Thoughts on jobs and dignity

Aziz Rana's makes the point here that Obama represents a shift in what we can point to as successful realizations of the American dream. No longer, he says, are the avenues of farming, industrial work, or small business ownership a possible way for large amounts of people to obtain self-respect in society. The modern success story, as realized in Obama, involves going to college and becoming a professional elite, or working one's way up the corporate or political ladder, and in general becoming powerful.

Now, I think somebody being president will always speak to the aspect of the American dream that involves gaining power. As to the story of being worthy of respect without being a bourgeois professional or power broker, I'm not sure that's gone away in America. McCain's campaign certainly showed that. But there is the idea that someone who works in industry as a laborer is living a less successful like than a lawyer, if our guidance councilors' advice is any indication.

But Rana is right to point out that regardless of what we're supposed to aspire to, a lot of people are perfectly happy not to have a flashy job title. They're happy to be a working person, and to provide for themselves or for their families. But this version of the American dream does seem to be getting harder to obtain with the way real wages are going.

I'm not sure I've bought the idea that people are so much worse off now. A lot of people can afford nutrition and technology that they could never afford before. Talking about real wages falling puts the question in materialistic terms, and I'm not sure that the American dream has become less possible in gross accumulation of goods. Consider what an ipod would have cost in 1970. Perhaps what has changed is the minimum level of income for self and social respect has changed, and there lies the problem.

On Obamian Ecstacies

Will Wilkinson on the spectacle of Obama's election:

I’m glad Obama won. I am perhaps the world’s most lachrymose man, and I cried seeing Jesse Jackson cry. I have always thought that the symbolic or cultural value of an Obama victory would be enormous. The dramatic reaction last night confirmed that. I understand why so many people are elated, and part of me is elated, too. I find it hard to see how you could not be. There is no denying that an election can be culturally transformative. It means something profound that a black man was elected to the most visible, high-status position our society offers. The mere fact that Obama won truly does make our society a better place.

That said, every four years, I find myself deeply disturbed by the fact that the office of chief executive of the national public goods administration agency is in fact, according to most people’s sense of things, the highest peak, the top of the heap. And the quadrennial reflex of vesting in a single powerful man so much hope for the future seems to me a truly depressing failure to internalize the spirit of American democracy. Last night’s celebratory catharsis was a long time coming. We needed it. But, frankly, I hope never to see again streets thronging with people chanting the victorious leader’s name.

I tend to agree with the point here. Personality-driven elections draw on deeper layers of our brains that developed during our tribal past and so they draw a lot of power from short circuiting our rationality. There is something creepy about Obama's election being so driven by his own image, an image often portrayed in a propagandist vein that we haven't seen for a good while in America.

I think that this sort of tribal thinking is important to us, but its proper place is a tribal setting. That means that it should be directed towards people that our major forces in one's actual life, like family (genetic or not), friends, and community leaders. But national government is supposed to be a necessary evil in America. Even those who think that the welfare state is a necessary for all to obtain positive liberty should still see the government as a dangerous instrument. We should be clear-eyed and skeptical of our leaders when they occupy power, as we learned after the first six years of Bush's presidency.

Americans liked Bush at first because of his personality. Looking at these pictures, I can feel somewhat positively toward Bush the man, he's just so adorable, and I have to think about what he did in power to feel negatively again.

I talked with my dad about Obama's potential role as president. He liked that Obama is a figure that the nation can unite around, one that restores an idea of America that could invigorate civic-mindedness in its citizens. This attitude reminds me of the time of FDR's reign, when one could find framed photos of FDR in restaurants, barbershops, and homes across America. There is something attractive about such a deep affection for a symbol of one's country.

But we should also remember what have been the results of propoganda, personality cults, and public displays of ecstatic emotion in the past. Perhaps we should also remember that if we wish to identify our nation with ourselves, we must identify with its evil as well as its good. Perhaps that is actually healthy, maybe identifying America's torture and brutality with ourselves would cause us to actually change these things.

So I guess my point is that scenes like this:



are definitely a mixed-bag for democracy.

do we (I) need moral realism?

In my english class, a fellow philosophy student wrote an essay arguing that moral realism requires bizarre, quasi-mystical explanations. He relies on Hume's is-ought distinction: that there is a gap between descriptive and normative statements that we do not know how to cross. Our motivations are simply given (based on impulses we owe to evolution, he argues), and cannot be derived from anything that actually exists in the world. He ends up saying that moral imperatives are groundless as anything but descriptions of how we are compelled to act. There is no way to really grasp an ought.

We aren't supposed to worry though, because society, friendship, trust, altruism, etc. will continue, because we'll have psychological impulses toward them all the same. I can't help but find this viewpoint disenchanting. I'm not sure how our actions can be meaningful, or the choices we make important without some normativity we can believe in.

I don't like pointing to meaning as something important for us, because it seems like such a contentless word. But I feel like our deepest emotions almost force us to aknowledge them as important, that to deny their signficance cuts us off from life. I don't know if moral realism would be necessary to resolve this meaning deficit for me, but the idea that normativity is just our highly developed apish codes depresses me. It also makes me laugh, so I suppose it's a draw.