Author: Simon Greenwood

In Defense of Conformity

Existentialism’s mortal sin deserves a fair hearing

The end of the second World War was followed by a flowering of creative activity in Western Europe and the US. The philosophical and artistic movement called existentialism spread like wildfire during this time. Our culture is now saturated with existentialist ideas.

The essence of existentialism is that we must choose what kind of person we are. We aren’t born a certain way, nor are we created by society; instead, we make ourselves who we are by the actions we take. Our choices define us, and there are right choices and wrong choices. The right kind of choices are “authentic,” and driven by one’s internal beliefs and desires. Wrong choices are “inauthentic” and are driven by outside forces like social or economic pressures.

Existentialism had great social value when it was a story that quirky, iconoclastic outsiders told themselves to feel worthy despite being scorned by society. Its value was lost when it became the dominant ideology. Its ugly flaws are becoming clear now. One of these is the way it treats conformity, social pressure, and inauthenticity.

Conformity is the compromise made between individuals and society so we can all get along

To us as individuals, being expected to conform is an intolerable nuisance. But we rely on others- the rest of society- to conform to our expectations, at least in some ways. Even if you’re fine with all kinds of un-“PC” language, for example, are you really fine with people cutting in line or farting in an elevator? If we choose not to conform, though, how is it fair for us to expect everyone else to?

Following social standards, such as dressing ‘normally’ or avoiding offensive language, is a symbolic way of showing that you’re willing to compromise. You’re willing to do what people expect of you. It creates trust and a common identity. By adopting common cultural tokens, you’re showing solidarity with others.

People see it as a red flag if you can’t be bothered to make that compromise and conform to basic expectations. It’s a signal that you might be a taker who wants the benefits of being part of society while considering yourself above it. Their mistrust isn’t just bad you personally, but weakens the bonds of trust of society as a whole.

Social expectations push us to fulfill unpleasant responsibilities

Other people have expectations for how we ought to behave, and these subtly shape our identities. This idea is sometimes taken to the extreme and leads to claims that society is forcing us to behave a certain way and that we’re robbed of free will.

Existentialists would be disgusted by that idea; they believe you have a terrible responsibility to create your own identity by choosing the actions that coincide with the person you want to be.  Jean-Paul Sartre, king of the existentialists, called fulfilling this responsibility living in “good faith”; conversely, ducking this responsibility is living in “bad faith”.

The problem is that the person we want to be, our ideal self, is often a glamorous fantasy. For how many people does “good faith” living mean trying to be an Instagram celebrity or reality TV star? Even Sartre’s life is not something attainable for most. If a janitor comfortably accepts his role in society, does that mean he’s living in “bad faith” because it isn’t an expression of his true self? Cleaning toilets is almost never an authentic expression of one’s inner self. The janitor is sacrificing part of himself (his time and energy) in return for part of someone else (their money). It’s easy to sneer at that as ‘selling out’ but he’s choosing to live a life that benefits himself and others.

Think of the movie American Beauty. The main character, going through a midlife crisis, finds his life as an office worker and family man to be inauthentic. He begins to smoke weed, leaves his job for an entry-level job in fast food, and pursues a relationship with a teenage girl. To an existentialist, this would be a positive transformation: he’s started to live life more authentically. To the rest of us, his “good faith” lifestyle changes did unimaginable damage to the people around him.

The existentialists are right that the character should choose to live better than just sleepwalking through life, only doing what’s expected of him. But his “bad faith” life is a minimum, not an alternative to an authentic life. It’s his responsibility to fulfill his social roles. After that, he’s free to pursue his “good faith” life.

Those societal expectations are on him for a reason, and when he abandons his responsibilities he’s doing something morally wrong. He’s hurting other people to pursue his own fulfillment.

Nonconformists can’t lead

Another problem with existentialism is that it makes a terrible dominant philosophy. It’s great for scrappy rebels on the edge of society to talk about how it’s important to do your own thing and ignore expectations and so on. It’s not a great message for the overbearing weight of mainstream culture to push on people.

How do you tell everyone that they’re expected to find their own bliss? There’s no need to answer that question; we already know what it looks like. There’s now a shortage of people with technical skills able to do the dull, unglamorous work of society, and a surfeit of people dreaming of being rock stars but ending up miserable.

We teach people to look down on the ‘majority’ as a faceless rabble living meaningless lives just because they can’t go on book tours and get paid for interviews. There’s already a natural human tendency for high-status people to look at low-status people with disgust; existentialism just reinforces that sense of superiority.

It’s important for leaders to have a sense of noblesse oblige and common identity with their followers. Teaching them that the majority are beneath them, and living “bad faith” lives, and that they have no responsibilities to the commoners but only to their own hearts, results in profoundly irresponsible and selfish leadership. There’s a reason why so many people have lost faith in the elites; the elites have embraced a philosophy that treats them as a superior class of person to the rest of humanity.

