Saturday, July 26, 2014


156. Montaigne and the mask of convention

 At first, Montaigne denounced the mask of social convention as make-belief, a lie, hypocrisy, an assault on truth. That motivated him to retire to his castle. Later, however, he adopted the mask as a necessary device, an interface and demarcation, between the make-believe of social functioning, as one part of human virtue, and authenticity and integrity of the self, as another, perhaps higher part of virtue. This is how Montaigne reconciled his being an independent thinker with his functioning as mayor of Bordeaux.

There is a connection here with the earlier series in this blog on Eastern and Western philosophy. Montaigne’s predicament may reflect the tension between on the one hand a Taoist commitment to the purity and autonomy of nature, and on the other hand a Confucian commitment to social responsibility, with its artificiality and make-belief.

How satisfactory would it be, Montaigne’s ironic, dispassionate social commitment, as a duty, without fight or self-sacrifice, without conviction other than taking one’s responsibility and wanting to preserve the peace? The Taoist would rather abstain from social artificialities, in wuwei, than betray truth, nature and what is genuine. The Taoist rejects the mask as the early Montaigne did.

My view on the matter is this. One should act on one’s beliefs, seriously, passionately even, not ironically, but with the pragmatist stance that the oppositon one meets can feed, refresh and transform ideas and beliefs. That also can be a Nietzschean joy. Counter to Montaigne: it can yield the excitement of discovery. But it is not a Nietzschean will to power. It entails the tolerance of give and take in dialogue, in debate. However, that is not without limit. If conviction cannot be shifted by reasonable debate, one should stick to it.

Surely, Montaigne is right in refusing to sacrifice or violate the self for the sake of social calling or duty. As I proposed in item 63 of this blog, Levinas seems to go too far in the opposite direction, surrendering the self ‘as a hostage’ to the other. But apparently Montaigne sees social action only as a sink, something one contributes to, not also as a source, something to learn from.

As I noted before (in item 140), Montaigne makes the error of seeing only one direction in the traffic between outward manifestation and inside flourishing. Others are not only receptacles for one’s ideas, compassion and sacrifice, but also founts of influence and opposition that help one to escape from one’s prejudice and myopia, and thereby to flourish. Niezsche also failed to recognize this (see item 60). Certainly, others may do more harm than good to the self, but that is no reason not to give it a chance, in seeking the good.

Did Taoism also make this mistake, of not seeing that action in the world, with other people, feeds the development of the individual?


Monday, July 21, 2014

155. Scepticism, relativism and conservatism in Montaigne

If truths and values are relative, in a variety of views, each with an individual claim to validity, without a basis for claiming one view to be better than another, is there still anything to commit oneself to, to fight for? Or does one shrug and comply with the powers that be?

Montaigne was a sceptic and a relativist, to some extent.[1] He was committed to humanist sympathy with others and abhorred the excesses of violence in his time (the religious wars in 16th century France). Yet he feared what he saw as the even worse excesses of sedition and revolt. He preferred continuity and peace to mutations, revolutionary change. He feared that revolution would yield unforeseen disasters, the next tragedy of good intentions gone sour.

He was a moderate conservative, arguing that there are good reasons for the existing political and cultural order. It had not arisen for nothing. He did not believe in any absolute underlying value or validity, and his compliance with the established political order was ironic, dispassionate and purely formal. He went along not out of conviction but to preserve the peace.

I sympathise, in part, with the conservative argument. Given the complexity of social systems, which emerge rather than being rationally designed, there is a fundamental uncertainty of outcomes, and any intervention will indeed have unforeseeable, unintended and unwanted effects. Intelligent design is largely an illusion.

Also, from an evolutionary perspective, the existing order has survived the struggle of survival with alternatives, and can therefore claim some fitness.

However, the evolutionary argument is valid only if the existing order indeed has been and still is subject to the selective forces of competition with alternative ideologies. There lies the value of democracy. Autoritarianism is less adaptive. There must be freedom of rival views for the evolutionary argument to stick.

