Crows and Eels

I think I need to eat crow. As my friends at Pomona will probably recognize, I spent a lot of the last few years being (at least outwardly) skeptical of political theory and philosophy. And, as you can probably tell from reading this blog, I’ve been thinking a lot while being in the UK about political theory. So I thought I ought to write a bit about why I used to be skeptical of the enterprise and why I’ve come to change my mind.

It’s worth starting, I think, by clarifying what I mean by “political theory” and what I used to believe more in. American political science is typically divided into a few different areas: American politics, comparative politics (literally the domestic politics of any non-American country), international relations (traditionally, the interactions between countries), public law (the law that concerns the relationship between a government and people, such as constitutional law and criminal law), public administration/public policy (concerning questions of implementing governmental policy), and political theory (basically, everything else concerning questions of government and politics!). As I understand it, political theory is distinguishable from these other subfields primarily by its concern with broader questions (e.g., in political theory, we’d ask questions such as, “what is a good government?”; “what is law for?”; “what is representation?”) and its broader methodological scope. As far as I can tell, in other areas of political science (except for public law), we focus on empirical, observable behaviors, and the purpose of the discipline is to explain and study those behaviors. In contrast, political theory engages with other kinds of questions, even those that are not operationalizable as empirical questions.

I used to believe a lot more in what we might lump as “quantitative, empirical political science” — efforts to understand politics by measuring phenomena and then applying the tools of statistics. Examples of this kind of work that I’m familiar with are the literature on presidential vetoes (when does the President veto legislation and why?), political polarization (what causes Congress to vote in increasingly partisan ways?), international treaty compliance (when do states parties follow human rights treaties?), and so on. This kind of work, I used to — and still do, to a certain extent — believe, can help us understand how politics works by building causal theories that are “falsifiable,” that is, theories that are testable and disprovable.

Three reasons led me to believe in the value of this kind of political science. First, methodological rigor helps us temper our ideological biases. We are all surrounded by and implicated in the work of politics. Political scientists all the more so — when you spend your entire life studying something, you tend to care a lot about it. And because politics concerns the big questions in life, your ideological biases can matter a lot. There are works of political science that try to argue, for example, that Democratic presidents tend to grow the economy while Republican presidents don’t (and vice versa). That kind of eminently partisan argument is very liable to ideological bias. Methodological transparency can temper those biases because they expose your work to criticism: How do you measure economic growth? What factors are you controlling for? And so on.

Second, quantitative analysis, especially, can temper other kinds of personal biases. We all have gut inclinations about how politics operates, and those are built off our individual life experiences. They’re subject to all sorts of cognitive biases that aren’t going to represent the complex, dynamic systems political scientists study. Aggregating data can help the analyst deal with those individual biases. Nate Silver, for example, loves to make fun of the traditional method of covering presidential elections by sending a journalist to a diner in the Midwest, interviewing a few random people, and then forecasting the results of an election. Obviously most qualitative political science tends to be more methodologically robust, but the strawperson example does help draw our attention to the dangers of non-systematic analyses.

Third, and most fundamentally, science is meant to be constructive — to develop over time, resulting in the accretion of greater and greater knowledge so that we can, in the end, say that we’ve actually learned something about how the world works. What made me skeptical of political theory, I think, is that it doesn’t feel like it grows; it seems like the endless negotiation of competing worldviews and values that lack any methodological or subject-matter constraint to enable the building of knowledge.

In my very first reading for my college introductory physics class — my beloved Physics 70 — our textbook argued that a scientific discipline requires four criteria: (1) a community of scholars; (2) commitment to logical consistency of models; (3) use of reproducible experiments to test those models; and (4) theory that enables research.

The vast majority of empirical, quantitative political science, we might say, barely (if at all) meets these criteria. Only a small proportion of political science is done by experiment, typically (as I understand it) in the field of political psychology. But what does distinguish empirical political science is that it attempts to build models to explain the behavior of political actors; it is grounded in, and tested against, observable reality. Critically, then, empirical political science is falsifiable, even if it is not experimental.

Take, for example, the “credible commitment” hypothesis, which is an important theory in regulatory studies. The basic idea is that democratic countries have legislatures that cannot bind themselves to a future action — a legislature that establishes, say, a carbon-trading mechanism could always, after an election, vote to abolish that system. The result is that corporations are skittish and are less likely to invest in that country because they think the country’s regulatory scheme lacks a credible commitment. (Note that this basic idea has normative breadth; arguments in development studies about the rule of law being crucial to economic growth, for example, are premised on this same underlying faith in property guarantees and regulatory stability.) The credible commitment hypothesis argues that countries will therefore create independent regulatory agencies with power to create stable, expert-driven regulation that can survive political changes. The probability of the creation of an independent regulatory agency — and the extent to which the agency is actually independent — will vary, according to this model, based on the number of veto points in the country’s legislature (i.e., is it easy for a subsequent legislature to create new law?). Regardless of whether you buy this logic — I’m skeptical, for reasons that aren’t relevant here — it leads to an empirically verifiable hypothesis; we can test it and disprove it. There’s something comforting, I think, in that possibility. For it suggests that we can learn about politics — that we can become better analysts, and perhaps even practitioners, of politics.

There are those for whom politics is simply chaos and arbitrary circumstance. For such fatalists, political success or failure is a function of luck rather than ability or knowledge. What a dismal view of politics. It is one that I simply can’t agree with, even as many of my professors seem to believe it.

