Moral Cross-Currents & Political Rip-Tides
In the present era of globalization we live in not just a smaller but an ever more divided world. Space shrinks, distant regions get interconnected, no place is truly remote, cultures diffuse and meld. As the world becomes more like one integrated globalized planet geographically, and even in some sense culturally, divisions along religious, political, and philosophical lines get deeper, more sharply defined, more intense and divisive. The picture is one of conflicting moral visions in an increasingly secular world.
Setting aside international conflicts, we see deeply contradictory trends even within developed North America. Our cultural life gets ever more secular, rational, interconnected, and bureaucratically managed in both its public and private sectors, while at the same time old battles over conflicting moral visions intensify and new ones break out.
Long-running opposition to abortion, often religiously motivated, clashes with the ideals of freedom and autonomy for women to make that difficult life choice for themselves. Immigration increasingly becomes a flash-point here and in other parts of the world in the wake of inequality and war. Do we let suffering people in, or do we protect our own jobs and resources for ourselves? Terrorism, both home-grown or directed from elsewhere, politically motivated or seemingly random—as in the rising number of school shootings in the United States—poses growing ever-present threats.
These worsening ills provide fertile ground for fear-mongering and demagoguery, which further divides and degrades our public lives. Unfortunately, there is no lack of examples, and one of the most obvious is unfolding now (June 21, 2018), going from bad to worse as I write. Trump has had immigrant families separated, infants torn from their parents’ arms, to protect us, he says (playing to fear and prejudice), from terrorists and criminals pounding on our borders. Now he parades victims of violence committed by immigrants in front of news networks to make his point.
The truth is, however, that vulnerable immigrants are among the groups least likely to commit violence against American citizens. See here or here or here). This is not the truthful, responsible leadership that I’d like America to show the world.
In yet another arena, conflicts over environmental issues continue to deepen, breaking out in overt resistance by environmental activists leading to arrests and occasionally violence. On a larger scale, economic interests pit local concerns against perceived national interests. As I write this, the province of British Columbia in Canada, where I live, digs in its heels in intense opposition against the federal government and neighbouring province Alberta over the proposed Kinder-Morgan TransMountain Pipeline Expansion. B.C. fears oil spills and other environmental damage from the huge project.
More generally, true believers in the laissez-faire “free market” clash with those who think that democratic government exists in part precisely to regulate and constrain the capitalist market for other (some would say larger) values. In today’s world that centuries-old conflict of opposing moralities gets even sharper and breeds its own movements like the 1999 demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and the more recent 21st century “Occupy Wall Street” movement.
The modern world, it was thought (or hoped), would embody the Enlightenment dream of a harmonious (or at least increasingly well-functioning) order based on reason. But this happy dream recedes ever farther behind the clash and clamour of conflicting moral visions.
Economic Inequality as a Moral Problem in Today’s World
Other long-simmering conflicts with moral dimensions are also moving more center-stage, catching the public eye as they become more critical. Economic inequality is a big one, and I want to focus on that for a moment, beginning with what a few representative authors and commentators are saying.
Rising to the extremes we see today, runaway economic inequality, says Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, existentially threatens democracy and democratic ideals. Commentator Umair Haque, points to our extreme inequality as one of a number of “social pathologies” (along with the opioid crisis, school shootings, homelessness). On top of these he adds indifference to these evils: unconcern in the face of others’ social suffering, the uncaring “normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes…”
Taken together, he says, these problems signal the demise of America as already, or nearly, a failed state. “American collapse, [already] much more severe than we suppose it is…”, he says, represents “a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel.”
Author Thomas Homer-Dixon in his popular 2006 book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, also sets his sights on inequality as a moral failure. “There are two things we can say with certainty,” he concludes after reviewing recent economic data: “Never in history have the differences of income and opportunity among us been so great, and these differences are prima facie evidence of a moral failure of almost incomprehensible magnitude.”
