In a previous post, “A Different Globalization for Labor,” I discussed some benefits of globalization and expanded international trade for workers in the U.S., other industrialized nations, and the developing world and the need to rethink how globalization works (resisting globalization per se seems to me futile because it’s not going away and wrong-headed because there are some real benefits) in order to produce economic patterns more beneficial to labor and the average person.
In an engaging article in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs (July/August 2007, pp. 34 – 47), and as their title indicates, Kenneth F. Scheve and Matthew J. Slaughter call for “A New Deal for Globalization.” Focusing their discussion on the U.S. context, they recognize that globalization and expanded and freer international trade have benefits for the U.S. economy and to some extent for U.S. workers. They also recognize growing protectionist sentiment in the U.S., both on the part of average Americans and those involved in thinking about and making economic policy.
They recognize a variety of common explanations for the rise of protectionism and dispense with these (see p. 38 of their article). One of these common explanations is most pertinent to their own argument and to my discussion here. One is “that policymakers and the business community have failed to adequately explain the benefits of freer trade and investment to the public. But in fact, public-opinion data show the opposite: large majorities of Americans acknowledge these broad benefits. If anything, the public seems to understand certain benefits better than ever – for example, that its enjoyment of relatively affordable toys, DVD players, and other products depends on globalization.”
In other words, globalization has led to a rise of a certain sort of affluence for consumers in the U.S., specifically an affluence of things, where lower consumer prices for DVDs, or toys, or sushi (see “Sushi and Globalization”) leads to material benefits for consumers.
Scheve and Slaughter recognize two things that many commentators on politics and economics seem not to.
First, they recognize that what’s good for the economy isn’t necessarily good for lots of people. George Will argues that the growth of income inequality in the U.S. recently isn’t a problem because the economy is thriving, and presumably this is good for everyone (see "Income Inequality isn't the Problem"). On the growth of protectionism, Scheve and Slaughter argue (p. 38):
“Policy is becoming more protectionist because the public is becoming more protectionist, and the public is becoming more protectionist because incomes are stagnating or falling. The integration of the world economy has boosted productivity and wealth creation in the United States and much of the rest of the world. But within many countries, and certainly within the United States, the benefits of this integration have been unevenly distributed – and this fact is increasingly being recognized.”
Second, they recognize that people can benefit from globalization and freer trade in some ways (and realize it – e.g. their arguments about the benefits of lowered consumer prices) and at the same time incur heavy costs from globalization in other ways (and realize that, too). In other words, globalization can have contradictory effects for people, and more people are beginning to see this.
Thomas Friedman seems to half recognize this. In his much read and much reviewed book, The World is Flat, he recognizes that some workers will be hurt by globalization when their specific jobs are outsourced. The U.S. government again half recognizes this through its Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which helps workers in specific job sectors affected by outsourcing or other effects of globalization.
Scheve and Slaughter point out that the effects of globalization are not restricted to workers in particular sorts of jobs. When workers on an auto assembly line or at a phone call center lose jobs through offshoring, they then have to enter new lines of work, placing stagnating or downward pressure on wages for U.S. workers in general. They point out that workers in almost all sectors have in recent years faced stagnation if not decreases in wages in real terms – with the only large exceptions (for now) being those with Ph.D.s or professional graduate degrees (e.g. M.D., J.D.). (Frankly, I suspect that even within these exceptions, there are more specific groups experiencing wage stagnation, or that will soon. For example, Ph.D.s teaching in academia could soon face these sorts of wage pressures as online teaching becomes more common and it becomes increasingly possible for American university courses to be taught by Ph.D.s elsewhere for lower wages.)
The overall upshot is that typical American consumers are simultaneously experiencing material affluence with the availability of a plethora of consumer goods cheaper than ever before (or sometimes simply not available before) and stagnation of wages and growing economic insecurity. Many Americans can now take for granted a tremendous variety of material goods and comforts while seriously worrying about how much longer they can keep the house.
Showing posts with label George Will. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Will. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
On Free Speech
“Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.”
Those two sentences open a recent column by George Will, “Speech Police, Riding High in Oakland.” Will discusses an incident and court case from several months ago concerning a group of Oakland city employees, the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), a flier they distributed and posted on an office bulletin board containing Will’s first quoted sentence, and the dust-up that resulted when another employee’s complaint led to the removal of the flier from the bulletin board.
