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Sunday Morning Coffee Pot: The Most Influential Writer You've Probably Never Heard Of
by lotp


It was culture that won the last election for Obama and it is culture that we must influence if we want to change the course of the country. But if we are to influence our culture we must start by understanding it and how it got to this point.

When Barack Obama repeatedly hit the theme of Fairness during the recent campaign, it resonated with people in the middle of hard economic times. The libertarian and right side of the country never offered an effective counter to this meme, which appears to have taken them by surprise.

It shouldn't have. Liberal political thought has been steeped for several decades in a worldview around justice, fairness and equality of outcome vs. equality of opportunity whose premises were laid by the most influential political philosopher you may never have heard of.

John Rawls died in 2002. His work isn't cited in court decisions and few today ascribe to the details of his positions. Yet he plowed the ground and planted the seeds that bore fruit last November and 4 years before that. Without knowing his name or examining his writings, most people under 40 (and many who are older) now accept as obvious truths the assertions he laid out and refined over several decades.

Rawls published his seminal work A Theory of Justice in 1971. The book had been gestating for nearly 20 years, taking shape as he used notes from the manuscript in the courses he taught at Harvard and while on a Fulbright fellowship at Oxford. It sold over 200,000 copies - a very high sales volume for a work in moral and political philosophy. In it Rawls set out to rescue liberalism from criticism on both the left and the right. His core premise was that inalienable human rights are the bedrock truth that must shape justice in society.

But what constitutes a human right? Rawls goes back two centuries to the Enlightenment, and specifically to Kant, as a starting place. The most basic civil and political right, he asserts, is to choose our own goals and to act on them. A just society must respect and actively guard that right. In this, Rawls was opposing Marxism and utilitarianism, two 19th century theories which each place the good of the whole over that of the individual. "Justice denies that the loss of freedom for some can ever be made right by a greater good shared by others," Rawls wrote.

But there is a problem we run into when putting the autonomy of individuals at the center of justice, and that problem is inequality. Inequality of family circumstances, education, physical and mental capabilities all mean that we are not in fact equally free to pursue our own ends. We are each either lucky or unlucky in what we have to work from. How then can justice be achieved, when inequality of circumstance inevitably limits the ability of some to choose and to act on their choices more than others?

Rawls asks us to consider a man or woman in what he calls the "original position" - i.e., utterly ignorant about his or her own situation. Rawls intends the original position to remove from our moral reasoning any bias in favor of ourselves. If you or I did not know whether we were wealthy or poor, male or female, young or old, healthy or ill, what social policies and rules would we consider the most just? He concludes that we would have to choose policies that assured that those in better circumstances have no benefit that doesn't also obtain for those who start in lesser circumstances. This is the only fair thing to do. The fairness principle, he asserts, must form the basis of a social contract for any just society. A just society is one in which people *choose* via a social contract to redistribute advantage so that all have a real chance at equality of outcome, because equality of opportunity is never actually a real situation in life without such a contract. Only this society is fair and therefore just.

Rawl's ideas stuck a chord with liberals in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His books and papers reinvigorated many intellectuals by offering an alternative both to crude Marxism and to the unpalatable emptiness of modern critical theory which was then in full flower among academics. Rawls, it seemed, told them that they could - indeed, should - take bold action to remake society, and that they would be acting justly if they did so. A Theory of Justice is quite in line with the Great Society initiatives, with the rise of welfare and the civil rights movement, with environmentalism and a host of similar programs.

Rawls was not universally accepted on the left, however. A huge literature exists in response to his original book, critiquing it from all angles. Marxists pushed back, disliking the emphasis on individuals rather than social classes. A related criticism emerged as a result of the branching of literary critical theory into social, race and feminist critical theories. Each of these demanded not only a focus on group rather than individuals, but also a focus on inequalities between groups. In 2001 Rawls published Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, backing off of several positions in the earlier book (including a vision of religious diversity as part of the fair society).

Meanwhile the right was focused primarily on neo-liberal (i.e. free market) and monetarist economics, some of which had a libertarian focus on individual autonomy that simply ignored social context or inequality of circumstances entirely. The economically-oriented right stressed efficiency rather than fairness of opportunity, which they tended to define in terms of removing governmental limits on action. They were, in the short run, successful. The wage and price controls of Nixon and the signficant stagflation of Jimmy Carter's presidency gave way to growth under Ronald Reagan, which in turn fueled welfare reform and the dot com boom under Clinton. As far as the right/libertarians were concerned, their free market advocacy had been vindicated. The right didn't respond effectively to Rawls because they didn't feel they needed to. The rising tide of economic growth would lift all boats. Minorities and other disadvantaged people would inevitably migrate into greater prosperity and wellbeing. A virtuous cycle would reinforce itself as new opportunity overshadowed inherited disadvantages.

