Who Is Our Opponent in Winning the Future

After the obvious issues of civility that are really matters of democratic inclusion or anti-democratic marginalization, the next issue that calls for attention in thinking about President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address is the overall framework: who is the opponent he calls us to defeat in the shared struggle of winning the future? One way to understand what he meant is to think of a sports competition with a worthy opponent, where everyone plays by the same rules, there are competent and neutral officials, and Americans are all on the same team—like the Olympics, with fans chanting “U.S.A.” That reading is supported by the patriotic line that brought the whole chamber of government leaders to its feet, “I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other country on earth.” If that’s what he meant, however, the question is: who does the U.S.A. team defeat, and what do they take home if they fail to win the future?

A different reading suggests rival business teams competing for the same client, presenting their facts and figures as convincingly as they can in the hope of getting the deal. This reading is supported by the line, “At stake is whether new jobs take root in this country or somewhere else.” But again the questions arise, who is the client, what is the contract, and what is left to the losers?

War suggests a third, darker metaphor that also finds support in President Obama’s speech, with the suggestion of Al Quaida plotting against us followed by the line, “We will not relent, we will not waver, and we will defeat you.”

All of these meanings were wrapped up together in President Obama’s most striking image: “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” In the late 1950’s, the “space race” signified technological dominance with military implications taken as proof of cultural and ideological superiority. There was a clear rival nation that already had invaded neighboring states and imposed a central command system of political economy and an image of the future that U.S. citizens had learned to fear. Children had been taught to “duck and cover” under their desks if Russia launched nuclear bombs before they could get to the underground fallout shelters many of their families had built near their homes. Winning the space race was about showing the world that freedom of expression, freedom in research, freely elected government representatives, and free markets could produce better results under pressure than a tightly organized, top-down system with an equal number of geniuses running the labs. Of course, this was a vast oversimplification of the American system of the time, already over-influenced by what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” and already curtailed in our cultural freedoms by the McCarthy hunt for communist sympathizers and tendencies that some well-paid radio and television commentators still carry on.

The problem with President Obama’s Sputnik image is this: we have no single, clear opponent in the world today, and thus, it’s hard to say what it means to “win” the future. The old Soviet Union is gone, and it makes more sense now to try to work with Russia as an ally than as an enemy—a project that is not advanced by making the future about the past. The United States and the American people do have enemies in the world, but they are not nation-states, and can only be defeated if nations and peoples work together against them, instead of treating one another as rivals. Given the realities of globalization, even competing for jobs and stronger economic growth numbers against other nations of the world is a losing proposition, not only in the long term but in this fragile present moment in the life of our international economic system. If the future is to be “won,” the alternative to be defeated is chaos, not a rival nation or business group. The invention that will show the superiority of a democratic way of life in the twenty-first century is a more just and stable system of global political economy based in a global sense of inclusion, cooperation, and mutual benefit: “We will more forward together, or not at all.”

Helping President Obama Win the Future

“Winning the Future,” the recurring theme of President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address, combines a pragmatist orientation toward the future with a realistic invitation to join in a hope-motivated struggle in which more than one team is involved and the outcome if far from certain. His apparent goal was to get clarify that all Americans are on the same team, even though “we have fought fiercely for our beliefs—and that’s a good thing…but there’s a reason why the tragedy in Tucson gave us pause: each of us is part of something bigger…we share common hopes and a common creed…that, too, is what sets apart as a nation…” It was good to see rival Members of Congress sitting together as an expression of this unity amid diversity and to see them rise together with a roar of approval when he said, “As contentious or messy or frustrating our democracy can be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other country on earth.” Lastly, it was good to hear him acknowledge that the struggle for the better way forward will and should continue in order to develop and adopt the best ideas, that this will not happen unless rivals actually work together instead of demonizing one another, and that this new approach to daily politics will require help from all of the American people. Even though he disagreed with President Obama’s policy proposals, Representative Paul Ryan’s civil and intelligent reply on behalf of the Congressional Republicans was fully compatible with this new approach to handling differences in political vision.