GNEA is a Christian-identified employee organized that is opposed to the possibility of gay marriage, the main topic addressed in their flier. (I do wonder what the full contents of the flier look like. I searched quite a bit on the web for the full text, but was unable to find it. Many websites supportive of GNEA do contain short quotes, mostly along the lines of that in Will’s column. I wonder whether the lack of ready availability of the full text indicates selective attention to the most relevant passages or whether it indicates omitted text that is less innocuous.)
Office management removed the flier from the bulletin board after the complaint of one fellow employee. As Will mentions, other employee groups had previously put up advertisements and fliers there and through office email, such as a gay employee group’s advertisement of a “Happy Coming Out Day” event. Quoting from Will:
“The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.”
My initial reaction on reading Will’s column was that it did seem unfair to allow some groups to use the public bulletin board and to disallow that for others – provided GNEA’s flier was not overly disruptive and relatively innocuous. I still think the flier’s viewpoint should have been allowed expression in that forum, even though I strongly disagree with it, if other viewpoints were also allowed expression there. At the same time, I think that Will mischaracterizes the 9th Circuit court’s decision on the matter.
First, Will and others on the web raise the specter of GNEA’s speech being prosecuted as hate speech. Here’s a quote from a blog post by Ed Brayton on the issue:
“As usual, the media reports focus on the broadest possible issue and not on the actual legal issue under dispute in the case. California does not have a law against "hate speech", nor does any other state. The only place such rules exist in the US are on college campuses (and as I wrote recently, I am in favor of an all out legal assault to get such rules declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). But the issue in this case is much narrower than that and has little to do with outlawing the advocacy of anti-gay positions.
“The particular issue in the case is whether the Constitution requires that employees be allowed to post material in public view in their office that their employer (in this case, the city of Oakland) has deemed to be in violation of their anti-harrassment policies and disruptive to the collegiality of the workplace. The case does not attempt to declare such sentiments "hate speech", nor would it prevent the plaintiffs from expressing their position in a myriad of other ways; it deals solely with the narrow question of whether the employer can regulate the content of material posted on their public bulletin boards.”
Second, Will mischaracterizes the court’s decision, which is actually more nuanced than you’d think from his column. Here’s a selection from the court decision that’s quoted by Brayton:
“Having laid out plaintiffs' and defendants' competing interests, the court must strike the balance called for by Pickering. Neither side has presented a strong case. But, the facts being undisputed, the court must resolve the question of law posed by Pickering. The interests on both sides are slight: On the one hand, defendants' restriction of plaintiffs is far from a wholesale muzzling, but on the other hand, the suppressed speech was not patently inflammatory "fighting words." To be sure, it caused friction in the workplace, but there is a difference between episodes of friction -- which are the daily incidents of life in a pluralistic society -- and disruption -- which impairs the government's ability to discharge its duties to its citizens. The City must tread carefully when it exercises its authority to suppress its employees ' speech.
“Because the flyer plainly addresses a matter of public concern, it is defendants' burden to show that the City's interest outweighs plaintiffs' interest. This balance must be resolved in the City's favor for two reasons. First, plaintiffs' interest in this particular channel of communication is vanishingly small. It is undisputed that plaintiffs may promote GNEA outside of work and may do so even at work under proper conditions. Plaintiffs do not have a privileged First Amendment interest in communicating their message to their officemates, for their First Amendment rights derive from their status as citizens, not their status as employees. Their right to speak to their coworkers at CEDA is no greater than the right of a citizen at large to speak his message to CEDA employees -- which is to say, plaintiffs have little rights at all in the particular channel they chose.
“The second reason that defendants prevail is that their response to Jennings' complaint -- removal of the flyer without any adverse employment action against plaintiffs -- was a narrowly tailored and proportionate response to the actual workplace disruption or, perhaps better described, distraction. An actual adverse employment action against plaintiffs would very likely not be justified on these facts, and the City would be well to consider this for the future. But the City does have an "administrative interest" in avoiding situations that distract employees from their jobs. Pickering counsels that public employers must, of necessity, be afforded some leeway in fixing their employees' attention on their tasks, free from upset stemming from public controversies having no bearing on the work of the employer.”
