Contracts and Character

I’ve run across a few passages from novels relevant to the last Milbank chapter reviewed here – dealing with the shift in our mode of dealing with one another from character and virtue – adherence to an external standard – to contracts founded on self-defined self-interests.

First, from Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, as the narrator, a Jersey shore real estate agent in late November 2000, recounts the events following the discovery that his wife’s ex-husband Wally, presumed dead, is in fact alive:

All marriages – all everythings – tote around contingencies whether we acknowledge them or don’t.  In all things good and giddy, there’s always one measly eventuality no one’s thought about, or hasn’t thought about in so long it almost doesn’t exist.  Only it does.  Which is the one potentially fatal chink in the body armor of intimacy, to the unconditional this ‘n that, to the sacred vows, the pledging of truths, to the forever anythings.  And that is:  There’s a back door somewhere to every deal, and there a draft can enter.  All promises to be in love and “true to you forever” are premised on the iron contingency (unlikely or otherwise) that says, Unless, of course, I fall in love “forever” with someone else.  This is true even if we don’t l ike it, which means it isn’t cynical to think, but also means that someone else – someone we love and who we’d rather not know it – is as likely to know it as we are.  Which acknowledgment may finally be as close to absolute intimacy as any of us can stand.  Anything closer to the absolute than this is either death or as good as death.  And death’s where I draw the line.  Realtors, of course, know all this better than anyone, since there’s a silent Wally Caldwell in every deal, right down to the act of sale (which is like death) and sometimes even beyond it.  In every agreement to buy or sell, there’s also the proviso, acknowledged or not, that says, “unless, of course, I don’t want to anymore,” or “that is, unless I change my mind,” or “assuming my yoga instructor doesn’t advise against it.”  Again, the hallowed concept of character was invented to seal off these contingencies.  But in this wan Millennial election year, are we really going to say that this concept is worth a nickel or a nacho?  Or, for that matter, ever was?

And from the end of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer:

Would you verify my hypothesis?  Is not that your discovery?  First, is it not true that in all of past history people who found themselves in difficult situations behaved in certain familiar ways, well or badly, courageously or cowardly, with distinction or mediocrity, with honor or dishonor.  They are recognizable.  They display courage, pity, fear, embarrassment, joy, sorrow, and so on.  Such anyhow has been the funded experience of the race for two or three thousand years, has it not?  Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative that no one has hit upon.  It is that one finding oneself in one of life’s critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways.  No.  One may simply default.  Pass.  Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one’s heel and leave.  Exit.  Why after all need one act humanly?  Like all great discoveries, it is breathtakingly simple.

The second of these  especially calls to mind the discussion of cultural intelligibility in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.  But where Kierkegaard may challenge the Knight of Faith to live in a way which is isolated in its lack of intelligibility to onlookers, he nevertheless drills the refrain of the individual before God.

Second Sunday in Lent

‘In total, during the first eighty-eight years of the [twentieth] century, almost 170 million men, women, and children were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad other ways governments have inflicted deaths on unarmed helpless citizens and foreigners. … It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague.’


- Israel W. Charney




‘The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.’


- Franz Kafka




‘I either know about the God I seek from my own experience and insights, from the meanings which I assign to history or nature – that is, from within myself – or I know about him based on his revelation of his own Word. … [I]f it is God who says where he will be, then that will truly be a place which at first sight is not agreeable to me, which does not fit so well with me. That place is the cross of Christ.’


- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Theology and Social Theory, Ch. 2

Milbank’s second chapter is entitled ‘Political Economy as Theodicy and Agonistics’. Where the ‘New Science of Politics’ dealt with the origins of a secular space for power relations, political economy was more interested in how the mechanisms of power functioned. Crucially, its theory centered on the regular, unintended harmony of these mechanisms, in which the observed consequences of Hobbes’ and Machiavelli’s systems, once established, would arise apart from erratic and arbitrary extensions of the sovereign’s might. If Hobbes and Spinoza had sought to derive the origins of norms from (ur- and archetypal) deliberative human choices, political economy sought nevertheless to maintain the conformity of observed social outcomes to unthinking natural processes, claiming ‘to “demonstrate” the presence of a spiritual power filling the vacuous “gap” between human intentions and social outcomes.’ (27)