While Montaigne was occupied, obsessed, one could perhaps say, with his self, he was not indifferent or passive regarding society. He took on social responsibilities, e.g. as mayor of Bordeaux, but dispassionately, not sacrificing the integrity of his self, and trying to preserve his peace of mind.

How relativist is my plea for accepting, indeed rejoicing in imperfection on the move? Earlier in this blog I argued that while I admit that the moral and epistemic validity, and the meaning, of ideas depend on context and are subject to change, this does not entail relativism in the form of a claim that any judgement is as good as any other. Rival views may be incommensurable, yielding no points of contact for reasonable debate, but that should not be assumed too quickly. There are a number of common conditions for life and survival, and people are likely to have some common ideas as a foothold for some form of debate.

Hence in this blog I argued for a modest notion of truth as warranted assertibility (in item 104), and of  morality as debatable ethics (in item 118).

This stance is nihilist in rejecting immutable absolutes of the true and the good, but it goes beyond nihilism, as I argued in items 19 and 148 of this blog, in the commitment to achieve improvement, even when acknowledging that that also will be imperfect. And, with a bow to Nietzsche, that is not so much a duty as a fount of flourishing life.

There is something odd in Montaigne’s view that the existing order is imperfect but yet to be accepted, and rejecting change because it would fall into similar imperfections. Recognizing that all effort yields imperfection, one could still be on the move, trying to make improvements.
 


[1] Here, as before, I use Jean Starobinsky, 1993, Montaigne en movement, Editions Gallimard

Saturday, July 12, 2014


154. A basic income

For democracy and capitalism to survive, in addition to a change of perspective on equality and solidarity, discussed in the preceding items in this blog, a corresponding system change of the economy is needed, in the distribution of work, income and wealth. For that I recommend the introduction of a basic income (BI).[1]

A BI is a free, unconditional, fixed subsistence income for everyone above a certain age. I propose something like this: 1000 euros per month in a developed country such as the Netherlands. On additional income there is a tax, at a flat rate of 20 to 30 %, except for very high levels of profit income for which a rate would apply of 50 to 60%. I claim that the step to a BI is inevitable, sooner or later. Here are my arguments.

Work has been shrinking for a long time, as a result of increasing productivity (reduced cost per unit of production), mostly due to technology and innovation. First in agriculture and then in industry. Until recently it was thought that employment would be maintained in services, where productivity growth was supposed to be small.

However, innovation, especially in information and communication technology, such as the internet, have increased productivity and reduced employment in a whole range of services, especially those involved in the processing of information, such as administration and communication, e.g. in banking, insurance, booking, publishing, media, parts of entertainment, surveillance, security, retailing and physical distribution, etc.

This has produced a polarization of work and income, between highly paid professional and managerial jobs and low-paid, unskilled work, such as cleaning, serving (cafes and restaurants), call centres, harvesting, parts of construction, and parts of care. Especially the middle classes have suffered from this, which contributes to widespread discontent.

A next wave is that of robots, replacing labour in harvesting, driving (automated cars, trucks and airplanes), cleaning, forms of care and nursing, which will eliminate much of the work indicated above.

We should be happy about this reduction of dirty, exhausting, dangerous and boring work. We are in fact unhappy because it threatens employment and income. How much work will be left, how much employment, and what source of income? The BI offers a solution.

Forms of work that will remain are: all forms of culture, entertainment, teaching, forms of care that entail human interaction, social activities (community work, help of elderly and handicapped), day care for children, etc. Ironically, those activities of the future are the ones that are currently curtailed to reduce government spending.

How would a basic income help? One major benefit of it is that it eliminates the ‘poverty trap’. Currently, receivers of social benefits (for unemployment, rent, health insurance,…) lose their benefits when they enter employment. It is as if on wage income they pay 100% tax. This keeps them locked into poverty. With a BI they would pay tax on additional income, but only 20-30%.

This gives an incentive to perform the social and cultural services that remain to be done, and do it at a low wage, on top of basic income, which makes those services more affordable. There would no longer need to be a minimum wage.