Will’s account of the decision is as follows:
“A district court affirmed the city's right to impose speech regulations that are patently not content-neutral. It said the GNEA's speech interest -- the flier -- is "vanishingly small." The GNEA, in its brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, responds that some of the high court's seminal First Amendment rulings have concerned small matters, such the wearing of a T-shirt, standing on a soapbox, holding a picket sign and "other simple forms of expression."
This is a highly partial account in that it implies that the court has ruled that if a speech interest is small, it can be disallowed for that reason. What the court has actually ruled is that sometimes one right needs be considered in balance with another, in this case, the employee’s right to speech and the employer’s right to maintain an efficient and non-disruptive workplace. The court actually also warned the city against the use of strong actions in cases like this one.
After reading about this case from a variety of sources, I have a couple reactions to the matter.
1. My first reaction has less to do with freedom of speech than with patterns of speech or discourse.
In a number of ways, conservatives have appropriated the discourse of their opponents. I’ve heard conservative Christians speak of the need for conservative Christians to “come out” – sometimes without a hint of irony. Will uses the language of sexual harassment and anti-discrimination regulation when saying that GNEA could plausibly claim that a “hostile environment” has been created for them.
In addition, conservatives have mastered the discourse of oppression. Gays cannot marry in 49 of 50 U.S. states and have trouble accessing a slew of basic rights (inheritance, hospital visitation, spousal benefits, adoption – just to name some of the most important) that heterosexuals, or at least married heterosexuals can take for granted, yet it’s those who oppose gay marriage who are oppressed, even though they wouldn’t lose any rights or anything if gay marriage were permitted.
This would make more sense if the expansion of rights to excluded or marginalized social groups were being played out in a zero sum game. Instead, the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s for blacks, Hispanics and others, the expansion of rights for women with the successes of feminism, and the possibility of equal rights for lesbians and gay men simply expand rights already taken for granted by one group (whites, men, or heterosexuals) to another. In each case, social change has been accompanied by conservative tails of woe and oppression. (If anything, the opposition to gay marriage and other equal rights makes even less sense to me. With the civil rights movements, southern whites did potentially face new job competition from blacks previously excluded, and men potentially face competition for jobs with women in a way not previously the case, but there’s nothing of the sort in the gay rights issue, because the expansion of gay rights is mostly about the expansion of social rights and not so much economic rights [at least not economic rights that might pit them in competition with individual heterosexuals].)
2. Many don’t seem to get that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to impose one’s speech anywhere. This is true across the political divide.
I do think that it was unwise of office management to have removed GNEA’s flier (again, unless there was material in it that’s not been quoted online that was more disruptive and much less innocuous than Will’s and other’s quotes seem to indicate). Fairness would seem to indicate that if one group could disseminate their views on the bulletin board, then others should be allowed to also.
Still, freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom to speak everywhere. There are contexts in which anyone is free to express their views, but most contexts are not so free, and often for legitimate reasons. A newspaper, such as The Washington Post for which Will writes, controls its own content and has a valid right to exclude material (including whatever letters or manuscripts anyone might want to send in) as the editors see fit – this is part of their freedom of expression. I control my own blog – I don’t often delete comments, but I can legitimately do so, and if I do, I’m not in any way denying anyone’s ability to express themselves – I would just be denying them the ability to impose their expression on a forum controlled by me. The bulletin board from which GNEA’s flier was excluded is similar. It was a forum controlled by someone else, and as the court ruled, denying the group access to the board, while technically a small infringement on speech, in no way kept the individuals from distributing their ideas in other contexts.
Those two sentences open a recent column by George Will, “Speech Police, Riding High in Oakland.” Will discusses an incident and court case from several months ago concerning a group of Oakland city employees, the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), a flier they distributed and posted on an office bulletin board containing Will’s first quoted sentence, and the dust-up that resulted when another employee’s complaint led to the removal of the flier from the bulletin board.
GNEA is a Christian-identified employee organized that is opposed to the possibility of gay marriage, the main topic addressed in their flier. (I do wonder what the full contents of the flier look like. I searched quite a bit on the web for the full text, but was unable to find it. Many websites supportive of GNEA do contain short quotes, mostly along the lines of that in Will’s column. I wonder whether the lack of ready availability of the full text indicates selective attention to the most relevant passages or whether it indicates omitted text that is less innocuous.)