Milbank continues to argue that these are intellectual shifts possible only from within a theological mindset – the ‘spiritual power’ remains necessary to provide ‘divine sanction’ to the secular order. But now, ‘No longer is God the ultimate arbitrary power behind human arbitrary power; instead he is a God regularly and immediately present to human society, holding it together… This providence can be exactly known about, and it is invoked at the level of finite causality.’ (28)

As in the previous chapter, Milbank provides an intellectual genealogy of this science of political economy, beginning this time with the Scots moral philosophers typified by David Hume and Adam Smith. Social theory for the Scots was founded neither on the sole ground of Hobbesian rationalism nor of an inherently ethical Aristotelian telos. They spoke instead of ‘sympathy… specifically pre-moral, natural and sub-rational.’ (29) ‘Sympathy’ describes our common animal attractions and aversions and our ability to see ourselves in the place of others. Public laws and institutions are not derived from rational calculation, nor directly from considerations of virtue as such, but from their observable effects on ourselves and on others. Because we know what it is to lose and to gain and can imagine others feeling the same way, we come to feel that our own security is bound up in the existence of property laws, and to know that we have an interest in justice not only for ourselves but in society. Notions of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ come artificially to be attached to practices which adhere to or violate such laws, but these merely reinforce existing institutions without providing them an independent ground on which to stand. The ground remains the ‘natural’ processes of individual human emotions – and mostly negative ones at that, e.g. outrage (hence the asymmetry which holds that violations of property, but not failure of benevolence, is punishable). ‘If there is a utilitarian design at work here, then it is on the part of “nature”, not man.’ (30)

Smith is aligned with Hobbes, on the other hand, in his definition of human self-interest in terms of property rather than virtue. Whereas Aquinas (and, for that matter, Aristotle) had held that liberality and magnanimity were self-interested characteristics because they chiefly augment the virtue of the giver, Smith reverses things so that self-interest is equated with self-preservation and justice, not benevolence, is the virtue grounded on selfish concern.

At this point Milbank traces two divergent forms political economy can take – one Machiavellian or agonistic, and one natural theological, providing, as it were, a secular theodicy.

In its Machiavellian form political economy replaced societal adherence to virtue with sovereign manipulation of the complex of many individuals’ self-interest as the key to peace, security, and political strength. Central to this dynamic was the emergence of the market-based economic and financial systems promoted by Smith:

Equally important as any rise of a middle class is the changing definition of “nobility”, allowing the possibility of a “speculative” aristocracy where fortune is a matter of a gamble on one’s reputation just as economic fortune was now no longer so firmly tied to landed property but could be built on successful investment in the future success of trade, or strength of government. As Montesquieu noted, the power of England was founded on aristocratic whiggery… As a “free nation” England could “bring to bear against its enemies immense sums of imaginary riches which the credit and nature of its government might turn into reality.”‘ (32)

The sovereign wishing to marshal such forces to his own benefit stood at the head of a great reversal in the order of desire and virtue: no longer driven by external standards of the common good, desire now existed as its own end, subject to control by the savvy prince.

The place of inequality in society shifted in logical manner. Previously an evil met in the public sphere by Christian charity, it was now celebrated by Smith as the very engine of progress. Production is driven by the desire of every individual to attain to the luxurious lives of the rich. Not only the wealth but the security of nations is enhanced by this situation, by providing an arena in which conflict among individuals and even states could take place rationally, bloodlessly, via commerce rather than warfare. Milbank highlights the political economic theory of Sir James Stewart as the apogee of this line of reasoning: for Stewart, Christian charity is positively harmful to the state, dampening the need which keeps laborers working for the economic and military strength of the state. Ideally the laborers own nothing, but are dependent on procuring a return for their labor which they can only consume. ‘[T]he accent [for Stewart] is clearly on wage-labour as a mode of discipline, not as a mode of freedom (as in Smith).’ (35) But Stewart also departs from Hobbes in understanding the origins of the successful society as arising by natural processes: ‘the marketplace is a self-regulating agon, but its bounds are initially marked out and constantly redrawn by arbitrary political violence.’ (36) Where Smith promoted fierce defense of property rights, Stewart candidly and cynically recommended that the sovereign violate them whenever dictated by state interests, in order to maintain the necessary agonistic dynamic.