Nonconformists can’t breed

Existentialists are not known for having stable, successful family lives. To be fair, philosophers in general aren’t disposed to domestic bliss. Existentialism, though, makes it especially difficult to create and raise a new generation. If you see your primary duty as being true to the whims of your heart, how can other people possibly trust you?

Families must rely on each other through thick and thin, good times and bad, for decades. It’s not easy for a child to grow up knowing that their mom would run off as soon as she felt her motherhood was inauthentic.

Healthy, intelligent young adults only see downsides to being restrained by society’s demands. Why should they have to sacrifice their autonomy for the good of the group? It takes a village to raise a child, though, and if every able-bodied individual opts out because they consider the responsibility too onerous, then it becomes impossible to raise the next generation.

Everything in moderation, including authenticity

I’m not arguing that you should give up on all your dreams and do whatever you’re expected to. Existentialists may have overrated authenticity, but that doesn’t mean authenticity is a terrible thing and you should always do the complete opposite. Rather, you should be comfortable with a certain amount of “selling out,” of doing what’s expected of you, and of tempering the passion with which you pursue your dreams. These things have a hidden value even though they’re uncool.

In Politics, Intentions Don’t Matter

We spend too much time trying to read the hearts of our leaders. If they’re on our side, we want to know that they’re decent people. If they’re on the other side, we want proof that they’re terrible people. This is pointless.

Let’s travel to the early 20th century in rural China. Chinese peasant farmers were a terribly exploited underclass. A famine in Hunan province pushed some over the edge, and they tried to protest. The protests were crushed. When they seized food, their leaders were caught and executed.

A young man saw this and knew it was wrong. He had grown up in the peasant class and knew from personal experience how badly they were treated. He swore to help the peasant farmers and end China’s corrupt, backwards, oppressive system.

That man was Mao Zedong. When he came to power, he implemented his vision of agricultural reform. It would replace a corrupt, oppressive bourgeois system of land ownership with a rational, forward-looking system. Exploitation would be replaced with solidarity.

His plan was called the Great Leap Forward, and it led to the deaths of between 25 million and 50 million Chinese farmers. The true extent of the horror still isn’t clear, because of the Chinese government’s efforts to cover it up. This was the legacy of Mao’s good intentions, personal experience of oppression, and moral courage.

Let’s look at a different man with a less idealistic vision for China. Deng Xiaoping was a practical man: he famously remarked “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice its is a good cat.” That quote got him in some trouble with people who did care about the color of the cat (i.e. whether the economy was truly socialist) instead of its mouse-catching ability (whether people were starving to death).

When Deng came to power, he reformed China’s economy. People were no longer limited to getting what the Communist Party allowed them to have; now the ambitious and greedy could earn as much as they were capable of. The boom of economic activity resulting from people trying to make a buck ended up lifting more than a billion people out of poverty, possibly the largest alleviation of human suffering in history.

The market economy created by Deng’s reforms wasn’t a welfare program, or a charity. It was an explosion of entrepreneurs who were just looking out for number one. Their self-interest had better consequences for the world than the works of any martyr or saint.

The Utilitarian Argument for Eating Meat

We may be entering an era of vegetarianism. For generations, vegetarians (and vegans) have advocated against meat-eating. Even when their arguments were sound, they didn’t change people’s behavior. Their cause faced insurmountable barriers: meat tastes good, is an easy source of protein, and is a traditional part of most cultures.

Two of those barriers are collapsing. Fake meat is becoming tasty and convenient. There will always a be a hard core of traditionalists who want to cook things the way their grandparents did, but the rest of us will look at a menu and think “why not order the gardenburger and save a cow’s life, if it tastes and costs the same?”

Vegetarian arguments against carnivory haven’t been much tested by criticism. One of the advantages of being ignored is that you aren’t scrutinized. Now that vegetarianism has the possibility of changing society, it’s worth applying a critical lens to it. Let’s look at utilitarian perspective for why the meat industry is good.

[Disclaimer: I’m not a utilitarian. I also don’t have strong feelings about eating meat or animal products. This isn’t meant as a polemic, but as a novel argument.]

Utilitarianism 101

Utilitarianism is a moral philosophy dating back to the mid-1800s. Its essential idea is that the goodness or evilness of an action depends only on the outcome. Specifically, how much that outcome effects net “utility,” which usually means happiness, but other utilitarians interpret it as well-being or other positive subjective states.

For a concrete example, imagine asking a group of moral philosophers whether you should kill Mr. X. One philosopher might say no, because it’s against God’s commands. Another might say no, because you wouldn’t want Mr. X to kill you. A utilitarian would say maybe: you should kill him if it makes people happier overall more than it makes them unhappy. You should let him live if the murder would make people more unhappy than happy.