Office management removed the flier from the bulletin board after the complaint of one fellow employee. As Will mentions, other employee groups had previously put up advertisements and fliers there and through office email, such as a gay employee group’s advertisement of a “Happy Coming Out Day” event. Quoting from Will:
“The flier was distributed after other employees' groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city's e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it "homophobic" and disruptive.”
My initial reaction on reading Will’s column was that it did seem unfair to allow some groups to use the public bulletin board and to disallow that for others – provided GNEA’s flier was not overly disruptive and relatively innocuous. I still think the flier’s viewpoint should have been allowed expression in that forum, even though I strongly disagree with it, if other viewpoints were also allowed expression there. At the same time, I think that Will mischaracterizes the 9th Circuit court’s decision on the matter.
First, Will and others on the web raise the specter of GNEA’s speech being prosecuted as hate speech. Here’s a quote from a blog post by Ed Brayton on the issue:
“As usual, the media reports focus on the broadest possible issue and not on the actual legal issue under dispute in the case. California does not have a law against "hate speech", nor does any other state. The only place such rules exist in the US are on college campuses (and as I wrote recently, I am in favor of an all out legal assault to get such rules declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court). But the issue in this case is much narrower than that and has little to do with outlawing the advocacy of anti-gay positions.
“The particular issue in the case is whether the Constitution requires that employees be allowed to post material in public view in their office that their employer (in this case, the city of Oakland) has deemed to be in violation of their anti-harrassment policies and disruptive to the collegiality of the workplace. The case does not attempt to declare such sentiments "hate speech", nor would it prevent the plaintiffs from expressing their position in a myriad of other ways; it deals solely with the narrow question of whether the employer can regulate the content of material posted on their public bulletin boards.”
Second, Will mischaracterizes the court’s decision, which is actually more nuanced than you’d think from his column. Here’s a selection from the court decision that’s quoted by Brayton:
“Having laid out plaintiffs' and defendants' competing interests, the court must strike the balance called for by Pickering. Neither side has presented a strong case. But, the facts being undisputed, the court must resolve the question of law posed by Pickering. The interests on both sides are slight: On the one hand, defendants' restriction of plaintiffs is far from a wholesale muzzling, but on the other hand, the suppressed speech was not patently inflammatory "fighting words." To be sure, it caused friction in the workplace, but there is a difference between episodes of friction -- which are the daily incidents of life in a pluralistic society -- and disruption -- which impairs the government's ability to discharge its duties to its citizens. The City must tread carefully when it exercises its authority to suppress its employees ' speech.
“Because the flyer plainly addresses a matter of public concern, it is defendants' burden to show that the City's interest outweighs plaintiffs' interest. This balance must be resolved in the City's favor for two reasons. First, plaintiffs' interest in this particular channel of communication is vanishingly small. It is undisputed that plaintiffs may promote GNEA outside of work and may do so even at work under proper conditions. Plaintiffs do not have a privileged First Amendment interest in communicating their message to their officemates, for their First Amendment rights derive from their status as citizens, not their status as employees. Their right to speak to their coworkers at CEDA is no greater than the right of a citizen at large to speak his message to CEDA employees -- which is to say, plaintiffs have little rights at all in the particular channel they chose.
“The second reason that defendants prevail is that their response to Jennings' complaint -- removal of the flyer without any adverse employment action against plaintiffs -- was a narrowly tailored and proportionate response to the actual workplace disruption or, perhaps better described, distraction. An actual adverse employment action against plaintiffs would very likely not be justified on these facts, and the City would be well to consider this for the future. But the City does have an "administrative interest" in avoiding situations that distract employees from their jobs. Pickering counsels that public employers must, of necessity, be afforded some leeway in fixing their employees' attention on their tasks, free from upset stemming from public controversies having no bearing on the work of the employer.”
Will’s account of the decision is as follows:
“A district court affirmed the city's right to impose speech regulations that are patently not content-neutral. It said the GNEA's speech interest -- the flier -- is "vanishingly small." The GNEA, in its brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, responds that some of the high court's seminal First Amendment rulings have concerned small matters, such the wearing of a T-shirt, standing on a soapbox, holding a picket sign and "other simple forms of expression."