In addition to that, there would be an incentive for enterprising people to voluntarily leave traditional jobs to become self-employed, since they can fall back on the minimum of the BI when the enterprise fails. Also, the BI would sustain them through the difficult period of developing and introducing innovations, under an uncertainty that discourages suppliers of capital.

I suggest that an impulse of enterprising self-employment is good for the economy, society and culture. Also, it makes room for people who have no aptitude or drive for self-employment, want jobs but can’t get them.

From what would a basic income be paid? A number of existing social benefits could be abolished. It would be financed from tax on wage incomes above the BI, and on a high tax on profit income from capital. An immediate objection would be that this would drive investment abroad, thus eliminating that tax base. But wait. The robots to be used are location bound, in harvesting, cleaning, transportation, care, etc. To earn profit from them one would have to pay the local taxes on them. Robots do not earn an income for work but pay for it. They are the slaves of the future.

Finally an ideological argument. Entrepreneurs and firms claim that they are the ones who add value and deserve the reward for it. But what they add value to is the fruit of many generations of genius, sweat, blood and tears. Why should they have an exclusive claim on its fruits? The BI is to be seen as the fruit (called ‘social dividend’ in the literature) of that common heritage, with equal rights to all.

The advent of robots makes the time ripe for a BI. 
 


[1] In several publications, I argued for a BI in the 1980’s. It was not politically viable at the time. And I am afraid it still isn’t, but I think the time is becoming ripe for it.

Sunday, July 6, 2014


153. Response to authoritarianism

Western democracies show an inability to restrain uninhibited rampage of markets, excesses of cupidity, extremes of inequality in income and wealth, the political power of money, a culture of narcissism, and self-indulgent populism. This bolsters the self-confidence and acceptance of authoritarian forms of government across the world, presenting themselves as ‘bulwarks against Western individualism’, as it was recently called in the New York Review of Books[1]

In this blog I proposed ‘debatable ethics’ (item 118). That is relativist, not in the extreme sense that any ethic is as good as any other, but in the sense that it is pluralist. I argued that any system of ethical values and moral guidelines or rules requires debate that allows for arguments from different dimensions of the good life, in an Aristotelian virtue ethics. Does this relativism allow for authoritarianism, with ‘growth without democracy and progress without freedom’[2]?

Ethical debate requires open access to the debate, which requires freedom of participation and expression. It also requires truthfulness and fulfilling commitments. That much would still remain of a universal ethic.

This universalism is limited, however, in the recognition that the debate will lead to different ethical/moral systems, depending on different views concerning different dimensions of the good life, or virtues, which are not necessarily commensurable and whose priority, form and viability depend on circumstances of culture, history, education and economy.

Moderate relativism, or pluralism, in ethics is needed to engender an attitude of modesty and restraint in foreign policy, not to impose one’s own view by force, as Obama now seems to try to establish. Instead, one should try to prove the attractiveness of one’s view, in competition with other views, in the flourishing of one’s own society.

Democracy has the potential of resilience against error and excess, as discussed in item 127 of this blog, as a form of ‘imperfection on the move’, in contrast with the dreams of perfection by authoritarian design that is sooner or later bound to fall into disastrous collapse.

Democracy should now prove its ability to do this, to redress its errors, in a drastic revision of its current state of on the one hand an overreach of the welfare state and bureaucratic design, and on the other hand excesses of market ideology and inequalities of power, income and wealth. Conservatives and progressives should be able to find each other in this. 

If democracy fails in this it will itself fall into disastrous collapse and will show itself to be no better than authoritarianism.

I propose that all this requires an answer to current excesses of individualism, called ‘singularity’ in item 151 of this blog, and that part of that answer lies in the new type of solidarity proposed in item 152. This should restore a sense of reciprocity, collaboration and civic responsibility, with a renewed sense of justice. Will that be convincing enough to disarm authoritarianism?

[1] In an article by Michael Ignatieff, NYRB vol. 61, no. 12, p. 53
[2] the same reference.