they estimate, 3-4 hours a day?
Actually, my wife and I teach a 6th grade Sunday school class. I asked the kids a couple of weeks ago how much TV they watched per day. I said do you watch l/2 an hour - Oh, come on!!! Maybe they were bragging in front of each other, but they said they were watching 4-5 hours of television per day. You know, it strikes me if you want to be really cynical, but you say is what is the resource for handling the problems that are raised by Brazilianization ...TV serves the 80% at the bottom as a kind of soporific that keeps people from rebelling. In a way, it's the substitute for Heaven. And it keeps reinforcing, at least in certain ways, the notion that as a viewer you are a consumer, you are seeing, you are participating, you are finding out who the winner is, and vicariously enjoying the victory.
IATH WWW Server 
Center's Home 
New Dialogue Main Page