T.S. Eliot, Populist
firstthings.com
firstthings.com
All I gleaned is that the author thinks "old money" people should have more influence in society. Somehow that is what populism is about, and apparently it's good.
Did I miss something?
But don't let nuance get in the way of rooting for your preferences.
A discussion that goes back to Plato, and includes tons of great thinking on either side, from the US "Founding Fathers", Tocqueville, Burke, to Enlightenment philosophers like Diderot and Voltaire, to people like Dewey, Elliot (the subject of the article and a huge intellectual force in the early 20th century), modern critics like Bloom and Lasch, all the way to todays cultural wars.
People will discuss philosophy forever. That doesn't stop society, rightly or wrongly, from forming consensus that some positions are dumb.
So with my original comment, I am curious (a) if I understand the article correctly, and (b) why some HN readers support a position that, in my neck of the woods, people consider dumb.
No, but it also doesn't stop society from forming dumb consensuses either. It's not like what's dumb is determined by popularity contest (even if one assumed that most of "society" is on the same page on such issues).
>(b) why some HN readers support a position that, in my neck of the woods, people consider dumb.
Because what people consider dumb and what is dumb is not the same thing.
Some people believe that science and tech aside (where progress is cumulative), it's not at all clear that modern norms, culture, practices, art, laws, etc are better than older norms and practices.
And it's a totally reasonable stance to have (and a lot of the counter-arguments are not really very deep, e.g. "You prefer the 50s society? But back then they had more racism". Well, it's not like we have to "take-or-leave" everything from today or from a past era. Plus, today we have more of other negatives that they didn't have at some other time -- e.g. the quality of modern politics, for one, the obesity and opioid epidemic, zero corporate loyalty, increased privacy erosion, pricier college education, and other such things...).
It's not like what's dumb is determined by popularity contest
One thing is sure: all common knowledge, all traditional
opinions, are foolish, for the very reason that the
majority agrees with them.
My personal view is that it's dumb to use 'inherited wealth' as a gauge of a person's character or competence. For the past century, that view has also been the majority view in the West. If the views didn't agree, I would have had to position my original post differently. I probably would have gone with something like "I realize most of you believe inherited wealth is a sign of good genes, but I disagree because.." But then, I wouldn't likely be as interested, since - in such an alternate universe - I would already be aware of the popular reasoning.
Eh. At this point, maybe we're off in the weeds
For others, for example, inherited wealth means inherited culture (from their cultivated parents etc). It's not as much "inherited wealth" but inherited class (as in the sentence "this man has class").
Plus, even if it's not the perfect gauge of "character of competence", respecting such a wealth order can be argued that results in a stabler society than one where people always compete for a place at the top.
Not saying that I agree with those arguments (and they are not the sole ones fans of that arrangement make).
>For the past century, that view has also been the majority view in the West.
Depends, because there's a very real classism in both the US and (even more so) the UK for example. Both in that rich families take care of their own, consider themselves a separate league above the rest, and see outsiders as intruders, and in the very real sense that for all "startup rags to riches" success stories, those in top don't change that much:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-07-10/rich-k...
https://newrepublic.com/article/116462/family-wealth-lasts-t...
https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...
And people still consider nouveaux-rich ("new money") as gaudy and uncultivated.
people still consider nouveaux-rich as gaudy and uncultivated.
It's hard to call one person gauche when it's stylish for another to own a print of a Campbells soup can. Modern-day haute couture might include a tattered tee shirt emblazened with the word "Urine". There's probably a Youtube video somewhere of Prince William wearing Crocs and "dabbing". There is little agreement over what "is done" these days.
there's a very real classism in both the US and (even more so) the UK for example
Holy False Dichotomy, Batman!
I don't believe in an inevitable march, but I'm definitely not enamored of keeping social norms the way they are just because they're social norms. I think society can and should be improved based on sound policy, but my ideas aren't teleological; that is, they don't move towards a specific long-term end goal, just a short- or medium-term goal which is, essentially, a position better than this one, from which we can plot the next improvements.
