Parasitic Liberalism

This hot-off-the-press paper by Samuel Bowles investigates the "parasitic liberalism" thesis, which is roughly the idea that liberal societies do not produce enough civic virtue to maintain themselves, and instead are parasitic on the older inherited forms of social organization (clans, eg) that they displace. If the thesis is true, then liberalism is doomed, because it will ultimately cannibalize the source of its own success.

For example, in the absence of a strong work ethic and feelings of reciprocity among employers and employees, an adequately functioning labor market would be impossible. If trust, truth-telling and other ethical behaviors were absent among borrowers and lenders, credit markets, likewise would collapse. The same is true with even greater force of other institutions, so that: "...no social system can work ...in which everyone is ...guided by nothing except his own ...utilitarian ends.." (Schumpeter).

I know academic papers are supposed to speak with an air of timelessness and not riff on current events like blogs, but it must have taken effort to write the highlighted sentence in 2010 without making explicit reference to the actual state of our society.

... the following are commonly held to be among the cultural foundations of a well functioning liberal order: willingness to help others at a cost to oneself (voluntarily paying taxes and contributing to public goods for example) and upholding social norms such as respect for private property, honesty, fair treatment, and political participation even when these do not enhance one's material benefits...

By liberal society I mean one characterized by extensive reliance on markets to allocate economic goods and services, formal equality of political rights, the rule of law, public tolerance, and attenuated ascriptive barriers to mobility... examples of liberal societies are Switzerland, Denmark, Australia, the U.S. and the U.K., while examples of non-liberal societies... are Saudi Arabia, Russia, Ukraine, and Oman as well as the small scale societies of hunter-gatherers, herders and low technology farmers...

So, to restate the idea, traditional human society develops a rich texture of human relationships, based on kinship, professional guilds, personal loyalty, etc. Liberalism (aka modernism, aka the market) comes along and sweeps most of the relational structure away and replaces it with individualised, atomistic economic transactions. But the market depends on a certain level of trust and good faith. All that stuff comes from an earlier time, and the grinding gears of the market will eventually use up the store of it that was generated from earlier times, and we're left with a harsh landscape of pure self-interest and low trust, which just won't work that well.

This is apparently an old idea but it's somewhat new to me, at least crystallized in this form. Bowles cites classic authors like Burke, Tocqueville, Hayek, Polanyi, Habermas, Rawls, Mill, and others who have touched upon it before. And there's a wide range of cited literature from behavioral economics that I'm not going to have time to read, but looks fascinating.

So then the paper presents a mathematical model for thinking about virtue and liberalism. There's a lot about this kind of thing that raises my hackles. For instance, it's not really clear that you can tell much from ultra-simplistic models in which "virtue" is represented by a single numerical variable. But it may that an ultra-simplified model is better than no model at all. Certainly much has been made before of game-theoretic models like the Prisoner's Dilemma, and this is just a slightly more complexified version of that.

This topic is related in various ways to an earlier paper by Bowles and Jayadev on guard labor.

Indirect evidence consistent with the predicted inverse relationship between virtue and the extent of markets is found in the fact that the U.S., perhaps the most market-based of the advanced economies, also excels in the fraction of its labor force devoted to what Jayadev and I call guard labor, namely, that devoted to (or the consequence of) maintaining order.

Bowles' conclusion is that while there is some general truth to the parasitic liberalism thesis, it paints too simplistic a picture:

...the parasitic liberalism thesis fails not because it misunderstands the cultural consequences of markets or the tendency of liberal institutions to erode traditional institutions and cultures, but rather because it overrates the benign contribution of tradition to the moral underpinnings of liberal institutions, and underrates the contribution of the liberal state and other non-market aspects of liberal societies to the flourishing of these values.

My own take: The US certainly seems to have consumed a large stock of its virtue, while cultures with deeper roots in tradition seem to have deeper wells of virtue to draw on (for "virtue", read "willingness to cooperate with others" or simply "fraternitié", the third and often neglected leg of the French version of liberalism). That may be why the US seems to be heading into banana republic territory while European states actually seem to use there powers to take care of their citizens. The people who do really well at small-scale, ground-level capitalism in the US are those with large family/ethnic networks to draw on.