In the opening of The Federalist, Hamilton wrote: “It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” I think the debate between empirical political science and political theory is mirrored by Hamilton’s central question — whether government can, in fact, be created and act based on “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” Hamilton, one of America’s first political scientists, thought it could. Indeed, in a different essay, he relied on this essential logic. He acknowledged that previous republics had failed, and dismally so: “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.” But the “science of politics,” he thought, “has received great improvement.” Armed with a more perfect political science, Hamilton suggested, the American experiment in republican self-rule might endure.

The Federalist, it is sometimes remarked, was a piece of political propaganda. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay wrote these essays supporting the 1787 Constitution; their work might be better understood as disingenuous advocacy than sincere belief. But I think concentrating on Hamilton’s use of political science is helpful for us. For one, it helps us understand how political science is inherently political — it is invariably tied to, and thus shapes, the phenomena it studies. The political science of Montesqieu was embedded into the American Constitution in its separated powers and checks-and-balances. Even the scholar who studies political science solely for intellectual stimulation ought to recognize that political science can and will be used for normative ends.

Hamilton’s essay, we should note, also reveals the limit of empirical political science. It is hard to read the writings of the Framing generation without feeling that all of their thought was fundamentally, irreconcilably, absurdly wrong. How, we wonder, can one write about liberty, and equality, and human rights — of government based on “reflection and choice” rather than “force” — when one partakes in a system built on chattel slavery? The political theorist Judith Shklar wrote of the Framing generation’s intellectual giants (Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson): “Not one could even suggest a plausible solution to America's greatest single failure, black chattel slavery. History, institutional analysis, and economic calculation were all equally useless. For all their confidence in political knowledge and in their own ability to determine the fate of a nation, they were unable to imagine a multiracial citizenry. . . . The narrowness of the politics of rational compromise confront us starkly (as do those of merely accurate knowledge) when we recall the drift to the Civil War.”

Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson were America’s early empirical political scientists, and they failed so utterly in responding to the profound moral dilemma of their time. Their failure, I think, points to the first reason why I’ve become more disillusioned with empirical, quantitative political science. It is a subfield that, I think, can’t answer — and doesn’t even engage with — many of the important questions of politics. There are fundamental ideas in politics that we just can’t operationalize for quantitative, empirical analysis. How do we talk about, quantitatively and systematically, the pull of rhetoric or the visceral effects of a story? Yet there's no doubt that both of those things matter a lot. Think about the canons of American political rhetoric: the better angels of our nature; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; government of laws, and not of men; a republic, if you can keep it; government of the people, by the people, and for the people; all men are created equal. Political rhetoric in America often reads like a poorly-cited judicial opinion, sprinkled as it is with echoes of the past. Think, too, of the power of individual stories: the killing of George Floyd or the federalization of the Arkansas National Guard in response to Orval Faubus’s refusal to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. These stories profoundly shape the American political self-image in ways that we might peripherally measure but cannot ultimately test.

A second argument is that political theory is necessary for widening our imagination and situating empirical analysis. We need a name and causal mechanism before we can study a phenomenon, as I have suggested previously. Moreover, theory-driven empirical research is important as a methodological constraint: it helps us justify that we are finding more than mere correlations, but actual causal mechanisms. And theory enables us to interpret quantitative results. Consider electoral analysis. What does it mean to say that rural voters are more Republican than urban voters? To a certain extent, that empirical finding alone means the exact same as “Republican voters are more Republican than non-Republicans.” For neither offers any causal, explanatory value. Where you live, on its own, doesn’t explain why you behave in a certain way. We need a theoretical reason to think that where you live ought to matter; otherwise, we might not be finding anything helpful, and the rural-urban divide might be better explained by other factors, such as education, attitudes toward race, and so on.

A third and most fundamental reason for caring about political theory is that it clarifies our values. Empirical political science can help us trace why someone votes a certain way. And there is insight there. But it is a limited insight. Hanna Pitkin wrote about the “democratic” answer to political questions, where we simply say, “they do X because of A, B, and C.” But it doesn’t give us a reason that they should act in that way. In her analysis of representation, she explained, “I will not ask what causes people to have a psychological feeling of being represented, but what reasons can be given for supposing someone or something is being represented.” There’s a value in theoretical abstraction because it requires you to confront the fundamental questions at hand, rather than attempting to explain them in terms of empirical issues. No wonder, then, that political scientists love to dodge questions by saying, “that’s an empirical question.”

It is this third reason that has felt most compelling to me recently. From time to time, I worry that I lack concrete political convictions. My personal sense is that I tend to judge too quickly, and so I try to force myself to learn more before rendering judgment. But I’ve noticed myself recently feeling very contrarian — I feel that I’m finding ways to disagree with just about anyone I’m talking with. Everyone, I feel, seems quite certain, and it’s making me feel more and more uncertain even as I wish I were more certain.

The last time I really felt this way was when I spent eight months in DC. Two people in particular — one of the line attorneys at DOJ and my supervisor at CCE — really inspired me because they seemed to have figured it out: they were both extremely certain of the righteousness of their causes and also had extremely firm groundings for those beliefs. As always, there is a good Taylor Swift lyric about this feeling (although, as is often the case, it comes from a romantic song whose ideas are capable of much broader application): “You're so much older and wiser, and I / I wait by the door like I'm just a kid.”