There are wrinkles on the idea, but that’s the gist of it. Utilitarianism isn’t a tremendously popular view of morality, but it’s had its adherents, and its been influential for the century-and-a-half that it’s been around. Among other things, utilitarians were leaders in pushing for animal rights and banning animal cruelty.

More animals, more happiness

The mathematics of utilitarianism mean that more happy sentient life forms = more total happiness = more good. If you breed a chicken, and over its life that chicken feels more pleasure than pain, then you’ve increased the total happiness of the world and thus done a good thing. The more net happiness it felt, the better your choice to breed it.

It doesn’t matter if you kill the chicken as soon as it’s plump (so long as the killing isn’t painful). Remember, for utilitarians, acts are only as good or evil as the happiness or suffering they cause. Painlessly killing a chicken is therefore neither good nor evil. Breeding and raising that chicken was a good thing, assuming you kept it content and relatively free from pain, so you’ve done a net good.

That’s without even thinking about the benefits people get from eating chickens. People really, really like eating chicken. The average American eats 90 pounds of chicken per year! Eating that chicken is another increase to net happiness, which makes your chicken breeding even better, morally speaking.

Counter-arguments

Someone squeamish about this conclusion might object that we wouldn’t have to eat the animals we raise, most of the good would come from breeding them and raising them in a happy lifestyle. That’s fair enough, but at that point it wouldn’t be a farm anymore, it would be an animal sanctuary.

Animal sanctuaries are fantastic, but they need donations to keep running. People are only willing to donate so much money. Farms, on the other hand, not only generate enough money to keep running, but can even turn a profit and then, theoretically, use that money to do more good in the world. Raising animals for meat can be done in addition to, and on a much larger scale than, raising animals just to give them happy lives.

A different objection is a slippery slope or reductio ad absurdum argument. If raising animals for meat is good, then wouldn’t a good person just keep breeding more and more livestock until the world is one large pasture? Is that really utopia?

This objection fails because, at some point, adding more livestock would do more harm than good. About 25% of the earth’s land surface is currently used for livestock; increasing that to 26% would be a small change, but going from 99% grazing area to 100% would mean (among other things) razing the last human cities and turning them into farmland. That’s not good!

That means there’s some peak point in the middle, after which adding more chickens makes the world worse. The “slippery slope” looks more like a hill. We’re climbing up the hill now and would stop when we reach the peak.

Green objections

There are environmentalist utilitarian arguments against eating meat. One is that raising livestock is bad for the environment, which in turn will lead to unhappiness. This can be true, but it isn’t necessarily true. A utilitarian would have to look at the specific environmental consequences of raising one more chicken (for example) and weigh it against the net happiness produced by that chicken. The environmental consequences of raising individual animals can be very low with the right approach, and those individual animals are possibly capable of feeling as much pleasure as an individual human, so it’s very unlikely that the unhappiness caused by the environmental consequences must outweigh the net happiness caused by that animal’s life.

Another green argument is that livestock experience more suffering than happiness, so each chicken/pig/cow/etc is decreasing the net happiness of the world. This is something else that can be true but isn’t necessarily so. There are ways of raising animals that make them suffer– the way we treat chickens, in particular, is quite bad – but animals can be raised in ways that are much better than if they lived in the wild. Some livestock are raised in conditions that are better than most humans live in!

Non-utilitarian objections

There are non-utilitarian arguments against the meat industry. You could say that it’s wrong to kill lifeforms, especially relatively advanced lifeforms like cows and chickens. You could also say it’s wrong to breed animals just because you like how they taste, not because you want their companionship.

These counter-arguments may be good, but they’re outside the scope of this article. A rule against killing has no place in (most) utilitarian philosophy, because utilitarianism doesn’t allow for moral rules; it’s concerned only with consequences. Calling an action evil because it has selfish motives also has no place in utilitarian philosophy, because utilitarianism doesn’t care about motives, only consequences.

You’re Only as Good as You See Your Enemies

Looking for the worst in others will find the worst in you

There’s a brilliant idea in philosophy called “the principle of charity.” Despite how it sounds, it’s not about being compassionate to the poor, although that’s a good idea, too. It’s about given the benefit of the doubt to people you disagree with and understanding their arguments in the most fair and reasonable way.

Why’s that a good idea? Because our natural human tendency is to avoid thinking and being challenged, so we are always (subconsciously) on the lookout for excuses to dismiss other points of view. That’s why strawman arguments and their ilk are so appealing.

If we let ourselves ignore our critics, then we’re doomed to become parochial and intellectually flabby. We’d be like an industry that lobbies for tariffs so that it doesn’t have to compete. We need rivals challenging us to force us to learn and grow.