In this regard, Stewart anticipates Marx’ characterization of capitalism as dependent on the forcible separation of a majority of the population from the means of production. Stewart differs from Marx, however, and from Smith, in that the latter two saw capitalism’s origins in rational processes rather than arbitrary extensions of power. All of these, however, stood firmly in a position which Christian theology had once questioned, exalting the autonomy of secular reason and the decisive control of individual desire.

If the Machiavellian strand of political economy can be characterized as ‘pagan’, the more ideological form of political economy instead took the form of ‘a heterodox “theodicy”‘ (38), justifying not God but sovereign nature. The difference lay in the proposed mechanism which underlay social outcomes. Rather than the agonistic system of separate individual actions leading to unintended results, the theodicist highlights the ‘invisible hand’ – perhaps God, or providence, or nature – who takes the place of the Machiavellian sovereign in weaving together disparate interests into a unified (and sometimes optimal) whole. It is crucial to Milbank to note that the great step here towards secular reason was taken by natural theologians, who first made the ‘scientific discovery’ that God had laid divergent desires in the hearts of individuals for the good of society. From here it was a trivial matter to replace God with unthinking nature. Smith attributed to God the animal passions vital to the constitution of society – but not a God who worked through passions as secondary causes, but one who could, in a sense, be reduced to those very causes, which were primary but finite, subject to scientific inquiry.

It would seem that heterogeneous desires lay at an intermediate level in Smith’s ontology, though he did not openly present political economy as natural theology: the hand, while not entirely invisible, was neither yet opaque. Milbank seeks to restore its opacity to the history of secular reason: ‘The heterogenesis of ends can only appear as a fundamental mode of social description because one thinks of an imaginary intending agent standing “behind” her projects, whereas the agent really becomes an agent through her projects. Choice, in its most basic options, is not discovered at the individual level, but within social discourse. Only by forgetting this can one establish an economic “science” which divides and rules in terms of private sentiments and “natural” design.’ (42-43)

Milbank closes with a less than compelling reading of Malthusianism as having originated in yet another flavor of theodicy, one in which it is to the benefit of mankind that God introduce scarcity of resources, as the development of virtue depends on lack (a position close to Stewart’s, but with virtue back at the helm in place of state power). Milbank proposes that it was the theodicy which drove Malthus’ pessimistic economic theorizing on the limits of population growth; it was not the observation in Malthus’ day, then, of what appeared to be looming famine among exploding pre-Industrial peasant populations, that drove Christians to justify God having allowed such a state to come to pass. Again, Milbank shows a weakness for divorcing the history of ideas from the history of events.

I find Milbank’s treatment of Smith to be somewhat unfair.  Smith stands in need of rehabilitation in the current economic environment, which has rightly helped some observers to ‘find a flaw’ in pure free-market ideology.  Certainly in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but also in The Wealth of Nations, Smith never maintained that free markets could function in the absence of morality.  ‘God’ was not a mere placeholder in his system; sympathies acquired normative force primarily by virtue of their having been placed in human hearts by a God who stands as Creator and the supreme Lawgiver.  It is nevertheless the case that in his work as a moral philosopher Smith presented a reductionistic account of the Deity’s work, rendering him too much a benevolent social planner, worthy of emulation by sophisticated statesemen but hardly of worship.

_____________________________________________________

See also Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, Oxford University Press, Ch. 1, pp. 10-13.

First Sunday in Lent

‘In birth, two people go into a room and three come out. In death, one person goes in and none come out. This is a cosmic joke… There are philosophers who take this joke seriously. To their way of thinking, the only option in the face of death – in facing death’s absurd non-face – is to laugh. This is not the bold, humorless laugh of the triumphant atheist, who conquers what he calls death and his own fear of it. No: this is more unhinged. It comes from the powerless, despairing realization that death cannot be conquered, defined, contemplated, or even approached, because it’s not there; it’s only a word, signifying nothing.’