I just finished a book about Louis Brandeis, and his method for dealing with this concern about righteous certainty was to focus on facts. He abandoned the search for a grand theory in favor of contingent judgment. It’s really hard to imagine in the abstract the meaning of “justice,” but it’s easy for us to point to examples of injustice that we witness. And we can act based on our shared agreement about such injustices. In a speech called “The Employer and Trades Unions,” he explained, “Nine-tenths of the serious controversies which arise in life result from misunderstanding, result from one man not knowing the facts which to the other man seem important, or otherwise failing to appreciate his point of view.” When talking about the development of law, he chastised Lochner-era jurisprudence for being overly focused on abstract legal concepts rather than the lived realities of people’s experiences; “no law,” he contended, “can be understood without a full knowledge of the facts out of which it arises, and to which it is to be applied.” Full understanding of the context surrounding the novel legislation — in these cases, dealing with labor conditions, such as minimum-wage or maximum-hour laws — would help judges realize the rationality of laws that, facially, abridge the freedom of contract. Conflicting absolute principles of law — the police power of states weighed against the due-process right to liberty of contract — could give way to reasoned compromise by focusing on facts and the particular circumstances surrounding each piece of legislation.

That kind of common-law-like method of thinking about politics — successively making contingent judgments that are highly fact-bound — can be valuable, but I worry that it can lead one to get lost in the weeds. For those kinds of judgments can only really be made with regard to specific questions, and they’re not always the important ones. Here’s an example. I met up with another Marshall yesterday, and she posed a very different kind of question, one that we don’t typically ask. She noted that Western countries whose companies have developed vaccines were able to do so because, for the last few centuries, they have plundered and looted the world’s riches, enabling them to concentrate wealth and thereby facilitate scientific development. Do these countries not, therefore, owe an obligation to other countries to share the fruits of that wealth (perhaps narrowly the coronavirus vaccine, but also more broadly)? And if they do, how can that obligation be fulfilled?

To put a finer point on it: there is value in asking questions that do not normally arise in our political discourse, in imagining future worlds that do not seem possible today. The vast majority of people, a year ago, would not have thought the abolition of policing was a possible policy. Many today, it seems, still hold that belief. But that policy has become the subject of mainstream political debate; it has entered the realm of the possible because people chose to imagine a different world free of fundamental injustices. We can critique — and I have critiqued — political theory for being abstract, and academic, and impractical. Try approaching a politician or policymaker and asking them for their thoughts on the ideal Gandhian versus Weberian politician; I don’t imagine you’ll get a meaningful response. But is it wrong for us to ask what we ought to expect of our politicians, to wonder whether a principled, religious politician versus a deal-making machine-raised politician is better? Of course not. But when we’re sucked into the messy political disputes of the day — how large a check should people get in a COVID stimulus package? how much money should go to local and state governments? — we lose sight of those animating, broader questions that undergird political practice.

I’ve written previously about the necessity of judgment in thinking about politics. Politics can’t, in the end, be reduced to the mere application of absolute principles. There are simply too many conflicting principles that are each individually desirable. When we have those conflicting principles, we are driven to narrower, fact-bound assessments, as Brandeis would have it. But we need to balance that perspective with that of the theorist who seeks to build a constructive political morality — who tries to answer the broader questions of what is good, and right, and just, as opposed to merely what is better.

There will be moments in my life, I think, where I feel a stronger pull toward the former perspective — the Brandeisian idea of emphasizing facts and narrow, negotiated compromises through the muddied process of democratic politics. But right now, I feel that what is missing in my political thought is much more the latter perspective — that clarity of values and of guiding ideas that act as a lodestar for rendering those fact-bound political judgments.

* * * * *

Roses: Two things this week. First, I’ve continued to go for bike rides with my LSE friend! It has been quite fun, although I’m still pretty bad at approaching a red light with cars stopped near the sidewalk; the combination of going slowly and not having much space for error means I tend to lose my balance. I think we’re going to try doing longer rides soon to build up to the Runnymede trip. Here’s a picture of us.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, I met up with another Marshall in the town of Ely — a cute little town in Cambridgeshire. The folk story (disputed, according to Wikipedia) is that the town is named after eels, because there was a lot of eel-fishing in the area. (Apparently the Domesday Book recorded the number of eels being fished in the area!) My friend and I decided to take a selfie with all of the eel-themed art we found as we walked along the eel trail (yes it is a real thing, and yes, I did pay £1 to buy their eel trail pamphlet). Also, the town is also famous because Oliver Cromwell’s house is there, and his house serves as the visitor center for the town. I should note, also, that Ely’s cathedral is the first British cathedral I’ve been in. And it was absolutely breath-taking. The size and grandeur of the space was astonishing, and I could really understand the sense of reverence that it would’ve induced in a medieval church-goer. Anyhow, here are some pictures.

Large Eel, feat. Us

Mrs. Cromwell's Eel Recipe!

Duck, feat. Us

Eel Spear (??), feat. Us

Creepy Ely Statues

Stained Glass Museum (1)

A Great (Musician) Dad Joke

Stained Glass Museum (2)

Christmas in COVID Time

Ely Cathedral (1)

Ely Cathedral (2)

Ely Cathedral (3)

Oliver Cromwell's House!