This is a highly partial account in that it implies that the court has ruled that if a speech interest is small, it can be disallowed for that reason. What the court has actually ruled is that sometimes one right needs be considered in balance with another, in this case, the employee’s right to speech and the employer’s right to maintain an efficient and non-disruptive workplace. The court actually also warned the city against the use of strong actions in cases like this one.
After reading about this case from a variety of sources, I have a couple reactions to the matter.
1. My first reaction has less to do with freedom of speech than with patterns of speech or discourse.
In a number of ways, conservatives have appropriated the discourse of their opponents. I’ve heard conservative Christians speak of the need for conservative Christians to “come out” – sometimes without a hint of irony. Will uses the language of sexual harassment and anti-discrimination regulation when saying that GNEA could plausibly claim that a “hostile environment” has been created for them.
In addition, conservatives have mastered the discourse of oppression. Gays cannot marry in 49 of 50 U.S. states and have trouble accessing a slew of basic rights (inheritance, hospital visitation, spousal benefits, adoption – just to name some of the most important) that heterosexuals, or at least married heterosexuals can take for granted, yet it’s those who oppose gay marriage who are oppressed, even though they wouldn’t lose any rights or anything if gay marriage were permitted.
This would make more sense if the expansion of rights to excluded or marginalized social groups were being played out in a zero sum game. Instead, the expansion of civil rights in the 1960s for blacks, Hispanics and others, the expansion of rights for women with the successes of feminism, and the possibility of equal rights for lesbians and gay men simply expand rights already taken for granted by one group (whites, men, or heterosexuals) to another. In each case, social change has been accompanied by conservative tails of woe and oppression. (If anything, the opposition to gay marriage and other equal rights makes even less sense to me. With the civil rights movements, southern whites did potentially face new job competition from blacks previously excluded, and men potentially face competition for jobs with women in a way not previously the case, but there’s nothing of the sort in the gay rights issue, because the expansion of gay rights is mostly about the expansion of social rights and not so much economic rights [at least not economic rights that might pit them in competition with individual heterosexuals].)
2. Many don’t seem to get that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to impose one’s speech anywhere. This is true across the political divide.
I do think that it was unwise of office management to have removed GNEA’s flier (again, unless there was material in it that’s not been quoted online that was more disruptive and much less innocuous than Will’s and other’s quotes seem to indicate). Fairness would seem to indicate that if one group could disseminate their views on the bulletin board, then others should be allowed to also.
Still, freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom to speak everywhere. There are contexts in which anyone is free to express their views, but most contexts are not so free, and often for legitimate reasons. A newspaper, such as The Washington Post for which Will writes, controls its own content and has a valid right to exclude material (including whatever letters or manuscripts anyone might want to send in) as the editors see fit – this is part of their freedom of expression. I control my own blog – I don’t often delete comments, but I can legitimately do so, and if I do, I’m not in any way denying anyone’s ability to express themselves – I would just be denying them the ability to impose their expression on a forum controlled by me. The bulletin board from which GNEA’s flier was excluded is similar. It was a forum controlled by someone else, and as the court ruled, denying the group access to the board, while technically a small infringement on speech, in no way kept the individuals from distributing their ideas in other contexts.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Income Inequality Isn't The Problem - Stagnating Affluence At The Bottom and Middle Is
In his June 10 column, “Democrats’ Prosperity Problem” (this link may require you to sign in, though it should be free to do so if you’re willing to give your email address to the Washington Post), George Will takes the various Democratic presidential candidates to task for their concerns over income inequality in the U.S.
Will points out that there has been continued, sustained economic growth over the past several years. This is true – the economy is in grand health, or it would be if the economy were the sort of thing that could be healthy. Will brushes aside concern with growing economic inequality in two ways. First, he questions the concern with fairness, asking when wealth has ever been distributed evenly or fairly (which is to say that since things have never been fair, we shouldn’t now be concerned with fairness). Second, here and elsewhere, he and other fiscal conservatives have argued that so long as everyone benefits from an expanding economy, it shouldn’t matter that some benefit more than others, especially since it is through the investment of capital by the wealthy that great wealth is produced for everyone.
