Ill Fares the Land (17 page)

The second dilemma we face concerns the social consequences of technological change. These have been with us for some 200 years, ever since the onset of the industrial revolution. With each technical advance, men and women are put out of work, their skills redundant. However, the steady expansion of capitalism ensured new forms of employment—though not always at comparable wage rates and often with reduced status. Together with mass education and universal literacy—achieved in most developed countries over the course of the century 1870-1970—new jobs in new industries making new things for new markets sufficed to ensure a steady improvement in the standard of living of most people.

Today, the situation has changed. Unskilled and semi-skilled work is fast disappearing, not just thanks to mechanized or robotized production but also because the globalization of the labor market favors the most repressive and low-wage economies (China above all) over the advanced and more egalitarian societies of the West. The only way that the developed world can respond competitively is by exploiting its comparative advantage in capital-intensive advanced industries where knowledge counts for everything.

In such circumstances the demand for new skills vastly outpaces our capacity to teach them—and those skills are anyway overtaken within a few years, leaving even the best-trained employee in the dust. Mass unemployment—once regarded as a pathology of badly managed economies—is beginning to look like an endemic characteristic of advanced societies. At best, we can hope for ‘under-employment’—where men and women work part-time; accept jobs far below their skill level; or else undertake unskilled work of the sort traditionally assigned to immigrants and the young.

The likely consequences of this coming age of uncertainty—when a growing number of people will have good reason to fear job loss and long-term redundancy—will be a return to dependency upon the state. Even if it is the private sector that undertakes retraining schemes, part-time work projects and other palliative exercises, these programs will be subsidized by the public sector—as they already are in a number of western countries. No private employer takes on labor as an act of charity.

Even so, the growing number of people who will have good reason to feel superfluous to the economic life of their society cannot help but pose a serious social challenge. As we have seen, our present approach to welfare provision encourages the view that those who cannot secure regular work are in some measure responsible for their own misfortune. The more such people we have in our midst, the greater the risks to civic and political stability.

—BERNARD WILLIAMS

 

 

 

 

T
he Left has failed to respond effectively to the financial crisis of 2008—and more generally to the shift away from the state and towards the market over the past three decades. Shorn of a story to tell, social democrats and their liberal and Democratic fellows have been on the defensive for a generation, apologizing for their own policies and altogether unconvincing when it comes to criticizing those of their opponents. Even when their programs are popular, they have trouble defending them against charges of budgetary incontinence or governmental interference.

So what is to be done? What sort of political or moral framework can the Left propose to explain its objectives and justify its goals? There is no longer a place for the old-style master narrative: the all-embracing theory of everything. Nor can we retreat to religion: whatever we think of accounts of God’s purposes and His expectations of men, the fact is that we cannot hope to rediscover the kingdom of faith. In the developed world especially, there are fewer and fewer people for whom religion is either a necessary or sufficient motive for public or private action.

Conversely, the fact that many in the West would be perplexed to learn that a public policy was being justified on theological grounds should not blind us to the importance of moral purpose in human affairs. Debates about war, abortion, euthanasia, torture; disputes over public expenditure on health or education: these and so much else are instinctively couched in terms that draw quite directly on traditional religious or philosophical writings, even if these are unfamiliar to contemporary commentators.

It is the gap between the inherently ethical nature of public decision-making and the utilitarian quality of contemporary political debate that accounts for the lack of trust felt towards politics and politicians. Liberals are too quick to mock the bland ethical nostrums of religious leaders, contrasting them with the complexity and seduction of modern life. The remarkable appeal of the late Pope John Paul II to young people inside and outside the Catholic faith should give us pause: humans need a language in which to express their moral instincts.

To put it slightly differently: even if we concede that there is no higher purpose to life, we need to ascribe meaning to our actions in a way that transcends them. Merely asserting that something is or is not in our material interest will not satisfy most of us most of the time. To convince
others
that something is right or wrong we need a language of ends, not means. We don’t have to believe that our objectives are poised to succeed. But we do need to be able to believe in them.

Political skepticism is the source of so many of our dilemmas. Even if free markets worked as advertised, it would be hard to claim that they constituted a sufficient basis for the well-lived life. So what precisely is it that we find lacking in unrestrained financial capitalism, or ‘commercial society’ as the 18th century had it? What do we find instinctively amiss in our present arrangements and what can we do about them? What is it that offends our sense of propriety when faced with unfettered lobbying by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else? What have we lost?

We are all children of the Greeks. We intuitively grasp the need for a sense of moral direction: it is not necessary to be familiar with Socrates to feel that the unexamined life is not worth much. Natural Aristotelians, we assume that a just society is one in which justice is habitually practiced; a good society one in which people behave well. But in order for such an implicitly circular account to convince, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘just’ or ‘well’.