Ely Cathedral (4)

Ely Cathedral (5), feat. Us

Bud: I’ve started two books that are really exciting and stimulating. First is Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation, which I quoted from earlier; it is about, as one might guess, representation. I decided to read it because I realized that I hear and use the language of representation a lot, but I have no meaningful way of thinking about representation. Second is Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial, about Abraham Lincoln and slavery. As I’ve hinted at in this post (and my very first post), I want to think about how one ought to respond to systemic injustice. History, just like political theory, can provide guidance.

Thorn: Since the last lockdown ended, I’ve been able to restart going to the gym, which has been nice, although I’ve hit a point in deadlifting where the constraining factor is my forearm grip strength, which is unfortunate. That was going to be the thorn, but as I just learned in the last few hours, London is entering a new tier of lockdown. So I guess the bigger thorn now is that I won’t be able to go to the gym for the rest of the year!

The Control We Have

A few days ago, the Federal Trade Commission and forty-eight states brought antitrust lawsuits against Facebook. I’m eager to see how the legal questions play out — my competition law professor seemed deeply skeptical of the arguments — but I wanted to take a moment to think through the sociopolitical context for this lawsuit.

Personally, my gut instinct is mixed about Facebook. My (not very informed) sense is that Facebook is a mediocre company that has developed a product that can be both deeply harmful but also really valuable for our livelihoods. But when I talked to one of my old Pomona friends about the lawsuit, he seemed much more skeptical of Facebook. For him, and I think for many, Facebook cultivates us as consumerist subjects. Its algorithms for microtargeting, feeding off the dumps of data we unwittingly provide, enable the platform to get us addicted, showing us exactly what we want to see so that we return to Facebook. The platform profits off our most powerful and destructive emotions; by stoking the flames of partisanship and by spreading misinformation designed to anger us, Facebook cashes in by hurting our democracy.

At least part of the motivation behind the angry backlash at Facebook, I think, is a sense that we’re losing control — of our relationships, increasingly mediated by not just people who are different from us, but by algorithms optimized not for our welfare but for profit; of our time, stolen from us by the equivalent of a personalized form of nicotine, gnawing always at our attention; and of our mind, programmed as it is by microtargeted ads meant to elicit a certain response and way of thinking. Personally, I am skeptical that Facebook succeeds at doing any of this. But I certainly think it’s plausible, and I can understand why these effects would lead one to feel a visceral anger at Facebook (and other kinds of social media).

I think our politics reflects this collective sense of loss, that sense that each of us has become, or has always been, disempowered. Think of QAnon, a phenomenon that my old political theory professor, Susan McWilliams Barndt, described in terms of mothers’ feelings that they’re unable to protect their children from all sorts of debauchery and immorality on the internet. Think of Justice Alito’s politically-charged address to the Federalist Society, where he talked about religious people coming under attack by contemporary social mores — about a perception that Christians have become a persecuted minority in the United States because media or intellectual elites have conditioned us into believing in a morality that opposes Christian tradition and, indeed, sees it as “backward.” Think of the President’s repeated claims that he’s been subject to a “witch hunt” or to a “coup” due to a system rigged against him — the most powerful man in the world, in other words, believes he has been disempowered by a cabal of globalist elites.

Of course, such a politics of loss and disempowerment is not limited to contemporary conservatives or Republicans. Think of traditional leftist politics, which is animated by an idea that certain classes of people are the downtrodden, the beaten-down, the losers in an unjust society that concentrates wealth, and propensity, and the good things in life in the hands of the few. Progressives profess to want to support racial minorities, people of lower socioeconomic status, LGBTQ people, and so on. These are people, progressives believe, who lack control and autonomy, battered as they are by discrimination from society. Progressives hope that the state, or some other entity, can promote these people’s welfare and thereby place control of their destinies into their own hands.

I don’t mean here to make a normative point. I’m neither making a “both sides are equally legitimate” claim nor a “one side is absurd” argument. Rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that so many people feel so disempowered — they feel that they have been dealt an unfair hand: city dwellers who feel that our electoral institutions unfairly benefit rural voters; rural dwellers who feel looked down upon by coastal elites and who feel that our culture privileges dependence on the state rather than personal responsibility, traditional communities, and moral righteousness; those who feel strangled by “PC-culture” that takes away their free speech and labels them as racists or sexists; those whose livelihoods feel defined by precarity and harassment due to prejudiced behaviors, institutionalized forms of bias, and material violence. For one last example, think about this passage from Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land, where he says he was forced to target people through drone strikes because of “the world they were a part of . . . .” The most powerful man in the world felt as if he lacked agency over government decisions, even as he was the person in whom the “executive Power” is vested.

In the latest episode of Strict Scrutiny, one of my favorite podcasts, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse described the conservative legal movement as motivated by a kind of “grievance politics.” Grief, I think, entails not just a sense of unfairness, of injustice and anger, but also of mourning — a sense of loss, of descent from an imagined state of righteousness. Progressives, I think, can’t be motivated in that same way, since they do not view the past as a time of glory. I think they tend more toward Butterfield’s “Whig histories,” where the past is explicitly seen as backward and wrong but leading to the promised land of the future. Progressives tend therefore to buy into a kind of providentialist politics, as I’ve written about previously. But the implications of both — grievance and providence — are the same. For when our politics invariably doesn’t deliver, we are always let down. Our grievances can never be fulfilled because they are matched against an imagined, romantic past. And our providentialist aspirations can never come true, because we compare them to a future that is always to come. Politics implicates wicked problems; part of the Sisyphisian feeling of politics comes from the fact that problem definition, itself, is always a moving goal post. There’s no perfect balance of our diverse political values. And so we are ever stuck in a struggle to get closer to that imagined, better world, which behaves like the fruit that Tantalus could never reach.