More generally, it's just too soon to tell. Liberalism, modernism and capitalism constitute a major change to human society, and we are only part-way through the transition. Technology continues to evolve and it drives new variants of political structures (ie, print supported the rise of nationalism, radio supported the rise of fascism, and we don't really know what the Internet will do yet). Liberalism is only a few hundred years old and given its self-mutating nature it is impossible to say what its long-term prospects are.

alt.scouts

Wired's GeekDad column has a good, long piece on the Boy Scouts and whether they have any relevance at all today. The short answer is mostly no, because they decided to jump into the culture wars on the wrong side. They are now dominated by Christianists, to the point where they exclude not only gay kids, but Unitarians.

This wasn't always the case. It surprises people who know me now when they find out I was in the Boy Scouts (a long time ago, to be sure). I had mixed feelings about it even then -- the quasi-military aspects of it did not appeal. But it got me and my father out of the house and into nature, which was definitely a good thing. And I look back on some of the more positive cultural aspects of the organization -- "Be Prepared" is a still a fine motto today. And you could get merit badges in computers and nuclear energy, as well as more traditional things like first aid.

I got as far as Life Scout (one rank below Eagle) before quitting and joining up with Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-zionist youth group which is genetically related to the Boy Scouts through common ancestry in the Wandervogel movements of early 20th century Europe. Hashomer had girls and a much more attractive underlying culture. It didn't really take either -- I declined to go live on a kibbutz after finishing high school, and went off to MIT instead.

I occasionally find myself wishing that the Scouts had not become dominated by regressive elements so that I could participate in it with my own children. I came up with the idea that in places like the Bay Area or Boston you might be able to make an alternative organization that embodied the positive aspects of scouting without the Christianist crapola. Call it the alt.scouts, or maybe the Green Scouts, which sounds like an cadre of young environmental shock troops. If someone wants to help start a group like that, let me know, I'm in and I'll drag my kids along.

Here's a passage from the Wired article that makes the case for scouting:

Scouting emphasizes a strong bond between boys and their families. In many cases, this is exemplified by the relationship between boys and their fathers, who are most often volunteers for the program. This traditional arrangement provides an ideal opportunity for boys to step away from their daily routine and not only learn core Scouting skills like orienteering, cooking or first aid, but also skills outside the Scouting curriculum, like negotiating the pitfalls of adolescence and growing to become men. Yes, these are things that boys can learn elsewhere, but Scouting provides a conduit - whether a weekend-long campout, a two-week backpacking trek or just a weekly meeting - where interaction with teenagers and their fathers is mandatory — an occurrence that’s sometimes difficult for many families at home.

Then, there are Scouting’s values, those twelve points that both brand and identify a Boy Scout as, that squeaky-clean, do-gooder kid: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. For the most part, these are ideals that most of us want to see in our family, friends and neighbors. Scouting has consistently forwarded these values over their 100 year history. Peter Applebome, an editor of The New York Times, once wrote that, as an adult volunteer involved with his son’s scouting, he observed that “Scouting’s core values … are wonderful building blocks for a movement and a life. Scouting’s genuinely egalitarian goals and instincts are more important now than they’ve ever been. It’s one of the only things that kids do that’s genuinely cooperative, not competitive.”

Scouting today seems rather quaint and weak. Its iconography of Indians and play-soldiery was outdated in my time and is laughable to the kids of today. As an institution it has been unable to adapt to changing values and as a result is increasingly controlled by the troglodyte right (especially Mormons, it turns out). It might have once been a noble effort to temper the onslaught of modernity by creating a values-centered social institution, part of the lamented civil society, that network of non-state institutions that is supposed to be the main constituent of social life. Not a bad idea but difficult to pull off in practice. Unfortunately the groups best positioned to resist the centrifugal effects of capitalism and technology are also the ones with the most regressive values.

[[update: Here's Penn & Teller's take on the BSA]]