However, some powerful interests have already rejected this new approach, including some talk show radio hosts and cable commentators who earn large incomes by pouring fuel on the flames of fear and dislike, some elected officials like Representative Michelle Bachman who owe their offices to the disaffected and find themselves out of patience to listen to or read what their opponents actually propose, and those who lobby professionally on behalf of various interests that heard or thought they heard that they might make less money if Congress actually starts thinking together about how to advance America’s interest as a nation in a complex and unstable global context. Many of us ordinary citizens have already heard a lot from these voices, in part because some fair-minded communicators think that the democratic ideal requires that they give them “equal time.” This is a mistake, because these voices stand in opposition to the social preconditions of democracy, without which its formal processes are empty and even perverse.

What we need to do to help President Obama, the American people, and other peoples who long to live secure and meaningful lives with the guidance of the democratic ideal is to call out those who refuse to walk the walk while demanding equal time or as much time as money can buy to talk a very different kind of talk. This means we need to send emailsor tweets or even old-fashioned letters to challenge uncivil and anti-democratic speech as soon as we hear it. Democratic respect for others’ right to speak their minds freely does not require that we treat the views of those who challenge others’ rights to democratic participation as if their views were just “another perspective.”

What’s to be Done about the State of the American Union

Shortly before he died, Martin Luther King, Jr., penned a scorecard for assessing the state of the American union that President Barack Obama would be wise to keep in his hip pocket throughout the coming year as a valuable aid to his own thinking, whatever it may be prudent for him to say in his annual address to the nation. King noted that we face three great obstacles to Americans’ security and shared well-being: our nation’s social history of racism and its continuing economic and experiential legacy, our habit of tolerating poverty in whole regions of our country and areas of our cities, and our ever-readiness to go to war instead of pursuing the peace we really need.

These three costly bad habits still constitute a national blind side that we have trouble overcoming exactly because many of us still believe that willingness to change is a sign of weakness—“I am what I am” and “I gotta be me”—even if that means that someone must suffer as others go to the bank. Many still think that economic stratification and the laws of supply and demand are basic laws of nature, instead of Adam Smith’s rough summary of how things seemed to work (even if imperfectly) in his home town in the late 1700’s as Scotland was starting to industrialize and several Western nations were struggling over others’ land, labor, and assets to build powerful empires. We cannot easily change the direction of history they set so long ago, though America’s founders knew the habits of empire were wrong and dangerous, and therefore created some intellectual tools for gradually transforming them, even as they recognized that they themselves could not entirely escape them. Establishing a new nation on the basis of imperial land grants and slave labor makes it hard for inheritor generations to function as a democratic republic in which all are free and equal.

This is why we still struggle with an unjust legacy of inherited bad habits as well as unequal means and opportunities, though King’s scorecard would give our nation credit for making some progress during the past fifty years. We have ended legal segregation on the basis of race, but the economic segregation to which the old racism gave rise continues to segregate our nation residentially into locations of radically unequal opportunities for education, jobs, housing, and health care. Many still tolerate someone else’s poverty as if it were a character flaw or at least bad luck, firmly believing that our earnings reflect our effort and merit alone, instead of the workings of history within a global economic and social system that overvalues some contributions while undervaluing others, hiding its actual levers and who pulls them behind a noise-screen of “free choice.” Lastly, as a new year of America’s history begins, here we still are, stuck in wars that drain our resources and our will to change our domestic fortunes, when what we really need is peace. The question is not whose fault these are, but rather what’s to be done about them and how quickly.

What we need to do first is to stop telling ourselves that war is glorious or at least necessary, and start telling ourselves that war is an abomination, and that we must figure out why we keep going down that path and find a better way. That will require, as King said, that we recognize that we’re all in this together, and that you don’t balance a nation’s budget and strengthen its future position by deciding not to educate the kids and waiting for a fairy godmother on Wall Street to create the jobs their parents need. Finding this better way must begin, like any reasonable response to an unworkable situation in life, by telling t

Why We Need Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism

What is the solution for the devastating, world-wide problem of divisive ideologies, dismissal and demonization of those who disagree with group-shared views, and resort by default to violence of all kinds: communicative, physical, and by exclusion; through actions of individuals, gangs, militias, and national armies; motivated by frustration, by a sense of long-borne injustice, to gain group advantage, as divinely sanctioned, and as a matter of international policy? Such epidemic violence at all levels, like any other social disease, cannot be cured by addressing its symptoms alone. These may force us to face the fact that we have a problem, or a series of problems, but they do not by themselves tell us what to do.

