“I believe that intellectuals have played crucial roles in the making of democracy and in the ongoing practices of democratic life.” With this sentence, I opened my book Civility and Subversion. Motivating the writing of that book was a developing misinformed (to my mind) consensus that intellectuals played an important role in the democratic opposition to the Communist order, but they would be relatively unimportant for the post Communist making and running of democracy. I thought that this was a terrible mistake, and I tried to show that in the book. In short, my argument was that intellectuals play a democratic role, not when they purport to provide the answers to a society’s problems, but when they facilitate deliberate discussion. Intellectuals are talk provokers. Discussions at Deliberately Considered over the past week demonstrate my point. We have considered and opened discussion about important problems.
On Monday, Vince Carducci introduced and analyzed the photography of John Ganis, art that confronts the damage we do to our environment, showing beauty that displays destruction. Carducci observes that “Ganis describes himself as a ‘witness’ rather than an activist. And yet his subject matter and its treatment clearly indicate where the artist’s loyalties lie.” But it is the ambiguity of the work, its internal tension that provokes and doesn’t answer political questions that facilitated a discussion between Felipe Pait and Carducci, comparing the destruction of the BP oil spill with the devastation in Japan. This could inform serious discussion about my reflections on man versus nature. We are present. We have our needs. How does it look when we satisfy them? What are the consequences? I think that this reveals that the power of the witness can sometimes be more significant than that of the activist. Carducci and I have an ongoing discussion about the value of agit prop. He likes it. I abhor it. I think Ganis’ work, with Carducci’s analysis of it, as the devastation in Japan was unfolding, supports my position.
On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, I reported on and reflected upon some local happenings in my hometown: the closing of an A&P and threatened budgetary cuts at a community center in a primarily African American neighborhood. Logical business decisions and business as usual local governance were having profound unjust effects. I was particularly impressed by the replies to the posts. First, my Town Supervisor responded, asking if he could pass my criticisms of the A&P closing on to A&P. Then a series of replies to my post on institutionalized racism, which pointed to analogous situations. Rafael reported from Texas about the schools there. Regina Tuma’s noted how the conflicts in Wisconsin and the experiences in Ohio are a manifestation of the same problems. And Scott made the general point: “The powerless throughout the country are being asked, or more properly forced, to bear a disproportionate cost for a problem that was, by and large, not of their making,” and speculates about the likelihood of “a counterpoint to the Tea Party.” I also had discussions at the community center about the post. Staff and community members think that the protest I reported on may be having an impact. They seem to have a sense of empowerment, as they try to figure out how they are going to buy their daily bread, along with their other groceries. I’m struck how two parts of my life, one embedded in the academic world, the other in my hometown, met virtually through the post.
I tried hard to facilitate a careful response to the Japanese catastrophes. I have difficulty responding to natural disasters. To use a silly cliché, they are beyond my pay grade. I generally listen to the experts, turn off the cable news and try to act as a responsible citizen. Intelligent public deliberation and discussion are difficult.
The complaint of Pait in his response to Fine’s post on joking about Japan underlines the point. “This conversation is too much about the talk and too little about the act. There are people who like it. As an engineer, I don’t.” I am a man committed to talk, but I know that sometimes talk is cheap. Pait is right, action is imperative in the face of earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear disasters. Talk is secondary. But eventually it is important.
We need to confront the relationship between the human and the natural world. We need to know when we can tame nature, when we must accept its overwhelming destructive force, and we need to be aware when we are the destructive force, as it is connected to our pursuit of oil and our attempt to create easy alternatives in the form of nuclear power. That requires informed talk, when intellectuals, including artists, not only experts, are necessary.
And then there’s Gary Alan Fine, Deliberately Considered’s intellectual provocateur, mixing high and low brow insight. He established his learning by presenting a classic reflection by Adam Smith on distant suffering. Fine, in his first post this week, highlights that Smith recognizes both the problem of empathy at a distance, but also reflects on how reason and principle reach out, leading us to do the right thing. But, in his second post, he explains the humor in horror, justifying the politically incorrect jokes of: “Mr. Gottfried, Mr. 50 Cent, and Mr. Haley Barbour’s press secretary.” Fine in his appreciation of troubling humor, makes a classic conservative point about the human condition, “let us treasure those who begin the process by which we realize that we cannot change the world, but must distance ourselves from it, amused. We can wallow in the pain of others or we can recognize that our life continues.” Have I found an intelligent conservative intellectual within our midst?
Jeff’s comments on the community center and the shutting down of local food markets in a primarily African-American neighborhood is a heartbreaking side effect of much bigger and longer term issues than have been not been addressed so far. As has been pointed out, this is not an isolated incident. It is occurring in a much broader range of communities, but disproportionately impacting poorer communities.
Over the decades, we have witnessed the deindustrialization of the Northeast and what has become known as Rust Belt states. Some of the migration of businesses and people has been to the Sun Belt states, and more recently outside of the country. A number of explanations have been offered for the shift to the south. They include: a desire for higher productivity; better amenities; and more affordable housing. Other explanations are more blunt: a desire to escape legacy costs; the ability to start anew in right to work states; and a search for more favorable tax policies and rates. That may have helped explain the shift south, but it doesn’t explain the shift outside this country that is more related to cheap labor; a shifting in growth markets; and better logistical systems.
The results are the same: better paying jobs have been lost, as the economy has shifted from producing to services and consumption. As businesses and people have migrated, they have left communities that have inadequate tax bases and high unemployment and underemployment rates with little protects of turning this around. Where these conditions exist, citizens will suffer.
In order to address this chronic and worsening problem, we have to find ways to generate more value in the economy, and as President Obama suggested in his State of the Union address, produce more. This requires a fundamental rethinking of major policies: we need a practical energy plan which realistically bridges the shift from fossil fuels to alternative forms of energy, none exists today. We need a willingness to utilize our own natural resources.
We need to break through the barriers that make it virtually impossible to permit new facilities in reasonable amounts of time. We tax policies that are competitive on a worldwide basis and attract new businesses rather than encouraging them to flee to other areas. A weak dollar while providing short-term benefits is in a sense one of the most insidious taxes of all: it ultimately fuels inflation first through commodities and ultimately reduces disposable income for all, especially those who have little. This means putting in place fiscal and monetary policies that make longer-term sense.
We need a willingness to explore alternative approaches to doing work that empowers workers rather than shackles them, as is currently the case in the many traditional locations.
In the 1950s, Eric Trist and Fred Emery developed their sociotechnical-systems approach at the Tavistock Institute in London. Their concept was that things get done more effectively when social and technical systems are jointly optimized; and they found that teams in self-managed work teams in “high-commitment or high-performance” organizations best do this. I’ve seen this work in both union facilities and non-union facilities, although it is much easier and faster to get done in non-union facilities. One that I am familiar with breathed life back into a community that lost economic hope; and it became one of the safest, highest quality and most productive facilities of its type.
A worker who participated in a redesign effort offered this observation to me, “I used to dread getting up in the morning and having to go to work, and now I can’t wait to jump out of bed to go to work.” In these types of environments some of the most innovative and well-paying compensation systems have been developed and are used.
If we want to address the root causes of problems that Jeff raised, I think that we need to become engaged and seek better policies that actually will give communities a chance to rise from the ashes. It isn’t easy, but is can be done, but it will take time and a willingness to abandon preconceptions and implement pragmatic solutions. Many of the concerns that we have about race and class are addressed as significant value is generated in the economy on a sustainable basis. Without this type of economic revival, resources will not be available for the most vulnerable and at risk; and the enormity of our unfunded liabilities and cumulative debt will overwhelm efforts to deal with our concerns.