Do I believe in questioning everything? Sure, with the caveat that I'm willing to accept "We don't know how to improve it" or "It isn't something we can improve" as answers. Do I believe in equalizing everything? The question is unanswerable as posed, not least because "equality" means different things in different contexts, and some people have a distressing propensity for equivocation.
We have consensus on basic ethical norms - isnt it possible to identify which courses of action/inaction (regardless of bent) lead to ethical outcomes - and review the results of past actions under an ethical lens?
This debate just seems like some (maybe great) philosophy buried under a mountain of incentivised people searching for ammo.
Because half of the world has an IQ under 100 and it takes about an IQ of 120 to have a small chance of thinking about these ideas rationally.
There are still people who are way smarter than that who believe Zombie Jesus was real and thus being gay is evil. So progress is hard.
>There are still people who are way smarter than that who believe Zombie Jesus was real and thus being gay is evil.
There are people so uninformed and uneducated as to reduce all kind of religious or moral question to BS Americanisms like "Zombie Jesus".
On some, but morality has not been resolved, not even close.
> isnt it possible to identify which courses of action/inaction (regardless of bent) lead to ethical outcomes
No, figuring out all the consequences of a given action quickly gets intractable the bigger the action is. You can make predictions as to the effect of a law or policy, but you usually can't make guarantees as to their effects. nth order effects keep piling up.
Because rationality is just about making logical deductions. Not preferences, not what life is better, not goals, and nothing. At best it's about how to achieve one's goals more efficiently/faster etc. Not what goals to have.
Rationality as some all-around solution to the worlds problems is a naive pre-modern concept. Tons of 20th centuries atrocities and bad decisions have been performed by highly intelligent people using very rational means to pursue them.
>We have consensus on basic ethical norms
No, we don't, except at very crude stuff like don't kill and don't punch blind old ladies. And even "don't kill" can get tons of discussion and counter-arguments when it comes e.g. to protecting one's country, property, interests, the law, whatever.
>- isnt it possible to identify which courses of action/inaction (regardless of bent) lead to ethical outcomes - and review the results of past actions under an ethical lens?
Even assuming we agreed on ethical outcomes (which we don't) the world is too complex to determine "which courses of action/inaction lead to those outcomes" except in very crude cases. Plus, all actions/inactions have second order effects to other ethical outcomes where people can disagree, ad infinitum.
The past is not some safe guide either: circumstances can and will be different, so following the same action/inaction might bring results now whereas it didn't in the past (and vice versa).
Plus, even more hoopla is not about "ethical outcomes" but about personal interests.
No matter what the "ethical outcome" is, even if we agree on what it is, people can still, completely rationally, want to screw ethical considerations and e.g. take your property, squeeze value out of you to your detriment, etc, if it means they get more wealth/happiness/whatever out of that.
Bad things happening in the name of rationality tend to happen where people are not considering ethical outcomes. You can use computers to time traffic lights or launch missiles, doesn't mean computers are at fault. Building a social system that sees people put in gulags, if your course of action is intended to uphold ethical norms - is irrational.
Peoples preference, their goals, their opinions on which life is better aren't plucked out of the air. They follow logic based on a persons circumstance, history and assumptions about what will happen based on their choice. Coal miners didnt strike because they were marxist, they did it for better wages. Gun owners want to keep guns not because of a philosophical stance, but because they distrust the government or just like shooting guns.`
And yes, it's complicated to make decisions and resolve competing interests. But attempting to categorise individual stances on decisions into two groups of thought - when it's actually individual choices on some very low level stuff - doesn't add anything to the table.
Thats what Im confused about..
> Levelers object to any kind of hierarchy, however ancient and venerable: parents over children, priests over parishes, the gentry over the lower classes.
Well, yes. This is because this kind of arbitrary, unaccountable hierarchy facilitates abuse. I'd be surprised to see anyone defending this on HN. This all proceeds in a straightforward way from the Enlightenment.