When we think that the solution to violence is more violence, that’s our disease talking. What we need to do instead is listen to our own deep longings for peace within and among us, for the conditions that will allow all of us to grow stronger by growing together, and for lives governed by love, creativity, shared knowledge, and social hope, rather than by fear. Then we need to begin what John Dewey called a collaborative pragmatist inquiry into the historical and contemporary conditions that are keeping us from living in this better, more deeply democratic way, as well as the kinds of changes we will need to make as individuals and groups, diverse nations and cultures, and a world community as a whole in order to make the kinds of lives we long for really possible for us and those who will come after us.

In other words, we need to cultivate what I call “pragmatist cosmopolitanism.” This phrase owes debts not only to Dewey, but also to ancient Stoic thinkers like Marcus Aurelius and their modern inheritors like Immanuel Kant, to the great pragmatist social democrat Jane Addams, to the great “absolute pragmatist” Josiah Royce, to the great critical pragmatist Alain L. Locke, to the visionary pragmatist-personalist Martin Luther King, Jr., and a to number of brilliant and influential twenty-first century philosophers and political economists, including Martha C. Nussbaum, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Muhammad Yunus.

Since the Stoics’ time, “cosmopolitanism” has meant a kind of world-mindedness that supercedes and frames but does not exclude loyalties to nation, culture, religion, party, family, friends, other groups and those personal projects that help to make our lives meaningful. Some cosmopolitan thinkers, including Kant and Appiah, have grounded such a wider commitment and the “perpetual peace” they think may flow from it in a kind of individual reasoning that shakes off ideological and cultural claims, respects others as fellow humans rather than as group members, and reserves to the individual alone the choice of how to live. In critical response to such thinkers, feminist cosmopolitans like Nussbaum and Benhabib have argued that some of our unchosen group memberships are basic to our becoming able to reason, to value, to live as humans, and to experience life freely and creatively; the challenge is to assure that these groups (including families, cultures, and nations) work well for all people (women and girls as well as men and boys) in twenty-first century global contexts. Classical and contemporary pragmatists offer a five-fold contribution to the continuing development of cosmopolitanism: (1) the recognition that reason, like creative imagination, works on the basis of habits, institutions, and contributions from earlier thinkers, some of which must be conserved and some of which must be rejected or at least changed in some ways if we would solve new problems in living; (2) a process of context-specific collaborative inquiry that includes both experts and others affected by a problem; (3) an emphasis on the necessity of basic and continuing education to share the best insights and skills growing out of humanity’s earlier experience and current inquiries; (4) a willingness to experiment in active, thoughtful, attentive ways to discover just what kinds of changes will achieve the better outcomes our reason and imagination tells us must be possible; and (5) a commitment to the necessary work of reconciliation that heals the breach between those who have harmed and those who have been harmed within time’s flow as it carries tangible and intangible deposits from our past into our present and on into our future.

To change the world-killing practices of violence that currently overshadow our lives and our limit our hopes, we must hold fast to and lead countless others to share a cosmopolitan commitment that transforms how we understand and live in our twenty-first century global contexts. Pragmatist cosmopolitanism admits that we do not yet know how to do this, but it proposes effective processes for discovering and acting on what we need to know, for sharing old and new insights, for tweaking our existing institutions and designing new ones, for willingly changing our ways in order to become more fully ourselves even as we make peace with others, and for taking responsibility together to achieve the kinds of conditions in which all of us can grow into the fullness of our human capabilities and live the kinds of free, creative, contributive, and mutually supportive lives toward which our highest and best ideals lead us.

Pursuing King’s Justice

As we celebrate the birth and sacrificial contributions of Martin Luther King, Jr., again at the beginning of another year of trouble, and crisis, and controversy, it would be good to remember why this young man struggled so hard: to wake up our nation and our world to a better possiblility, “the bright sun of justice.” Scientific and technological changes had already made it possible during King’s lifetime for all people to live decent and dignified lives by sharing in the earth’s abundance. An ever more extensive communications revolution makes it even more clear now that all could share in education, civic decision making, and choosing the values that will guide our shared future.

King’s voice echoes down the long corridor of years: Let justice grounded in love be your guide to shaping that shared future. By love, King never meant sentimental gush. He meant empathy for others’ human situation, a sense that our lives are bound together in ways that make denying their needs and damaging their dignity a dangerous affront to all of us, and a conviction that humanity’s great gifts must not be wasted, but rather developed and shared.