Intellectual Strength

Anyone can fall for bad ideas. The important thing isn’t to get all our beliefs right the first time (which is impossible), but to be able to figure out when we’re wrong and when we’re right. That’s why we need to take criticism seriously and fairly.

Take, for example, the prohibition of alcohol in America. In retrospect, it seems like an obviously bad idea. Outlawing drinking was just going to drive drinking underground, making a mockery of the law and giving a great deal of power to organized crime. How did prohibitionists miss this problem?

In part because it was easy for them to dismiss criticism. They could describe critics as rum soaked rabble who belonged to unpopular ethnic minorities like German or Spanish. Or they could call them greedy businessmen trying to make a profit off addicts.

Prohibitionists were never forced to take opposing arguments seriously, so they didn’t.

Or think of conspiracy theories. Criticism of these theories can be waved away as being part of a coverup, as being misleading evidence meant to lead people away from the conspiracy, or as the meaningless testimony of brainwashed sheep-people. Whatever contradicts the theory can be dismissed. Its why very, very implausible conspiracy theories can survive and spread.

One of the great advantages of the scientific method is that it has an openness to criticism built into it. If a theory isn’t falsifiable – meaning, if its proponents can wave away all criticism – it’s considered unscientific. A good theory must be open to refutation; if its proponents want to be taken seriously, they must at least pretend to know they’re fallible and could be proven wrong.

This generally isn’t true in our political arguments. Being a successful ideologue means you must make grand statements then find petty reasons to dismiss all criticism. The only acceptable way to admit fallibility is to say that maybe you’re not extreme enough or loud enough.

Moral Strength

It’s not enough to be a good critical thinker, of course. You also should be a good person. If you’re cynical about other people, especially people with different values than you, it’s going to be hard for you to push yourself to be a great person.

There’s a moral version of the “principal of charity.” It’s called the “principle of humanity,” and it basically means putting yourself on someone’s shoes when you’re judging their beliefs. Try to imagine why you would see those beliefs as noble or, at least, justifiable.

Take Richard Nixon. He’s an easy guy to demonize- for good reason! He did a lot of awful things that hurt individual people and undermined American democracy as a whole. That means he’s going to be a challenging test of our ability to apply the principle of humanity.

When would you be willing to break into a hotel to illegally spy on opposing politicians? Well, what if you thought the whole country was in danger of falling apart and being enslaved by the Soviet Union? That’s what Nixon was afraid of. It wasn’t a reasonable fear, so it didn’t justify his massive betrayal of trust (and the law), but now we can understand it as a human failing, not the failure of some cartoonish two-dimensional villain.

If we did things the easy way and simply saw Nixon as a power-hungry tyrant, then we’d never challenge ourselves to be better than that. We’d never learn a lesson from his fall. We’d never understand that our allies and leaders could easily be the next Nixon.

The ultimate example of this is when we see our enemies as Nazis. That’s not rare: every US President I can remember has been compared to Hitler. That’s poisonous for political debate, and even more poisonous to the individuals making the comparison. If they tell themselves they’re literally stopping a genocide and a world war, then they can justify anything. That’s not an exaggeration. There are people out there who justify lying, cheating, and even violence because they claim their enemies are the second coming of the Third Reich.

Disincentivizing Dissent

Dissent is the most important remedy to groupthink and the “madness of crowds.” As the scholar Cass Sunstein wrote, “Institutions that reward conformity are prone to failure to the extent that they do not do that [promote dissent]; institutions are far more likely to prosper if they create a norm of openness and dissent.”

If you try to stigmatize your enemies as Nazi communist racists, try to get them fired, or even physically assault them, then you’re creating a more conformist society. Unlike the other problems with trying to trivialize your opponents, this one doesn’t harm you personally so much as it harms the whole society.

When Josef Stalin was the leader of the USSR, he instituted widespread purges, where he rooted out and destroyed any corrupting, capitalist influences – meaning, anyone who displeased him. That benefited Stalin personally by strengthening his hold on power but destroyed the ranks of the leadership of the USSR. If he had seen his opponents as sharing his good motivations and intelligence, just differing on the details, the Soviet empire would have been better off.

Exceptions

I know we can’t always be charitable and humane. Perhaps we shouldn’t always be so. If your enemies are literally shipping off millions of people to concentration camps and invading and occupying foreign countries, it’s time to stop thinking in terms of common humanity and start treating them as mortal threats. When you go to actual, literal, physical war with other people, you would be foolish to try to empathize with their plight instead of defending yourself.