> Populists focus instead on liberating natural communities from those who rule in the name of reason, science, expertise, or competence—managers, bureaucrats, and academics—as well as from large-scale organizations (government agencies, universities, multinational corporations) that embody the same spirit of abstract knowledge and procedure.
"The British public have had enough of experts"?
Again, I would be very surprised to see people on HN agreeing that people should be "liberated" from "reason, science, expertise, or competence" and let free rein to live in unvaccinated chaos.
> Levelers, including today’s liberals and cultural Marxists
Generally one should stop reading at "cultural Marxists" since this is a very ill-defined phrase with anti-semitic origins, but we can carry on a bit.
> levelers rely on an atomistic anthropology that ignores that human beings are formed by and within a social class. Class is essential to the individual, not merely adventitious and extrinsic to him.
Modern theory very much believes that people are formed by their environment; it's crucial to discussions of "structural racism" etc. I'm not clear what the second sentence means unless he's arguing that class is somehow genetic?
> Levelers argue that institutions that reward individual achievement, native talent, and moral character ensure long-term prosperity for all, while those that reward merely extrinsic characteristics, such as membership in a social class, do not.
Standard HN argument for startups here.
> In response, Eliot simply rejects the ideal of strict meritocracy and repeats the argument that a class hierarchy is indispensable for the creation and preservation of true culture.
This is .. not an argument, just a restatement.
> Eliot’s definition of culture as incarnate religion creates the possibility of anti-culture. A purely secular, nonreligious society would lack a culture in Eliot’s sense. So, too, would a society that had successfully privatized religion, so that its religion, insofar as it could be incarnate at all, was incarnate only at the level of individual lives. Finally, a society whose dominant religion is gnostic would also be anti-cultural. By “gnostic religion” I mean a religion or quasi-religion that rejects the very possibility of its being incarnate in this world and in this age. A philosophy such as Marxism or modern liberalism, which rejects existing social institutions and advocates their total replacement, is likewise anti-cultural, in Eliot’s sense (at least, until the eschaton is successfully immanentized).
Ah, now we've brought out the theological heavy guns! If you're not a Christian this paragraph will make little sense to you.
> We should fight for the abolition of inheritance and gift taxes, and for the exemption of family farms and businesses from capital gains taxes.
The conclusion: since meritocracy is bad and class is good, argue for the retention of hereditary wealth.
Merit is one of the fairest ways to determine justice and access to capital, it's the central point of post-Enlightenment thinking. When you're suggesting (with little justification) that privilege and aristocracy are superior to merit, how are you not essentially arguing for a return to a first-class status determined by a combination of power, circumstance, and one's adherence to mythology?
Great comment
edit: And based on what he wrote, he seems pretty in touch with American culture to me. Kind of proves his point on the distinction between class and elite.
That’s an ad hom
The Mountbatten-Windsor-Saxe-Coberg-Gotha-Hanovers have been in the royal family business for 300 years precisely because they are disinclined to have exactly that opinion.
The Price of Wales has stated that he'll stop having public opinions about health food and modern architecture when he accedes...nobody, least of all him, thinks he should have any thoughts at all about the Proper Role of the Monarch in Government, and if it should change.
QE2 is about as likely to start writing lurid romance novels as she is to write anything approaching that.
Without being critical of the origin of ideas and the interests that lay behind them, you're vulnerable to all sorts of manipulation. Think of the thousands of man hours that can go into producing content you can consume in hours.
Regarding the content of the essay, I stopped reading at the straw-man guilt-by-association definition of levellers -- quite clearly an attempt to manipulate.
You are not comparing like with like -- you even give it away in the tenses that you use.
The first three are not like the last three. Rockefeller came after Ida Tarbell after she investigated his trust and exposed some of the methods used by Standard Oil. Carnegie went to extensive lengths to break worker unions. Ford allowed his name, negligently or otherwise, to be put against a series of antisemitic articles that were published in 1920s Germany.
The first three have spent considerable money on philanthropic efforts that serve to bolster their names.