The sense that we lack control is, I think, an inevitable result of democracy. Democracy purports to empower people — we are made to feel that our vote, that our words, that our protests, can make a difference. But the reality is that democracy doesn’t empower individuals; it empowers people (“demos”) collectively. Power does not stem from my, or your, actions. It stems from our actions. I have little to no control. We do.

When I was in high school, I loved the philosophy of Chantal Mouffe, who wrote two decades ago about the “democratic paradox” at the heart of the project of liberal democracy. As I understood the argument back then — which, granted, is probably a poor understanding, because I was (and still am) bad at reading — Mouffe believes that (classical) liberalism contradicts with democracy because liberalism privileges individuals and their rights, whereas democracy empowers collectives. Minorities must be protected by the rule of law, according to tenets of liberalism. But democratic theory tells us that these kinds of protections enable rule-by-minority, which is deeply problematic from the perspective that the People ought to be sovereign. Thus, liberal democracy carries with it a core paradox — both liberalism and democracy must be limited, in some way, to coexist in a liberal democratic polity. Mouffe recognized the tension between the two political philosophies, and I think the resurgence of populism globally probably supports her analysis.

To this day, I think Mouffe’s argument is basically right. But I also think there’s a more profound way that liberalism and democracy are contradictory than liberalism’s protection of minorities. Liberalism believes that individuals are in some way inviolable. The philosophy, at its heart, is about either promoting the individual’s sovereignty or, in some variants, preserving that sovereignty. The individual’s loss of control today — whether due to unrestrained market capitalism in the digital age, changing social mores, or our careening institutionalized form of democracy — is the liberal’s worst nightmare. For our bodies, our minds, our beings don’t seem particularly sovereign today. It’s not like most of us can control what we put in our bodies or what we feed our minds. And if the political scientists are right that partisanship is a “helluva drug,” then maybe we don’t even have sovereignty over what we believe about the world.

I just finished the last season of The Good Place, and I think its depiction of the complexities of contemporary morality are really helpful. (There are some spoilers here, so CTRL+F “[END SPOILERS]” if you haven’t seen The Good Place and intend to.) In essence, the show discusses the place we go to after our death, and in the middle seasons, the protagonists find that no one has entered the Good Place in a long time. The karmic system that chooses where we go has made everyone go to the Bad Place because we’re embedded in complex organizations that penalize basically anything we do. Looking to buy a MacBook? It’s been implicated in global supply chains that harm the environment, and many of its pieces are almost certainly made by people working under deplorable labor standards. The same is probably true of any other computer that’s available on the market. So do you refuse to buy a computer? Do you try to be the moral saint, a Doug Forcett who, in the show, is so terrified of being sent to the Bad Place that he lives on only lentils, radishes, and recycled water, and he is grief-stricken to pieces merely by stepping on a snail? The life of the moral saint is surely not the life of a human. And it’s probably not even the most moral life — is it moral if you disengage from an unjust society, living by yourself in the woods and trying to maximize your own “points” while leaving others to get involved in what John Lewis famously called “good trouble”?

The Good Place’s critique of a karmic understanding of morality recognizes that if we have lost control over our actions, then we need a different understanding of morality. Its solution, presented in the final season, emphasizes learning. The Good Place proposes a system of moral judgment where people are tried, over and over again. They are given opportunities tailored to expose their weaknesses and flaws. The point of the system is to force people to live until they have learned to become better versions of themselves, after which they can ascend to the Good Place.

This is a model of morality that recognizes how we are all, or at least ought to be, muddling along to become better. It understands that humans are habitual beings who mostly stick to our old ways and routines, but also that we can incrementally improve given the right conditions. Foremost among those conditions, The Good Place suggests, is compassion from others. In this theory, learning to live a moral life is a social process. The main cast of The Good Place comprises four characters who journey together to become better. The four are originally chosen to torture each other; their personalities are fit so that each would pick at the others’ fears and insecurities. But through the process of living together, they become better. There is control, and power, in the interactions between the characters, rather than within each of the individuals.

The Good Place suggests that we need to break from ideas of individual autonomy in constructing a contemporary morality. We are moral not according to some absolute karmic value, the sum total of all of the good and bad things we have done as individuals, but insofar as we learn to become better over time. That learning happens through our interactions with others — when we observe and understand others, and when we fulfill our duties to each other. Morality is a social enterprise, rather than a matter of individual judgment or disposition.

[END SPOILERS]

If we return to Mouffe, then, we might diagnose our contemporary political malaise as deriving from the failure of that foundational assumption of liberalism — that we are autonomous individuals and that our personal sovereignty is, and ought to be, the basis for politics. Our contemporary circumstances and our concomitant morality is driven by social interaction. Our lives are dictated more and more by collective pressures, as power has shifted from particular, individual loci (the self, the head of the family, the teacher, the party leader, the monarch) and instead is now diffused through interactions between people mediated by technology and institutions that mould and produce those interactions. According to this way of thinking, we are experiencing the triumph of democracy over liberalism. We, as collectives, have control. But we, as individuals, do not.