In theory, that’s all well and good. At certain times in the past and for certain places (mainly the industrialized world in the post-WWII decades) this has actually happened to some extent. The middle classes, and to some extent the working classes, of the industrialized world did see a significant expansion in affluence over several decades. (I addressed some of the effects of this in popular culture in an earlier post, "Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence," and in relation to sushi in "Sushi and Globalization.")
The extent of both the growth of economic inequality and the stagnation of the expansion of affluence are made clear in an article in The New York Times from June 10 by Roger Lowenstein, “The Way we live now: the inequality conundrum.” The article includes these striking figures. First, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population collected 9 percent of national income in 1979 and 16 percent in 2004. While striking, this alone doesn’t bother me. If everyone were doing significantly better, it wouldn’t bother me that the richest are sucking up an increasing proportion of total wealth, but that’s not the case. The real problem is with stagnation of affluence for the rest. Lowenstein also points out, for example, that the incomes of the bottom 20 percent of Americans, adjusted for inflation, have increased only 2 percent, which is to say not significantly at all. Many in the middle class feel increasingly insecure as well.
I find myself stirred by the concluding paragraphs of Will’s column, though I read them differently than he intends:
“Democrats need not confine themselves to their ritual tropes about how "the middle class is under assault" (Clinton again). They control Congress; they can act. The unemployed John Edwards, who has the luxury of irresponsibility, challenges Democrats to repeal the Bush tax cuts they disapprove of rather than wait for them to expire.
“Democrats cannot end the war (actually, they can but won't), but they can send their tax agenda to the president and dare him to veto it. They can, but they won't. Do you wonder why?”
Given everything else he’s said, Will clearly thinks the Democrats will remain inactive on this front because of a disjuncture between their theory and reality. To me, the inaction of congressional Democrats seems to be the result of other factors. First, though slightly less spineless than during most of the Bush Administration, the Democrats in general are still mostly spineless in standing up to Bush, even though they control Congress. Second, while I don’t at all think that Democrats and Republicans are all the same (the Republican party is much more beholden to the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, and this does make a difference), they are more alike than I’d like (See my earlier post "The 'Sameness' of Republicans and Democrats"). Talking about economic inequality is the Democratic equivalent of Republicans talking about the perils of gay marriage or abortion – it’s a way of drumming up support from the party’s voting base. Actually doing something about economic inequality would require bucking the interests of the wealthy and the corporations who provide most of the campaign funding for the Democrats as well as Republicans (even while the Democrats do get more money in small sums from large numbers of middle and working class people, and Democrats receive less corporate money than Republicans).
(I was led to both Lowenstein’s and Will’s pieces via a summary in the June 22 print issue of The Week magazine.)
Will points out that there has been continued, sustained economic growth over the past several years. This is true – the economy is in grand health, or it would be if the economy were the sort of thing that could be healthy. Will brushes aside concern with growing economic inequality in two ways. First, he questions the concern with fairness, asking when wealth has ever been distributed evenly or fairly (which is to say that since things have never been fair, we shouldn’t now be concerned with fairness). Second, here and elsewhere, he and other fiscal conservatives have argued that so long as everyone benefits from an expanding economy, it shouldn’t matter that some benefit more than others, especially since it is through the investment of capital by the wealthy that great wealth is produced for everyone.
In theory, that’s all well and good. At certain times in the past and for certain places (mainly the industrialized world in the post-WWII decades) this has actually happened to some extent. The middle classes, and to some extent the working classes, of the industrialized world did see a significant expansion in affluence over several decades. (I addressed some of the effects of this in popular culture in an earlier post, "Generation Gaps, Popular Music, and Affluence," and in relation to sushi in "Sushi and Globalization.")
The extent of both the growth of economic inequality and the stagnation of the expansion of affluence are made clear in an article in The New York Times from June 10 by Roger Lowenstein, “The Way we live now: the inequality conundrum.” The article includes these striking figures. First, the top 1 percent of the U.S. population collected 9 percent of national income in 1979 and 16 percent in 2004. While striking, this alone doesn’t bother me. If everyone were doing significantly better, it wouldn’t bother me that the richest are sucking up an increasing proportion of total wealth, but that’s not the case. The real problem is with stagnation of affluence for the rest. Lowenstein also points out, for example, that the incomes of the bottom 20 percent of Americans, adjusted for inflation, have increased only 2 percent, which is to say not significantly at all. Many in the middle class feel increasingly insecure as well.