But the prosperity of the late 90s didn't last. The growing welfare state, a series of expensive wars and the aging of the huge Baby Boom generation all have intersected with major technology changes to create the crisis we are now in. And while that was happening, Justice as Fairness was permeating throughout academia and thence into much of the culture.

Which gets us to the emotional content of Rawls' theory and its continuing resonance today.

Rawls was doing more than theorizing intellectually when he worked out Justice as Fairness. He was responding to a series of events in his own life in which he was, inexplicably, lucky while others close to him were not. It's not just that he grew up with economic, educational and other advantages, although he did. It's more visceral than that. Two of his young siblings died after contracting illnesses from him, but he recovered both times. Men immediately next to him died during WWII, but he remained unscathed and went on to enjoy a rewarding academic career and happy marriage. Rawls came to see these experiences as emblematic of life at its foundation. Unless remedied, he observed, both unfairness and privilege tend to perpetuate themselves for those caught in or lifted up by them.

Listen carefully and you will hear Justice as Fairness everywhere you turn today. It forms the basis of the push for climate change treaties, of wealth redistribution (overt and indirect) by the government, and of columns criticizing Romney for rejoining the board of directors of Marriott rather than actively working for social change. It echoes more subtly in the firm conviction of many that they are not really, personally responsible for their own lives and the outcomes of their choices. It is shouted angrily in Occupy and anarchist riots. It appeals to people who are out of work through no fault of their own, or who grew up in urban poverty attending dangerous, poorly equipped and dysfunctional schools. It provides a tempting excuse for those who are in difficulty due to poor judgements, whose McMansions were way too expensive for them and are now being repossessed, whose union demands have bankrupted cities and companies, the young women who demand to Have It All without tradeoffs. It explains why Occupy protesters do not villify the wealthy 1% liberals who purport to support Occupy's goals, for such liberals don't justify their privilege and wealth as having been earned.

This is what we are up against. Justice as Fairness is not simply the product of envy, a misunderstanding many on the right rest in. It is a powerful theme infused into Western political thought as a result of Rawls' careful moral analysis and the intense responses his arguments triggered here and in Europe. However, the political impact of Justice as Fairness results not only from Rawl's careful analysis but also because it strikes a deep emotional chord with many people. It is this emotional response that Obama and others are playing on with great skill. Rawls influenced the thinking of an entire generation of intellectuals and academics who in turn influenced many of today's voters. Like Obi Wan Kenobi, Rawls was struck down by his various critics only to merge with the zeitgeist and become more powerful than ever.

What, if anything, can be said against Justice as Fairness? What does the libertarian/right side of the spectrum offer in its place? Whatever that message might be, it must resonate as deeply and with as much emotional impact if it is to be successful.

The very term 'liberal' promises freedom for new possibilities. The very term 'conservative' suggests an intent to preserve existing privilege and inequity. Perhaps we need a new start. Can the freedom of the individual to choose his or her own ends be preserved at the core of a new philosophy, a new party, that also recognizes and responds to the very real limitations that circumstances create for some while elevating others?

During the last few years the Tea Party and others have called for a return to self-reliance and neighborhood comity as the solution to social problems. But the small town/rural neighbor-helps-neighbor model is inadequate to the task. No matter how evocative references to such things are when they come from the mouth of Sarah Palin or in the form of the Romney campaign collecting plastic bags of miscellaneous goods for Sandy victims, they do not appear to be adequate to address the misery of inner city schools or the hopelessness of blue collar workers whose industries are being automated away. And Rawls is right: such circumstances do significantly limit opportunity for the people who are mired in them.

Inequality of circumstance is nothing new. The problem with the Tea Party message is, however, that it looks back to an old solution based on a situation that no longer obtains. We no longer have a physical frontier available for those who would risk leaving home and family to better their lives through independence, risk-taking and hard work alone. That is why the vision that fundamentally looks back to such days is uncompelling to many.

It lacks appeal to many young adults for whom it seems utterly out of touch with daily reality. Theirs is, after all, the cohort who are the most horizontally oriented (peer to peer relationships, information sharing etc.) of any generation in centuries of recent history. They live and breathe within global information networks, where the value of being connected in large systems is a given. The Tea Party is tri-corner hats and covered wagons crossing the prairie while they are collaborative online decisionmaking and nanoengineering. The Tea Party vision also fails to address the understandable concerns of Blacks who are now middle class but look around them and see their communities sliding fast back into poverty, and who are all too aware that many young Blacks have little realistic chance of escaping inner city hopelessness.

What new vision of Justice can we offer? Is there something from Rawls we can build on? If not, and if we do not offer some other compelling vision of Justice, Fairness will be the slogan that is used to justify a fundamental reworking of our country and every one of our institutions.


Posted by: lotp 2013-01-27
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=360984