The human need for meaningful, adequately compensated, contributive work for all who can and will do it is still a basic human need on which King’s love-guided pursuit of justice must lead us to fix our attention. The necessity of work is not some regrettable aspect of a social order that has not yet discovered ways to make full-time leisure possible for everyone. It is a deep part of who we are as human beings, how we develop our capabilities, where we test our various strengths and put them to use in the world. Thus, pursuing King’s justice now, in this time of continuing national and global recession, means seeking new ways to make socially and environmentally sustainable, fairly compensated, capabilities developing and personality expanding opportunities for work available to all, soon and for all the years to come.

Pursuing Civility as Domestic Peace

Welcome back, Mr. President! We’ve missed you for too long. When you called upon all Americans to take inspiration from murdered nine-year-old Christina Green’s high hopes for our democracy, and from the heroism of those who rushed in to prevent loss of even more lives to a madman’s bullets in Tucson, you practiced the kind of “soul power” Gandhi and King spoke about, and we felt it and felt thankful for it. All of us felt the eeriness, too, of losing this special 9/11-born child to the violence of one of our own, and yet you helped us see her death as a sacrifice that has made us stop in our tracks, reflect on how we are living, and resolve to do better as individuals and a society committed to the daily civility without which our democracy is a hollow shell. Many agreed with you that we must learn and teach how to disagree without being disagreeable, how to turn away from violent and divisive language that turns one’s opponent or competitor into one’s enemy, an object of fear and loathing instead of a neighbor and potential friend with whom one can stand in agreement about many things while working together for great and small things that matter.

This is domestic peace, the “positive peace” about which King wrote so movingly, and the “tranquility” the Founders pursued together and worked so hard to maintain among themselves as visionaries of a new way of living, not just a new nation that would claim the right to wage war like anybody else and to keep guns close at hand to protect themselves from any government or individual that tried to hurt them or take their stuff. Many urged you in recent months to “fight harder” for the public policies you and they regard as necessary for this nation now, in times of financial crisis and global war that have prompted many to abandon the practice of civility and to breach the domestic peace as a more realistic and more effective way of exercising power. Many called upon you to join in the mud wrestling, arm twisting, and distortion mongering that motivates action from fear and antagonism.

Taking wisdom from the life and death of Christina Green, you reminded us once again that the institutions of democracy cannot stand against the violence of the world without the committed habits of a deeper democracy among us, habits based in respectful and skillful practice of the kind of soul power Gandhi, King, and our Founders respected even more than guns, and that you displayed and deployed so well in this time of crisis and loss as a bright beacon of hope for what we and our national and our world can be.

Differences that Matter among Contemporary Liberals

Liberals in the broad philosophical and historical sense clearly share some important commonalities, but contemporary liberals also differ on important theoretical and practical issues that makes distinguishing them with descriptive adjectives or even different names more useful than simply lumping them all together as more or less the same in their views, and then contrasting them as a team with conservatives and communists. There are liberals and liberals, as John Dewey pointed out in 1930 in Liberalism Old and New. Instead of rejecting the concept as hopelessly confused, Dewey criticized and proposed a reconstruction of classical liberalism’s still-influental framework, calling for a “new” and improved liberalism that had a better empirical basis and more inclusive aims. Today’s so-called “liberals” include an even wider range of thinkers than they did in Dewey’s time, but they do not see themselves as members of a single team, though many of them have replied to the same texts and to one another.

For example, in A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls attempted to bridge Isaiah Berlin’s two alternative formulations of liberalism, whereas in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Nozick rejects Rawls’ bridge in favor of Berlin’s preferred libertarian individualist position. Rawls himself certainly knew Dewey’s name when he gave the Dewey Lectures he called “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980), intended in part as a reply to Nozick, which he later revised as the basis for Political Liberalism (1993) after a series of critical interchanges with Jurgen Habermas. Pragmatism was in intellectual eclipse in the 1970’s, which may be one reason why Rawls said nothing about Dewey’s pragmatist “new liberalism” in his works of that period. In contrast, utilitarianism was still very influential, which is why Rawls said a lot about its inadequacies as a reconstructed form of liberalism (as Dewey had earlier) in comparison with Kant’s classical views (which Dewey found inadequate).

Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill continue to be frequently cited as authorities or at least territorial signposts by a wide range of contemporary “liberal” thinkers who hold importantly differing views, perhaps because each of these earlier thinkers expressed some ideas that are closer to contemporary libertarian individualism and some that are closer to “social welfare” liberalism. However, these differing aspects of their views do not flow together seamlessly. For example, the libertarian aspects of Mill’s On Liberty do not match up very well with the social welfare emphasis of Utilitarianism. Thus, treating Kant’s and Mill’s bodies of work as unified within themselves is as misleading as treating as members of the same team all of those contemporary “liberals” who find Kant’s and Mill’s views insightful in some way.

At the left end of the democratic political spectrum, most of Rawls’ best-known feminist critics have argued for views similar to Dewey’s “new liberalism,” whether they knew Dewey’s work or arrived at some of the same conclusions by a different route. (Dewey predicted in 1930 that women would remake philosophy when they finally gained admission to the discipline, and he was right about that.) Many of these feminists’ political views developed in conversation with democratic socialists, some of whom knew Dewey’s writings, including the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. For example, Naomi Scheman and Catherine Mackinnon clearly belong on the left end of the democratic political spectrum, though neither would call herself a liberal. In fact, Mackinnon describes the book that made her famous as “post-Marxist” and explicitly rejects what she characterizes as liberal views of the state, including both Rawls’ and Nozick’s differing “liberal” views as well as those of Kant, and perhaps even Mill’s proposals for transforming what he called “the subjection of women.” Instead of calling herself a “Marxist” feminist, however, Mackinnon carefully described herself as a post-Marxist radical feminist, in that she was calling for a rethinking of gender relationships as well as political and economic institutions.

In spite of philosophical and historical roots in liberalism—roots shared by Karl Marx as well as the great conservative theorist, Edmund Burke—some of the most important current lines of political controversy, theoretical and practical, divide libertarian individualists, mainstream liberals like Rawls and Habermas, democratic socialists, feminists who hold a wide range of anti-conservative views, and post-eclipse pragmatist thinkers of various kinds. Why gloss over these differences?

Though Martha Nussbaum has not rejected the “liberal” label for her feminist political philosophy, which clearly shows the influence of all of these earlier thinkers, those who refer to it as “capabilities theory” say something clearer and more useful about it than those who group it with Rawls and Nozick, or even with Kant and Mill. She acknowledges the importance of these differing theorists’ work, as well as Aristotle’s and Mackinnon’s, but she frames her co-development of capabilities theory with economist-philosopher Amartya Sen in terms of feminism and empirically based democratic philosophy.

Moreover, there has been a recent revival of Dewey’s and Jane Addams’ “new liberalism” by contemporary “pragmatist liberals” or “progressives” working in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, educational theory, cultural studies, and religious studies who draw extensively on Dewey, Mead, Addams, and Royce. In many cases, their pragmatism works very well with Nussbaum and Sen’s capabilities theory, if this is understood broadly, transactionally, and contextually. Both approaches oppose libertartian liberalism as well as certain aspects of Rawls’ work. In contrast, Robert Talisse opposes Dewey’s “new liberalism,” advocating Rawls over Dewey in order to advance what he calls “Peircean liberalism,” although his view owes more to Cheryl Misak’s original contributions than it does to Peirce’s actual political views. (Peirce was a conservative on political and social issues, though not on knowledge and science.) Thus, contemporary pragmatists who do political philosophy generally advance some kind of liberalism, one could say, but the differences among them as pragmatists help to explain and clarify their wide differences as “liberal” theorists.

Some of us pragmatist “new liberals” or progressives feel a certain outrage toward other contemporary “liberals” because their adoption of some the kinds of methods Dewey, Mead, and Addams developed without the kind of acknowledgement they routinely offer to Aristotle, Kant, and Mill amounts to engaging in a kind of invasion of intellectual property. However, those of us who know all of these “great books,” as well as influential works by many “contemporary liberals,” have an additional and more important concern. In a world that needs philosophical help with real problems in living, the slow pace of many current political thinkers toward re-discovery of some of the better methods, concepts, and insights of the classical pragmatists sometimes seems intolerable. This is why we try to teach critically and improve on the classical pragmatists’ texts in accessible ways, as we simultaneously address the important issues of the day.