That’s not the situation we’re facing in the US, though. Not even close. Saying impolite words isn’t the same thing as kidnapping people and sending them to camps; welcoming immigration isn’t the same thing as military occupation. When people conflate disagreement with war, they’re just trying to justify their dumb ideas and bad behavior.

The Dangers of a Science of Morality

Treating values like physics could be a trap

Humanity has advanced tremendously in our understanding and control of the world around us. We’ve created institutions and a methodology that keep this momentum going with no end in sight. Progress has become our default state. This continual advancement sits uneasily with our gradual, stumbling, ambiguous moral development.

There’s a hope that we could science-ify morality and improve our values at the same breakneck speed as we improve our knowledge and technology. Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes is an example of this dream. Sometimes it isn’t expressed as a hope, but as a Jurassic Park-style warning that we must gain wisdom as fast as scientific knowledge or we’ll be destroyed by our own creations.

A scientific approach to morality is more likely to be Frankenstein’s monster that destroys us than our salvation.

We ought to avoid the “is-ought” problem

The Scottish philosopher David Hume warned of the “is-ought” problem. This is when we confuse the way things are with the way things should be. For example, most human cultures through history have had slavery. That doesn’t mean slavery is a morally acceptable institution.

For a more controversial example, take arguments about homosexuality. Some gay rights advocates point to examples of homosexual behavior throughout history as proof that it’s not wrong. There are many fine arguments for gay rights, but this is not one of them.

Granted, scientists could avoid this mistake. Take Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, for example. Haidt simply describes different moral perspectives without endorsing any. Anthropologists are also trained to describe values, rather than prescribe.

There are as many examples of failure as success, though. The field of psychology in general has an extreme problem with the is-ought distinction. The bible of psychology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), looks at the world of upper middle-class American professionals and considers it the way things ought to be. Deviation is stigmatized as “disorder”, at least until favored activists lobby to change it.

Science is done by scientists

It sounds obvious, but scientific research is done by scientists in that field. There’s not much room for dilletantes and amateurs. That’s a necessary part of advancement: keeping up with research and having access to the latest tools and methods is a full-time job. That means scientists will inevitable create a group identity.

No matter how you educate a group of people, they’ll still have the heart of a primate tribe. They’ll still uncritically absorb a set of shared values that they’ll eventually consider above criticism. They’ll still separate “us” from “them,” and view criticism from “them” as being an attack on “us” that requires rallying together and hiding any weakness. They’ll still ascribe nefarious motives to “them.” They’ll still use motivated reasoning to justify their own values and diminish outsiders’.

That’s a problem for a field like psychology that has a suite of tools to pathologize its critics. Scientific moralists would be even worse. They wouldn’t just imply that critics are crazy, they’d accuse critics of being evil people.

In the Middle Ages, the Church was the center of morality, and when you criticized it you were practically standing against Goodness. Imagine that the Church also claimed to be part of a group that was responsible for all progress in knowledge and technology. Even the most devout Christians during the Middle Ages saw some pre-Christian thinkers (e.g. Plato) as being brilliant, important figures. The Church couldn’t claim a complete monopoly on reason and progress the way a scientific morality institution could.

Think of the late 18th and early 19th century. There was a fad for phrenology and ‘scientific racism’ among intellectuals. They were confident that they could scientifically determine the worth of people (by measuring their skulls, for example) then institutionalize or sterilize the unworthy. That would be just the beginning.

Occam’s Razor will cut our heart out

Our sense of right and wrong is complicated. We value competing goods like happiness and justice. We’re sensitive to context. We use morality differently in different situations; for example, how we should react to a friend’s misbehavior versus what kind of legislation we should support. This would all be hurt by a naïve attempt to make morality scientific.

Science involves breaking complicated, poorly understand processes into simple factors that can be understood. Think of Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Periodic Table of the Elements. Occam’s Razor encourages us to eliminate any factors that we don’t think we need.

Human beings, however, resist being broken down into simple factors. The social sciences have had trouble advancing at the pace of the physical sciences, and achieving the same kind of successes, because there’s so much irreducible complexity in the human mind and in human societies. Reductionism hasn’t had much success.

The ne plus ultra reductive approach to humanity is a moral philosophy called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that increasing happiness is the only thing that matters. They don’t just think that the ends justify the means, they think that the means don’t matter at all: whatever you do should be judged only by its consequences. Specifically, it should be judged by how it effects the net global amount of happiness. Everything from breaking a promise to murder is fine so long as people like it more than they’re made unhappy by it.

It sounds absurd when you first hear about it. It sounds absurd to most experts on it, too.  But there’s a deep psychological appeal, especially to numerate intellectual, to deriving right and wrong from a simple equation.