I find myself stirred by the concluding paragraphs of Will’s column, though I read them differently than he intends:
“Democrats need not confine themselves to their ritual tropes about how "the middle class is under assault" (Clinton again). They control Congress; they can act. The unemployed John Edwards, who has the luxury of irresponsibility, challenges Democrats to repeal the Bush tax cuts they disapprove of rather than wait for them to expire.
“Democrats cannot end the war (actually, they can but won't), but they can send their tax agenda to the president and dare him to veto it. They can, but they won't. Do you wonder why?”
Given everything else he’s said, Will clearly thinks the Democrats will remain inactive on this front because of a disjuncture between their theory and reality. To me, the inaction of congressional Democrats seems to be the result of other factors. First, though slightly less spineless than during most of the Bush Administration, the Democrats in general are still mostly spineless in standing up to Bush, even though they control Congress. Second, while I don’t at all think that Democrats and Republicans are all the same (the Republican party is much more beholden to the interests of large corporations and the wealthy, and this does make a difference), they are more alike than I’d like (See my earlier post "The 'Sameness' of Republicans and Democrats"). Talking about economic inequality is the Democratic equivalent of Republicans talking about the perils of gay marriage or abortion – it’s a way of drumming up support from the party’s voting base. Actually doing something about economic inequality would require bucking the interests of the wealthy and the corporations who provide most of the campaign funding for the Democrats as well as Republicans (even while the Democrats do get more money in small sums from large numbers of middle and working class people, and Democrats receive less corporate money than Republicans).
(I was led to both Lowenstein’s and Will’s pieces via a summary in the June 22 print issue of The Week magazine.)
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Longfellow, George Will, Poetry, and the Individual Artist or Thinker
George Will is a conservative I respect. Of the widely published op-ed columnists in American newspapers and newsmagazines, Will is one of the few of any political persuasion, and virtually the only conservative, I consistently respect and find insightful, even while I disagree with much he has to say.
I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.
About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:
“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”
I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)
First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.
Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).
Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.
I respect two main things about Will’s thinking and writing. First, he is a careful, logical thinker. He doesn’t play around with or distort facts, nor does he reduce complex matters to sound bites that could potentially be shouted at someone during a guest appearance on one of the many “talk” news programs. Second, I admire his wide ranging interests and passions. He cares about and writes about the important news items of the day, of course, but he also cares deeply about the arts, baseball, and other phenomena that don’t habitually clog the headlines. He’s probably the only syndicated columnist willing (or able?) to dedicate an entire column to poetry.
About a month ago in a column published in Newsweek (March 12, 2007, p. 68), Will did just that, with a column dedicated to the bicentennial of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In addition to simply being dedicated to this important bicentennial of a poet of national importance in the U.S. (important for such familiar poems as “The Song of Hiawatha” or “Paul Revere’s Ride” which were once the staples of American public education), Will’s column also comments on the sad fact that this bicentennial went so unremarked in general. While I must admit that Longfellow is far from my favorite sort of poet, his poems are a part of an American tradition of thought as much as the works of Thoreau or Emerson, or even the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, or the Declaration of Independence, so it is a bit sad to see such an anniversary go largely uncelebrated. I’d like here to quote an extended passage from Will’s column, specifically a section exploring possible reasons for the lack of attention paid nowadays to poetry in general and poets like Longfellow in specific:
“Longfellow intended his narrative and lyric poems – genres disdained by modernists – as inspiriting guides to the nation’s honorable past and challenging future. Yeats ascribed Longfellow’s popularity to his accessibility – ‘he tells his story or idea so that one need nothing but his verses to understand it.’ This angers today’s academic clerisy. What use is it to readers who need no intermediary between them and the author? And what use is Longfellow to academics who ‘interrogate’ authors’ ‘texts’ to illuminate the authors’ psyches, ideologies and social situations – the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.? This reduction of the study of literature to sociology, and of sociology to ideological assertion, demotes literature to mere raw material for literary theory, making today’s professoriate, rather than yesterday’s writers, the center of attention.”