The basic dynamics of civilization seem to always create inequality—some more, some less. A characteristic of all civilizations, inequality has now become an acute problem for us. The commentators cited above are among the growing numbers of people, ranging from concerned citizens to Nobel-winning economists, who recognize it as such. The level of inequality we’re reaching raises more sharply defined, widely considered and openly debated moral questions than ever, as well as unprecedented fears for the future—especially in the U.S.
The Moral Burden of Policies that Foster Inequality
If a social condition like extreme inequality carries a moral burden, then so do the policies or events that bring about that condition. If it evokes moral responses of condemnation or outrage like those illustrated above, then the policies that result in that condition of inequality also fall under the same moral judgements. In that light we do need to look critically at the economic and social policies that have dominated U.S. politics, that catapulted the runaway inequality we’re experiencing off the starting-blocks.
Remember the clash that I mentioned earlier, between free-market fundamentalists and those who want government to control the market to protect vulnerable people, the environment, and other social values like equality. The free-marketeers have overwhelmingly prevailed in setting policy in the U.S. (and many other countries as well, most notably, Britain), by and large, since the late 1970s or early ‘80s, creating the rising inequality and deteriorating social values that critics and protestors point to. There aren’t many cause-and-effect relationships in society that are more clear than this one between neoliberal policies and rising inequality.
The policies we have been living under that favour free markets and limited government above all else follow a political philosophy known as neoliberalism. The extreme inequality we’re seeing now came in with neoliberal policies in the United States pursued by both Republican and Democratic political leadership beginning with Reagan in 1980. To just the extent that increasing economic inequality carries a moral burden, so also do the neoliberal policies that worsen inequality—and that discourage or deny actions to mitigate it—carry an equal or even greater moral burden.
Even though neoliberal economic policies pervade and govern our lives—and have done for the last nearly four decades—the term “neoliberal”is not well-known. Neoliberalism for us is like water for fish, so all-encompassing it’s invisible. Author and commentator, George Monbiot, calls neoliberalism “the ideology that dominates our lives [yet] has, for most of us, no name.” If you want to know more about neoliberalism, its place in our lives and its relation to runaway inequality, Monbiot’s article is a good start. If you google “neoliberalism and inequality,” you’ll find lots of other sources on the relation between them ranging from the academic to the popular.
So, to put it in simplest terms, if extreme economic inequality—concentrating a country’s wealth in ever fewer hands—is immoral because it causes human suffering, stunted opportunities and even deaths for many, then so are neoliberal policies that produce inequality also immoral. In that case, politicians and policy-makers who pursue neoliberal agendas (and ironically often parade under the banner of one moralism or another) in fact act immorally.
The Relativity [?] of Moral Judgment
Ahh, if only it were so simple! Actually, I think on one level it is that simple and straightforward. But some layers of complexity and confusion have to get worked through first. I’ll mostly save that for later, and just briefly mention one major complication for now.
It has to do with the relativity of moral judgement in the modern world. Neoliberalism has its own essentially moral precepts—its own moral vision rooted in a particular view of human nature. Sure, maybe it results in inequality; but, given human nature, isn’t that the price we have to pay for freedom and progress?
Neoliberalism expresses a set of beliefs, a philosophy, that has its own moral framework; and its followers—some of them, anyway—sincerely believe in the rightness of the precepts that underly it. They believe in its (their) own vision of the good. Maybe we have a different vision of the good—different understandings of the scope of human possibilities. But how can we tell someone else that their moral code is wrong, without ourselves falling into the wrongheaded errors of ethnocentrism, moralism, or even bigotry? How can we rightly or fairly judge one moral framework from the standpoint or standards of another?
One answer relates to the factual basis of the moral frameworks in question. This goes back to territory that I touched on earlier here, and here. I’ll pick it up next time, and try to tie the problem of conflicting moral visions in setting public policies together with what I’ve been saying in earlier posts about human nature.