That makes it appealing to would-be scientific moralists. Even if they didn’t adopt utilitarianism whole-heartedly (though some, such as Joshua Greene, already have) they would be drawn to reductive views for the same psychological reasons. If there isn’t room in their theory for moral concepts like duty or honesty, they could just dismiss them. They’d be the same as the aether or phlogiston. Outdated explanations that no longer serve a purpose.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a long tunnel

Maybe one day it will be possible to reduce the evils of the world and the human heart through research and engineering. That day has not yet come. In the 19th century, people believed that humans had nearly completed their understanding of a mechanical, clockwork universe. Then the 20th century came and blew apart everything we knew about the universe. We can’t afford to have the same hubris about morality as we had about physics.

Why We Don’t Trust Each Other’s Economics

Gut-level feelings about the market may be a product of one’s environment

Different subcultures have different attitudes towards economics. You probably know the stereotypes already: businesspeople and blue-collar workers lean towards the free-market views of the right. Academics (especially in the liberal arts) and artists lean towards the welfare-oriented left. Like many stereotypes, there’s some evidence supporting it.

Why do different groups have different views? People’s preferred explanation for political disagreements is that their opponents are just stupid and evil. They can then go on rants about buying votes, economic illiteracy, greed, and false consciousness. That’s a very self-indulgent explanation. It’s also boring.

A more interesting way to think about the split is to think about the specific economic situations faced by these classes of people.

Left wing skepticism towards the free market

The archetypal left-wing fields have very unpredictable and inequal rewards. Think of art. A brilliant, hardworking artist can work their whole life while struggling to make rent. Then, after dying, their work is discovered and sold for millions. A mediocre talent can become an overnight sensation and live in luxury. There’s no apparent link between quality of output and rewards.

Academia may have less income inequality, but academics only capture a fraction of the value of their work. Brilliant, world changing ideas don’t have the same kind of monetary rewards as you get for being a successful CEO or investor. That would be true even if academics were savvier about (and willing to engage in) marketing their work. Some works take centuries to influence the world — how can we repay Newton for his contributions? The lion’s share of the profit made from these ideas go to people outside the academy.

When you see economic unfairness all around you, it’s natural to become cynical about the market. The value of your peers’ work isn’t directly correlated to how much money they’re making, and even if they’re hard-working they might not make enough to survive. The system looks broken.

Right wing trust in the free market

The situation is different in the business world. The coworkers who never show up or do their job don’t get promoted. The talented hard workers do well. Yes, you personally might not be appreciated enough (who is?) but in general you see a correlation between the value other people add and the rewards they reap. Businesses that can’t reward good workers fold, or at least drive away their good workers, who find a new home in a business that does a better job tracking merit.

The same logic applies when you engage in business-to-business transactions. You buy from the suppliers who can offer better goods at better prices more reliably. The effective businesses are rewarded, and the ineffective ones flounder.

Your experience with free market skeptics is likely to harden your opinion. You notice when a coworker is complaining about how unfair the system is, it’s usually because they feel entitled to more money and resent the people who’ve worked longer, harder, and smarter to earn that extra money. Their sense of unfairness comes from their unrealistically positive self-perception.

None of that is universal, of course. Maybe the CEO’s idiot nephew will get promoted way beyond what he deserves. Maybe the young guy who wants to unionize actually does a great job and doesn’t just resent people who outperform him. Maybe one of your competitors is driving you out of business through shady practices. But you notice these as the exceptions, and the rule is that the system is fair.

So which view is right?

It’s a mistake to think that one group is right and the other wrong. The free market does do a great-but-imperfect job of allocating wealth to people who create and sell things of value. It does a less great job of allocating wealth to people who have big hearts and try really hard but don’t create things with immediately obvious economic value. There’s no objective answer to how big of a problem that is. There are some solutions that are clearly terrible (e.g. a command economy) but even after you exclude the extremes there’s a whole lot of room for disagreement and different values.

The Problem of Existence


He didn’t sign up for this. Photo by Mindy Olson P on Unsplash

We didn’t ask to be born. What do we do now?

Our political ideologies fail us as soon as we start to exist. Our ideas about the relationship between individuals and society implicitly rely on those individuals being adults, capable of making reasoned decisions. They gloss over the first two decades of our lives, and ignore a key, strange feature of existence: none of us chose to be here in the first place.

From the moment of our conception we’re parasites. Year after year we’re supported by other people, for no reason greater than their sense of obligation, with no explicit demands made on us in return. We may not be permitted to break most of society’s rules – even though we never agreed to them – but we have very few duties demanded of us. Is it right that we must follow these rules we didn’t create? Is it right that people must support us without getting anything in return? Do we owe them anything for this support, even though we never asked for it?

What we’ve been given

In a sense, we owe everything to our parents. If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t exist at all, so everything – good or bad – that we’ve experienced is because of them. We also owe a great deal to the communities we belong to. Our town or city created the social environment where we were raised, educated, and socialized. All the real-life friends we’ve made and mentors we’ve had are due to our community.