I agree with Will’s arguments and implications – with three big qualifications. (This is often my reaction to reading a piece by Will – I completely agree with what he has said, except for the huge qualifications.)
First, he implies that the lowered status (he mentions elsewhere in the column the past existence of celebrity poets – a phenomenon clearly not existing today, except in the sense that some celebrities, such as Jewel or T-Boz, have published books of poetry after becoming celebrities in other capacities) of poetry in general, and of accessible, narrative and lyric poetry in particular, is the fault of an “academic clerisy.” There is a large grain of truth to this, both in the sense that literary theory thrives on literature that needs theorists’ mediation, and in the sense that many genres of poetry enjoying prestige in some academic contexts (and thus absorbing the energies of many poets seeking that prestige) has moved in non-popular directions. But there is much more going on as well. Poetry over the past several decades has had to compete with many other genres of content, not least the movies, television, and the internet. These have as much to do with today’s lack of celebrity poets as an academic clerisy. Publishing practices have also played a role. Big publishers are more and more concerned not just with profitable titles, but titles with huge profit potential, with the result being huge sales of small numbers of titles, with poetry generally losing out. Change in income tax laws in the 1980s to make unsold inventory taxable didn’t help matters for slower selling genres like poetry, either. At the same time, I would actually contest that things are so bad for poetry nowadays. There are actually hundreds of small presses today publishing poetry, and lots of people reading poetry and other literature. There are no longer celebrity poets or poets known to virtually everyone, but poetry in general, in myriad forms is actually thriving.
Second, while he does not say this explicitly, Will seems to imply that accessibility in poetry is a good thing and that difficulty is a bad thing. I would disagree in that in art or scholarship neither accessibility nor difficulty is inherently good or bad. It is problematic that often in academia, accessible art or scholarship are almost automatically seen as lacking in sophistication or seen as otherwise unworthy or déclassé, while at the same time, the difficult or obscure piece of art or thought is often elevated largely on that basis alone. I do think somewhat different rules apply here to scholarship or art. With scholarly writing, I would argue that things should not be more difficultly or obscurely put than necessary, but when presenting complex ideas, such as in discussions of quantum mechanics, the structural study of Australian kinship systems, or the intricacies of modern art music, a certain amount of complexity in the text is inescapable in writing for a professional, scholarly audience. With art, it is not so much about presenting things as accessibly as possible as much as form matching content and artistic intent. Take the John Coltrane recording Ascension compared to his Giant Steps album. Ascension is much less accessible to most listeners – it certainly requires more patience and careful listening to achieve pleasure from it, though it also rewards that patience and careful listening – though on those grounds alone, I wouldn’t consider Ascension less, or more, worthy as art than Giant Steps. (See also my earlier post on the topic of difficulty, “Difficulty in Ethnographic Writing,” March 5, 2007).
Finally, like Will, I object to reducing the significance of an artist or thinker and their work to a symptom of their individual biography or sociological category. For example, in my earlier blog entry, “Charlie Parker and Shostakovich: Art, the Artist, and Culture” (February 13, 2007), I remarked that while knowing that Charlie Parker was experiencing heroin withdrawal during his class 1947 recording of “Lover Man” might heighten or inform one’s appreciation of the track, the significance or aesthetic quality of the recording is by no means determined by this biographic tidbit. Likewise, knowing that the viola sonata was the last piece of music written by Shostakovich, and knowing that he knew he was dying, might inform one’s listening, but such facts do not determine the structure or quality of the piece in itself, nor is the piece reducible to such biography. Will specifically targets tendencies to theorize poetry and other literature in terms of “the ‘power relations’ of patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.” In doing so, Will is aiming more specifically at brands of identity politics that explain phenomena, including art, as symptoms or reflections of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class as identity categories. As an anthropologist, I recognize the extreme importance of race/ethnicity, gender, and class in shaping people’s social realities, but also like most anthropologists, I reject straightforward cultural determinisms as well. So, while I cannot disagree with Will on this point, my main point of agreement with him is in finding problematic any form of reductionism of art or thought to personal biography or social factors, and I do find myself wishing Will had cast this point in somewhat broader terms.
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