For Aristotle and his successors, the substance of justice or goodness was as much a function of convention as of definition. Like pornography, these attributes might be impossible to define but you knew them when you saw them. The attractions of a ‘reasonable’ level of wealth, an ‘acceptable’ compromise, a just or good resolution were self-evident. The avoidance of extremes was a moral virtue in its own right, as well as a condition of political stability. However, the idea of moderation—so familiar to generations of moralists—is difficult to articulate today. Big is not always better, more not always desirable; but we are discouraged from expressing the thought.

One source of our confusion may be a blurring of the distinction between law and justice. In the US especially, so long as a practice is not illegal we find it hard to define its shortcomings. The notion of ‘prudence’ eludes us: the idea that it is
imprudent
as well as improper for Goldman Sachs to distribute billions of dollars in bonuses less than a year after benefiting from taxpayer largesse would have been self-evident to men of the Scottish Enlightenment, just as it would to the classical philosophers. ‘Imprudence’ in this respect would have been as reprehensible as financial chicanery: not least for the risks to which it exposed the community at large.

It was the distinctive achievement of the Enlightenment to weld classical moral categories to a secularized vision of human improvement: in a well-ordered society, men would not just live well but strive to live better than in the past. The idea of progress entered the ethical lexicon and dominated it for much of the ensuing two centuries. We hear echoes of this innocent optimism even today, when Americans speak enthusiastically of ‘reinventing’ themselves. But with the exception of the hard sciences, is ‘progress’ still a credible account of the world we inhabit?

The Enlightenment vision—with or without God as its first mover and moral arbiter—no longer convinces: we need reasons to choose one policy or set of policies over another. What we lack is a moral narrative: an internally coherent account that ascribes purpose to our actions in a way that transcends them. But what of the view that politics is the art of the possible and morality is something, in the words of the former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, best left to Archbishops? Are not all normative propositions—if taken seriously—potentially intolerant? Don’t we have to start from what we have, rather than from abstract first principles?

Collective purposes may contain competing objectives. Indeed, any truly open society will want to embrace them: freedom and equality are the most obvious—and we are all by now familiar with the tension between wealth creation and environmental protection. Some sort of mutual restraint will be required if we are to take seriously all of our desires: this is a truism for any consensual system. But it speaks volumes to the degradation of public life that it sounds so idealistic today.

Idealistic and naïve: who now believes in such shared ideals? But someone has to take responsibility for what Jan Patočka called the ‘Soul of the City’. It cannot indefinitely be substituted with a story of endless economic growth. Abundance (as Daniel Bell once observed) is the American substitute for socialism. But is that the best we can do?

—JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN

 

 

 

 

O
f all the competing and only partially reconcilable ends that we might seek, the reduction of inequality must come first. Under conditions of endemic inequality, all other desirable goals become hard to achieve. Whether in Delhi or Detroit, the poor and the permanently underprivileged cannot expect justice. They cannot secure medical treatment and their lives are accordingly reduced in length and potential. They cannot get a good education, and without that they cannot hope for even minimally secure employment—much less participation in the culture and civilization of their society.

In this sense, unequal access to resources of every sort—from rights to water—is the starting point of any truly progressive critique of the world. But inequality is not just a technical problem. It illustrates and exacerbates the loss of social cohesion—the sense of living in a series of gated communities whose chief purpose is to keep out other people (less fortunate than ourselves) and confine our advantages to ourselves and our families: the pathology of the age and the greatest threat to the health of any democracy.

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself. The inculcation of a sense of common purpose and mutual dependence has long been regarded as the linchpin of any community. Acting together for a common purpose is the source of enormous satisfaction, in everything from amateur sports to professional armies. In this sense, we have always known that inequality is not just morally troubling: it is
inefficient
.

The corrosive consequences of envy and resentment that arise in visibly unequal societies would be significantly mitigated under more equal conditions: the prison population of egalitarian countries bears witness to this likelihood. A less stratified population is also a better educated one: increasing opportunity for those at the bottom does nothing to reduce the prospects for those already well-placed. And better educated populations not only lead better lives, they adapt faster and at less cost to disruptive technical change.

There is quite a lot of evidence that even those who do well in unequal societies would be happier if the gap separating them from the majority of their fellow citizens were significantly reduced. They would certainly be more secure. But there is more to it than mere self-interest: living in close proximity to people whose condition constitutes a standing ethical rebuke is a source of discomfort even for the wealthy.

Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don’t like to be reminded of their privileges—if these carry morally dubious connotations. To be sure, it might be argued that after three decades of inculcated self-regard, young people in the United States and elsewhere are now immune to such sensitivities. But I do not believe this is the case. The perennial desire of youth to do something ‘useful’ or ‘good’ speaks to an instinct that we have not succeeded in repressing. Not, however, for lack of trying: why else have universities seen fit to establish ‘business schools’ for undergraduates?

The time has come to reverse this trend. In post-religious societies like our own, where most people find meaning and satisfaction in secular objectives, it is only by indulging what Adam Smith called our ‘benevolent instincts’ and reversing our selfish desires that we can “. . . produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole race and propriety.”
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