We owe much to our nation, as well. If we were lucky enough to live in a relatively stable, peaceful society, it’s because we happened to be born in the right place. If we were very lucky, we were born somewhere where we were cared for until we reached adulthood (or even longer), received a free education, were guaranteed some rights, and eventually gained some degree of political power. That’s a huge advantage compared to the less fortunate around the world or, especially, compared to our ancestors, who received none of those things.

It’s almost inconceivable how much we owe past generations of humans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – and his intellectual descendants – liked to imagine pre-historic humanity as “noble savages” who lived in peace with nature and each other. We now know this to be completely incorrect. Humanity had to constantly fight for survival against heartless nature (just like every other animal) and was perfectly happy to murder and enslave each other. We now live in extreme peace, prosperity, and leisure compared to our ancestors, and it’s because of their efforts.

Do we owe anything in exchange?

We didn’t ask for any of this, though. Even if we had, we were in no position to be making deals. In legal terms, we lacked “capacity” to make contracts. What do you owe to people who’ve helped you so much when you could never promise anything in return? It’s not an easy question to answer. Most philosophies don’t even try.

Take the classical liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith. This has probably been the most influential philosophy shaping modern Western governments. Liberals believed that government was necessary to keep people from a war of all-against-all, or, at least, to defend their natural rights. These thinkers were mostly concerned with limits on the state’s power, though. They thought humans existed as individuals first and then the state was created to serve and protect those individuals.

Classical liberals saw humans as having absolute ownership of our own bodies, and by extension having absolute ownership over the products of our own labor. These products are created by the time we invest in making them, so in essence they’re part of our lives, therefore just as much our property as our arms and legs.

This is no help to understanding the problem of existence. We’re created by the labor of our parents (literally, for our mothers) so by liberal reasoning we’re our parents’ property. Everything we created would be their property, by extension, like we were a factory or livestock that they owned. As property, we would owe nothing to anyone, because property can’t be indebted. All that would change when we became adults, when we would instantly transmute from being property to being an independent adult who’s implicitly consented to a social contract.

Over the last 150 years society has moved away from the classical liberal view. Now children are considered something more than property, more than pets even, but less than independent adults. That feels right to us, but it’s logically difficult. Liberalism was a very rational philosophy. We’ve added duties and privileges to it without complete logical justification (though some thinkers, such as John Rawls, have tried). In part, that’s because it’s hard to rationally define our sense of debt, obligations, and gratitude. It’s also hard to have a consistent philosophy about existence and childhood.

Existence as a plane crash

We can clarify our thinking about existence with an analogy. Imagine you were taking a flight above the Pacific and your plane went down. You nearly died in the crash, and your body washed up on shore. A local tribe saved you from the brink of death and nursed you back to health over months. At first you were delirious and bedridden, but as you healed you learned how to fit in with the natives. You learned their language and how they hunt and forage.

What do you owe the natives? You never asked for their help. In fact, you couldn’t stop them from keeping you alive. They forced this new tribal life on you without your consent. In your new life you’ll face pain and hardship that you could have avoided by simply dying in the crash. You’ll be expected to act in ways you don’t understand or agree with.

On the other hand, they saved you from non-existence. They sacrificed a great deal to take care of you, only hoping that you would join them and be a part of their society. Would it be fair to ignore all that because there was no written contract or explicit consent? Even if you don’t like joining their rituals and observing their taboos, they’ve given you a remarkable opportunity to join them instead of simply ceasing to exist.

Repayment

It’s not possible to really “prove” that we owe anyone anything. We don’t have pre-natal contracts to refer to. Still, I hope I’ve made a compelling argument that we do have unspoken and untallied debts. Even if you’re convinced, though, I haven’t told you exactly what we owe or how we can repay it. I don’t think there is an answer to that question. Someone who saw life as being entirely about material wealth could, in theory, total up the amount of money spent gestating and raising him – by his parents and by the government – then adjust it for a reasonable interest rate and think of that number as his debt. Very few of us have such a reductive view of life, though, which makes things more complicated. Even our imaginary Scrooge would run into problems with the second issue: how do we repay the debt? If you choose to repay governments it’s as easy as cutting them a check for services rendered, assuming they haven’t been overthrown and replaced. Repaying your loved ones and your community is harder,

History isn’t on our side

We all want to be remembered as good people. If you’re like me and don’t believe in an afterlife, then it feels even more important to have future generations love us. If the only thing that’s going to last forever is our reputation then we better make sure it’s good!

So when we fight other people, in war or in politics, we tell each other that history is on our side. We’re going to be remembered as heroes and our opponents will be remembered as villains or simply forgotten. We’re made by confident by the knowledge that our values will persevere and the rest will be consigned to the ash heap of history. There’s a problem with that, though.