Losing control as an individual — living a democratized life, in other words — is not a pleasant experience. Anyone who has done a group project will know how frustrating and difficult and absurd it feels to have to negotiate constantly over largely unimportant details. No wonder, then, that grievous or providentialist politics are such powerful forces in contemporary politics; they are symptoms of our desire to feel secure and in control. Fears of insecurity and loss of control are especially pronounced in an environment when opposite partisans are perceived so negatively. It’s easier to avoid being a backseat driver when you trust the driver. It’s much harder if you think the driver is manifestly incompetent or ill intentioned.

It seems like there are two (strawperson) responses to the democratized life. One response is to push back — to try to assert (reassert?) the individual’s autonomy. The other is to embrace the democratization of our life and to relinquish control. Both are, of course, absurd. The former is impossible, just like how the Lockean state of nature is a myth. The joke about classical liberalism is that it assumes that, in the state of nature, we’re all twenty-year-old men without familial obligations. The reality is that we are, of course, dependent on others, which means our choices are never our own. (Just think in the COVID context — when you live with others, your choice to go out and to risk contracting the disease is not only your decision, but rather, an implicit decision made on behalf of those you live with.)

On the opposite side, relinquishing control is also surely no way to live one’s life — that would be the default state that David Foster Wallace warned against. There is a truth in the existentialist perspective that what defines us as humans is our ability to make choices, to create ourselves. We have been gifted with the ability to think and feel and decide; we ought not, then, surrender that capacity to empirical circumstances and inertia, even if those forces are so powerful. There’s so much out there that shapes our lives and controls us, but there is also an inherent dignity that resides in each human. That’s, after all, the essential force of the great non-violent protestors in human history. Even in the face of pure violence and coercion, they maintained their dignity in their refusal to respond with force.

I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift’s new album (of course), and I actually think one of its best tracks can help us think through this conundrum. That song — “marjorie” — is written about her late grandmother and feeling her presence despite her passing. The essence of the song is heritage; the chorus is mostly a simple line: “What died didn’t stay dead.” When someone close to us leaves us, we yearn for their wisdom that we feel we have lost — “I should’ve asked you questions / I should’ve asked you how to be / Asked you to write it down for me / Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt / ’Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me ” — and yet we are surrounded by their impression: “if I didn’t know better / I’d think you were talking to me now.”

From the perspective of control, “marjorie” calls our attention to two entwined phenomena: death and history’s effects. Death is, of course, the outer boundary of our control. Coming to terms with its inevitability is one of the age-old lessons of human experience — think of Gilgamesh and his quest to bring his friend back from the afterworld. Similarly, we are affected by how others have treated us — we feel their ghastly effects long after those experiences have ended, whether the “frozen swims” with one’s grandmother or the friend’s dad who “is always mad” and traumatizes his child into crying and “hid[ing] in the closet.” But to put a finer point on it, we have no choice but to be affected by others — their actions and their eventual passing. To be human — really, to be a social animal — is to feel a lack of control in some of our most powerful experiences.

It is not, however, to simply be a passive observer. Another aspect of “marjorie” that I think is compelling is how it centers contradiction. Obviously there is the contradiction between death and enduring presence (“What died didn’t stay dead / You’re alive, you’re alive in my head.”). But there is also contradiction in how we ought to make decisions: “Never be so kind / You forget to be clever / Never be so clever / You forget to be kind”; “Never be so polite / You forget your power / Never wield such power / You forget to be polite.” We are urged to find some kind of balance, to recognize that extremity in itself might be a vice. As applied to this post, “marjorie” urges us to acknowledge our loss, our inability to fully control our destinies, while refusing to surrender all agency. It urges us to openly embrace the contradiction. And in articulating contradicting principles, it suggests that abstract ideas alone can’t provide the answer. This is the arc (to return to spoilers of The Good Place) that Chidi, the moral philosopher, goes through. He spends his life searching for answers in philosophy and reason. He believes there is an answer out there, to be found with sufficient effort and intellect. But over his experiences, accumulated over eight hundred lives, he comes to a realization that he encapsulates in a note to himself: “There is no ‘answer.’ But Eleanor is the answer.” Experiences anchored in social relations, The Good Place suggests, are what teach us to navigate the contradictions in our lives.

I started this blog post thinking about politics and have ended up at moral philosophy based on a TV show by way of a Taylor Swift song. In part, that’s because I’m writing in a more stream-of-consciousness way rather than trying to write an organized essay like I would for an academic paper. But in part, I think it’s also just because I’m not sure what the application of these ideas to politics should be. The logic of this conclusion is a bit like saying that we need “greater morality” if crime rates are rising. It’s not that the argument is wrong. It’s just that the argument is kind of useless. One cannot by fiat make people more moral. In the same way, the solution to our political malaise can’t just be “we need to acknowledge that we as individuals lack control but that we can and should come together as collectives to become more moral and politically empowered.” On the other hand, I’m not sure these arguments are supposed to point to a solution; rather, I think they might help us understand why we’ve come to where we are. If I’m right, our malaise is a necessary result of democracy and the diffusion of power into social relations. Technology has exposed that wound, but I think it’s probably inherent in our system of government and way of life. The absurdities of our politics today perhaps are warning signs about trying to maintain the pretension of the liberal autonomous subject in our democratic society.