The last three haven't yet. They've still got time. We may know what's made them unpopular now; we don't know what will make them revered in a hundred-years time when any controversies will be lost as little insignificant details in time.
Rockefeller oil, Carnegie steel, and Ford cars paved the way for the Industrial Revolution in America. They were building things in America, for Americans. Breaking worker unions and criticizing international elites were not considered anti-American activities in their time, despite our modern proclivities. They were viewed as titans who built up American might. The smear of "robber baron" didn't come until later when Matthew Josephson popularized the term.
In contrast, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are not building up American industry and making it stronger; they're mostly parasitic and toxic. Facebook has latched on to the desire of people to stay connected and become a tool to manipulate public opinion and serve advertisements. Amazon is essentially a giant middleman, which has helped demolish local mom and pops, by leveraging structural advantages granted by the state to operate at scale. Twitter has degraded public discourse to trolling and taken on the role of thought police. I could go on.
Of course the Silicon Valley elites are out of touch. Their business models take advantage of the little guy, which is why they must show contempt towards the little guy. They are elites without any class.
The industrialists were much more aligned with American interests. They were elites, but also had class.
But where's the data on Rockefeller.
Anyway those other two - I'd probably want to see data for how in touch they were after 10 years of wealth.
First Things: Eliot drew a fruitful distinction between the upper class and the elite. Class is inherited from one’s ancestors and is thus tied to family and to a place. Membership in the elite, in contrast, is acquired through the mastery of certain subjects and techniques, typically in selective cosmopolitan universities.
His first point is that there is a difference between "cultural class" and "elite ability." This is not obvious to those of us in the Americanized western world, which is very technocratic. That is, in the American conception of upper class, wealth is a pre-requisite. We typically can't imagine someone being upper-class and poor or not-rich at the same time - which was a reality for a huge portion of the upper class for the vast majority of history.
FT: As Eliot argues, class is inherently conservative and provides a rich soil for literary and artistic creativity, while a society dominated by elites loses the continuity of inherited tradition and suffers from a sterile obsession with artistic novelty.
We can see this phenomenon playing itself out in contemporary art. The art world at the moment is essentially without an "inherited tradition" and consequently you'll see a lot of work which is shocking or novel for (arguably) no reason other than to be shocking and novel. See Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, etc. for some examples.
FT: Corresponding to Eliot’s distinction of class and elite is a distinction between “levelers” and populists. Levelers seek to destroy the stratification of class, and with it the integral life of the nuclear family and local community. Populism, in contrast, can be a reasonable and wholesome reaction to the dominance of elites. It is often a natural ally of conservatism.
Eliot's idea here is that "levelers" are trying to level-out differences and remove hierarchy. Whether the levelers are poor socialists, rich technocrats, or somewhere in between, they are seeking to remove the existence of different value systems and hierarchies in favor of a single one. In the capitalist west, this is typically a sort of bourgeois-middle-class sort of value system, but of course that's an over-generalization.
FT: Unlike Marx, Eliot does not define class in terms of economic or political function. For him, classes are defined in terms of a shared way of life, acquired primarily through family and secondarily through education, clubs, forms of recreation, and other small-scale, face-to-face association. Entry into and out of class requires at least one generation, often several.
Now, this is a problem for Eliot, because he sees the upper classes as culturally separate from the lower classes. That is, the difference between the lower class and the upper class is not money or wealth - it's an entire culture, one in which he is interested in preserving.
He then goes on to explain why he thinks a culture created largely by lower-class values leads to a focus on commercialism, novelty and distraction. Populism, according to the author, is a sort of bulwark against this, as it prevents the technocratic elite from supplanting the historical upper-class culture. I don't think the thesis of "Eliot was a populist" is very fleshed out in this essay, though.
"Levelers seek to destroy the stratification of class, and with it the integral life of the nuclear family and local community."
Not clear: does the integral life of the nuclear family and the local community depend on stratification? It is very possible to end up with one stratum at the bottom that finds it hard to afford the nuclear family, and one at top that revels in serial monogamy.