- Zadie Smith




‘DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.’


- John Donne

Transfiguration Sunday

‘We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal. It is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.’

- T.S. Eliot

‘Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation.’

- Elaine Scarry

‘We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility.’

- Simone Weil

Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

‘Boredom is a serious matter… Our aversion to being bored has considerably greater significance than a mere reluctance to experience a state of consciousness that is more or less unpleasant. The aversion arises out of our sensitivity to a far more portentous threat… that we have no interest in what is going on.’

- Harry Frankfurt

‘I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.’

- Albert Camus, The Stranger

‘…[I]f we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.’

- C.S. Lewis

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

‘Even though we are now in faith . . . the heart is always ready to boast of itself before God and say: “After all, I have preached so long and lived so well and done so much, surely he will take this into account.” We even want to haggle with God to make him regard our life . . . But it cannot be done. With men you may boast: I have done the best I could toward everyone, and if anything is lacking I will still try to make recompense. But when you come before God, leave all that boasting at home and remember to appeal from justice to grace. [But] let anybody try this and he will see and experience how exceedingly hard and bitter a thing it is for a man, who all his life has been mired in his work righteousness, to pull himself out of it and with all his heart rise up through faith in the one Mediator. I myself have been preaching and cultivating it through reading and writing for almost twenty years and still I feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something, so that he will have to give me his grace in exchange for my holiness. Still I cannot get it into my head that I should surrender myself completely to sheer grace; yet [I know that] this is what I should and must do.’


- Martin Luther

Holiday Pictures 2008/9

As I mentioned the other day, Leann, Jacob and I enjoyed an extended stay in the Bay Area, first for Christmas and New Year’s and then a month of work in my company’s San Francisco office.  We missed our home in Cambridge, though I can’t say we missed the weather, and it was wonderful to see Jacob meet the rest of his family during the month.

Enjoy the pictures here or in the gallery sidebar; many of these were taken by my dad and by Leann’s.

Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

‘[I]f there exists an end in the realm of action which we desire for its own sake, an end which determines all our other desires; if, in other words, we do not make all our choices for the sake of something else – for in this way the process will go on infinitely so that our desire would be futile and pointless – then obviously this end will be the good, that is, the highest good.’


- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics




‘The ultimate blow against God [by Nietzsche]… consists in the fact that God, the first of beings, is degraded to the highest value. The heaviest blow against God is not that God is held to be unknowable, not that God’s existence is demonstrated to be unprovable, but rather that the god held to be real is elevated to the highest value. For this blow comes precisely not from those who are standing about, who do not believe in God, but from the believers and their theologians…’


- Martin Heidegger

While I was in San Francisco…

Cambridge blows through snow removal budget

By Jillian Fennimore/Chronicle staff

Tue Jan 27, 2009, 05:00 PM EST

Cambridge – Since the winter season is showing no signs of slowing down, Cambridge’s snow and ice budget has already dried up.

Cambridge’s Public Works Commissioner Lisa Peterson said her crews have already used up the $350,000 for snow and ice removal this fiscal year.

As of Martin Luther King Day on Jan. 19, Peterson estimated that the department has spent close to $1.1 million on clearing the city’s 125 miles of streets and 18 miles of sidewalks.

“Traditionally the snow budget is budgeted at a very modest level,” she said. “We typically overspend our budget. [The city] expects us to be as assertive as possible.”

The Boston area has already exceeded last winter’s total snowfall, with 44.7 inches so far this winter compared to 44.6 inches total in 2007-08.

Forecasters were predicting an additional six inches for DPW workers to tackle on Wednesday. A snow emergency and parking ban was announced for Wednesday morning in Cambridge.
Peterson said she plans to meet with the City Council next month to appropriate more snow and ice funds in order to sustain the department’s work for the remainder of the fiscal year. The DPW operates 14 salting trucks and 17 trucks with plows for heavier storm conditions, along with access to private contractors.

Uh… no one has shoveled my driveway since Christmas Eve…