History never makes up its mind.

Sure, at some points in time the majority of historians have settled on one view. Contrary to popular opinion, this isn’t always because “history is written by the victors.” We don’t usually think of the fall of Rome as being the triumph of the noble Germanic tribes against the oppressive Roman Empire, nor do we study the glorious victory of the North Vietnamese against colonialist capitalists. We think of these defeats in more diffident ways.

But even when historians reach a consensus view, it’s not written in stone.

The Bright Ages

Most of us think of the years following the decline of the Roman Empire (around the 5th century) to the start of the Renaissance (the 14th century) as the Dark Ages, a time of ignorance, superstition, and barbarism. This isn’t completely wrong: the collapse of the Western Roman Empire did do a lot of damage to societies around Europe. It’s not completely accurate, either, and we’re mostly influenced by a historical consensus that developed in the Renaissance and became more extreme during the Enlightenment. It’s only relatively recently that historians have started to challenge this view.

The fall of the empire fractured governance into many smaller states. The central power uniting them became the Church. This was damning to Renaissance thinkers, who embraced humanism and rejected the view that mortal life was fleeting and temptations of the flesh should be resisted. The blossoming of art, philosophy and science that happened under the Church was minimized as it was inconvenient to their view of history.

Protestantism and the Enlightenment put more nails into the coffin of the Dark Ages’ reputation. Protestants wanted more reasons to condemn the Catholic Church, so they interpreted the Dark Ages as a time of the Church oppressing people and causing societal stagnation. Enlightenment thinkers needed to see themselves as triumphing over persecution, so they interpreted the Dark Ages as a time of ignorance and superstition that was encouraged by an anti-science Church. This was despite the fact that virtually all science was conducted under the Church, and that scientific works were preserved by the Church.

Even today many people believe these distortions, though most historians reject them. Does that mean history is on the side of the Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers who dismissed the Dark Ages, or on the side of the people of the Dark Ages?

The Found Cause

Today nearly all historians agree that the American Civil War was over slavery. But this was not always so. Explanations of the war have shifted over time and, though it seems unlikely, they might keep shifting.

When the South first declared secession, their declarations and the speeches by their leaders made it clear why they were seceding. They said, over and over, that they wanted to preserve the institution of slavery. They seceded in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln, a member of the staunchly anti-slavery Republican Party. Though Lincoln himself was a moderate on the issue he still represented a party dedicated to ending slavery so was unacceptable to Southern leaders.

Then the South attacked Fort Sumter and the war began. Lincoln, and most Union soldiers, initially saw the war as an attempt to put down a rebellion threatening the United States. As the war continued their attitudes would change and they would see it as a war to end slavery. Southern leaders continued to defend slavery until they lost the war, at which point many would change their tune and say the war was about defending their way of life. The attitude of the Confederate soldiers fighting the war is less clear: only 20% specifically mentioned defending slavery, but the others did talk of opposing the North’s attempt to change their society, which, in the end, meant they were defending slavery. Maybe they didn’t personally love slavery, but they saw themselves as defending a society with slavery as a key part.

So, during the war, it was generally seen as a war over slavery. After the war ended, that changed. People (mostly Southerners) framed the war as a noble “Lost Cause” against a greedy industrialist North trying to destroy a chivalrous, pastoral South. Slavery was downplayed. A pro-Confederate person alive at that time could have said “look! History was on our side the whole time!”

As time passed, the Lost Cause explanation has fallen out of favor. Historians overwhelmingly see the war as being caused by the South’s secession which was caused by the Republican Party’s opposition to slavery. The war, therefore, was a war over slavery. Now, a pro-Union person could say “look! History was on our side!”

Both people are right. History was on the Confederate’s side until it was on the Unionist’s side. It’s possible that history will change its mind again and again. It’s unlikely, as there’s such a strong argument that the war was about slavery, but history is always viewed through the lens of historians. If a future society wants to tell a story about a war about honorable farmers fighting hordes of industrialists, then they might repurpose the Civil War again.

Don’t Count on History’s Hindsight

It’s tempting to think that future generations will look back on us and applaud our side as being on the vanguard of progress. Tempting, but unwise. It’s most likely that we’ll be forgotten by future generations, exempting niche historians. If we are part of a rare movement that makes the history books, then history will have a fluid view of us, as history is always a story told by historians, and the perspective of historians never becomes a timeless constant.

That’s a dispiriting message for those of us whose only afterlife is in the memories of our descendants. We aren’t going to be shuffled into a reputational Heaven or Hell for eternity. All we can do is believe in our actions today and hope that we’re not judged too harshly for them tomorrow.