* * * * *

Rose: This was a good week, filled with friends: an outdoor breakfast with some other Marshalls (it was quite cold, but the cobbler they made was amazing); dinner with an LSE friend; a few long walks through the touristy parts of London (Covent Garden, Oxford Street, Soho) with other Marshalls in London; a few calls with Pomona friends; a visit to London from one of my old high school friends. I’m also hoping to get to Runnymede, where Magna Carta was negotiated and signed, sometime soon. But it’s a 20+ mile journey. So I’m relearning how to ride a bike (it turns out that you can forget how to ride a bike!), which has been quite the experience. Luckily, one of my LSE friends and my flatmate are both very kind souls who are entertaining my incompetence. Also, my flatmate taught me how to make baguettes! They turned out pretty well, although they were surprisingly tiring and difficult to make (and it obviously helped that he was there to guide the process/fix mistakes). Here’s a photo dump:

Mosaics in Central London!

Carnaby Street with Friends

Oxford Street with Friends

Random Churches in London

Baguettes!

Lights in Carnaby

More Lights in Oxford Street

Angels in London

Carnaby in Day Time

Cinnamon Bread

I Was Very, Very Confused

Christmas Decorations

Ominous Church

More Christmas Decorations!

HUGE Ornament at Covent Garden

More Christmas Decorations

More Christmas at Angel

Marilyn Monroe?

Lights and Murals

Bud: I asked my competition law professor to do research with her, and she found a potential project for me! It’s not (in her words) the most glamorous of assignments, and I haven’t technically accepted yet since she told me to spend time thinking about it, but I’m pretty certain that I’ll take the job. It should be fun and interesting.

Thorn: I don’t think I have much to complain about, to be honest. It really has been a positive week, one that has felt fulfilling and positive. The upcoming thorn, though, is that my remaining flatmate is going home tomorrow, so the flat will soon be empty for three weeks. We’ll see how that goes.

“The Greatest of All Reflections on Human Nature”

In designing a government, James Madison once argued in The Federalist, we must recognize the dangers of ambitious politicians. A successful government must have coercive power — it must be able to govern. It also needs leaders to exercise that power, and, as Madison reminds us elsewhere, “[e]nlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” To control those unenlightened officials, the Madisonian design was to divide power and to pit the self-interest of office holders against each other — hence, “[t]he interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” “It may be a reflection on human nature,” Madison explained, “that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

If government is a reflection on human nature, then we might try to incorporate our understanding of humans into designing and implementing our politics. Behavioral economists, for example, talk about how humans are “boundedly rational,” subject to limits on not just knowledge but computational capacity, and as a result will make decisions based on heuristics that lead to systematic biases. Behavioral public policy as a field has blossomed, driven by ideas about “nudging” and other methods for incorporating cognitive biases into the design of policy. Madison’s own logic similarly reflects behavioralist assumptions: he posited that the ambition and avarice of people holding public office would compel them to defend their own turf, and so a division of power can be maintained if the branches were given “the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.”

This line of thinking starts with the human as the unit of analysis and projects the implications of those posited behaviors into the realm of politics. But we can also go the other direction and ask how government, and its behavior, might reflect aspects of who we are.

First, we might want to think about why this line of thinking could be fruitful. A thoughtful person, I suppose, might not find much value in thinking about political life in order to understand their own life. After all, they could just be reflective and introspective. Moreover, they might say, we have no reason to naturally believe that the “reflection” that Madison talked about makes sense in both directions: Presumably, we start by analyzing individuals in order to inform our understanding of politics because individuals are simpler than collectives. In contrast, studying politics to understand human individuals might be a bit like studying the entire human body just to understand how gut bacteria operate; the former provides a system within which the latter might operate, but there are both autonomous aspects of the latter that are important and studying the former seems substantially harder.

On the other hand, I think it would take an uncommonly thoughtful and objective person to be able to study themselves in the way we can study politics. Formal politics is written and recorded, so we can thematically study politics across time. Individuals, in contrast, don’t typically write down everything they do, and their memory is subject to predictable biases and errors of recollection. It’s hard, in other words, to reflect on yourself with accuracy and clarity. Formal politics might also be worth studying because it’s extreme — the subject matter of formal politics often implicates life and death, and so studying formal politics provides us the opportunity to understand how humans make momentous decisions under conditions of uncertainty, contradictory incentives, and exacting scrutiny. In both ways — its documentation and extremity — formal politics can be a unique lens through which to understand individual humans.

If we take this line of thinking and apply it to our contemporary politics, I think it’s easy to draw some depressing conclusions. It’s clear that politicians — and partisans generally — have a strong ability to rationalize their views, enabling them to flip their positions and yet feel that those positions are strongly held. That sense that politicians abandon principle, that they flip-flop, is, I think, a major contributor to why politicians are regarded so negatively. (I’m not sure how seriously we should take these data, but in 2013, Public Policy Polling did, in fact, find that Americans have a higher opinion of dog poop, cockroaches, and toenail fungus than Congress.) We might also note the rise of negative partisanship and conclude that humans tend to be tribal animals, bound to protecting their side over just about anything else. Our politics seems bitter, untethered to reality, and, to be frank, incapable of responding to new circumstances — what does that say about us? Maybe politics brings the worst out of us. Or maybe we just were never that good; maybe our politics is what we deserve.

There are aspects of our politics, though, that I think might be more positive — and perhaps even instructive. Two things come to mind.

First, we might think about what we expect out of governmental conduct. We hold commonly, I think, the idea that government is meant to serve the public interest, and to do so, we expect certain kinds of values to be embedded within the actions of government. We expect government to reflect the will of the people (some level of democratic accountability); to be transparent and truthful; to treat people fairly and equally; to provide procedures for exercising its coercive authority in a just way (“due process of law”); to provide for redress when it has harmed people; to make reasoned decisions having consulted diverse perspectives and stakeholders.

These are values peculiar to government. We do not normally expect a corporation to act transparently or to be democratically accountable. And I think we hold the government to those high standards because it is in some way meant to reflect us — it acts on our behalf and, as our representative, ought to reflect the best of who we are. We limit what the government can do, then, not only because we worry for our own liberty, but also because we expect the government to instantiate our contemporary standards of decency and justice. Hence, Thurgood Marshall once explained that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” could be understood as “protect[ing] the dignity of society itself from the barbarity of exacting mindless vengeance . . . .”

For that reason, I think those values we hold as peculiarly public values are also values that we’d do well to internalize into our own lives. Open communication, sticking to truth, feeling accountable to those around us, trying to be fair and reasonable with others, offering redress to those whom we have harmed — these aren’t just values that we expect of the state, but also reflect some of the highest duties that we owe each other. When government lives up to those standards, we ought to recognize and learn from that; and when it fails, we rightly ought to criticize it. In that sense, I think Louis Brandeis was right to conceptualize government as “the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” the one who “teaches the whole people by its example.”

A second example: budgets. Government necessarily balances a plurality of interests, and a good government — we can debate about whether ours succeeds at this — accommodates that diversity. Budgets are, I think, the best example. We could approach the question of how to allocate money with some moral principle — say, we budget as utilitarians seeking achieve the best outcome for the highest number of people. But I suspect the upshot of that calculation would be that all of the national budget should go toward buying food and shelter for people across the globe. Laudable as such a budget might be, it does not perform what we expect out of government — we expect government to serve, in some way, its own people; to provide a litany of different services to us, from education to firefighting, consumer protection and trust-busting to military defense and conducting international relations; and so on. If we tried to design a budget based on any single principle, it would be a bad budget because the government has so many different obligations that are not easily balanced in any moral framework. How do you talk about the value of, say, increasing funding for the National Endowment for Humanities versus buying an extra fighter jet versus providing more funding for food stamps versus putting funds toward establishing a new national park versus an extra grant for basic scientific research? Each has different values — values that we can’t easily compare.

I don’t want to make the argument so strong as to suggest that we can’t morally evaluate a budget. We certainly can and should. But what I want to emphasize is that we might learn from how budgets combine different interests in a way that probably promotes the public interest better than any single understanding of the public interest. There could be intrinsic value, in other words, of recognizing different sources of input and combining them even if they do not combine in a coherent way that is easily organized by a moral or philosophical principle. This most fundamental form of politicking — battling over how to allocate resources — might hold some insight into how we ought to negotiate our own lives as social animals.

* * * * *

Rose: It’s been a pretty quiet week, although I did have a good number of calls with old friends, all of which was nice. Also, I read some delightful essays this last week: David Runciman on the 2018 midterms (I was especially intrigued by his argument that social democrats across the globe are failing to paint a vivid picture of their ideal world, whereas nationalists can simply harken back to an imagined, glorified past); my old political theory professor, Susan McWilliams Barndt, on QAnon and the insecurity that comes with the internet (I also recently reread her 2016 essay on Trump, which I think is worth thinking about); Charles Duhigg on venture capitalism and how it can distort innovation (this seems to distort a foundational idea in competition law!); Tom Shippey on Edward the Confessor (I know that sounds boring, but it was a really fun read!). Also, we went to a Chinese grocery store this last week, and the cashier gave us a free calendar, which reminded me a lot of the Chinese supermarkets at home. I didn’t take many pictures this last week, but here’s a few.

A Chinese Calendar

Christmas near Chinatown

A View from the Canal

Bud: Next week is the last week of classes for this term. It’s kind of bittersweet — I’m definitely sad that my competition law class is finishing up, but it’ll be nice to have more free time to address the quickly proliferating number of tabs on my browser/stacks of books piling up on my desk. Also, I’ve started writing down questions that I think could be potentially interesting research topics, and I’m pretty excited about some of them.

Thorn: I remember thinking when we first made our turkey that it would take us forever to eat it, since it was like twelve pounds and there are just two of us. The turkey disappeared very quickly and, alas, we had to get back to our normal meal planning after a few days respite.

Future topics:

* A young people’s constitution — I listened to a podcast earlier today about the National Constitution Center’s Constitution Drafting Project, where the center brought three teams together to write different constitutions (libertarian, progressive, and conservative). Meanwhile, I’ve also been listening to a lot of Talking Politics, and David Runciman loves to talk about generational divides in American and British politics. So I thought it might be interesting to think about what a constitution written based on American young people’s values might look like.

* Progressive nationalism — I’ve been reading Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, and in it he makes an argument about the way that British nationalism has always been tied to a notion of Englishness and whiteness. Gilroy was deeply skeptical of progressive attempts at nationalism precisely because the imagined past of Britain was a very homogeneous society; he thought British nationalism was therefore invariably tied to racism. I’ve been wondering about whether that critique holds weight for the United States and whether progressive ought to think about how to employ a rhetoric of patriotism and nationalism toward their political goals (an example that came to mind was this Politico article’s discussion of the American flag).