Joseph A. Palermo: Glenn Beck: "Historian" for a Troubled America

Joseph A. Palermo: Glenn Beck: "Historian" for a Troubled America
(Click the above link for the article. It appears in the Huffington Post, but I don't want any genetic fallacies - just read and consider the argument Palermo presents!)

Joseph Palermo, a real history professor, at a real, accredited university, who has a real (not honorary!) Ph.D. in history, takes on Glenn Beck's outrageously false historical revisionism. Beck may or may not earnestly believe the utter fictions he's spinning out, I can't claim to understand the motivations of the man, but his distortion of historical facts is arguably dangerous, and as Professor Palermo points out, appealing to the views and ideas of 18th Century men may not be the best thing for 21st Century citizens.

The Founders were not monolithic, as my Con Law professor once said, and they had a diversity of views, motivations and ideas. To appeal to what the Founders as a single entity thought or wanted is a mistake - they often disagreed sharply with one another. As a philosophic point, it's inadvisable to appeal to the authority of the Founders. I argue for this because we're trying to figure out what is best to do now, in 2010, for people with problems and issues and technology that the Founders could scarcely have dreamt of. While it's worthwhile to acknowledge the importance of what they were trying to accomplish, and also to keep their spirit of liberty for all (in a modern sense, since for example they didn't see fit to eliminate slavery when they founded the republic) as an ideal, it seems inappropriate to refer to men from the 18th Century for answers, when their lives, views, and situations were influenced by states of affairs which obtained when they were alive - well over 200 years ago. In order to determine what would best address issues and problems we have today, we need to consider what would result in the best possible outcome today.

As another point, Palermo points out the pitfalls of an unrestricted market:

"Beck, Goldberg, Shlaes and others seem to be pursuing a long-term project of their own to misinform their rather gullible audiences into believing that anytime a government imposes limits on the ability of private business (especially giant corporations) to exploit the country's land and labor it is an attack on individual "liberty." It's the identical argument that the representatives of corporate trusts deployed at the turn of the last century when they demanded the "freedom" to do anything they wished. In the wake of the Wall Street financial meltdown and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe, both brought to us by the less than benevolent actions of unrestrained corporate power, Beck's views are not only stupid and false, but dangerous."

I acknowledge that the above quote adds another issue to this post, and could result in a couple different threats in the comments (should there be any!), but I couldn't resist it... as an egalitarian I totally agree with it!

Ok, unleash the hounds!

The ethics of capitalist self-interest

For my first post, and our first discussion, I'll turn in the direction of an issue my wife pointed me. It's not precisely what she suggested, but the idea is a good one, and one that I can adapt to fit in the ball-park of political philosophy. The issue is brought up in a chapter of Peter Singer's book, How are We To Live? Ethics in an age of self-interest. Below I provide a link to that chapter, which I invite you to read before digging in on the discussion. It's a short chapter, only 11 pages (though each page of the PDF is two pages from the book, it's still a quick read - Singer is very accessible), and will help to keep you better informed about some of the details that may arise in discussion.  Singer only talks about the problem with raising animals for food on a couple pages, and does not provide a robust argument for vegetarianism here - he's written extensively about it elsewhere - I feel that this chapter dovetails nicely into one critique of capitalism, which Singer here argues is unsustainable and immoral.

"Required" reading: Chapter 3, "Using Up The World"
(Note: This links directly to the PDF file. Either you can read it in your browser, if it has the proper plug-in, or you can right-click the link to save it to disk and read it with Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

Singer does an excellent job in this chapter of illustrating the stark differences between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. The west, with America arguably leading the charge, has followed Smith's theories closely, to the benefit of the few, a ceaseless struggle for basic necessities for many, and the detriment of much of the planet's environment. Smith was extolling the virtue of self-interest, and greed is on the same spectrum as self-interest; one may view greed as a much greater degree of self-interest (and a correspondingly lesser degree of concern for the interests of others). How Smith arrived at the view that as the rich increase their fortunes, the poor would somehow benefit is quite unclear. He often refers to the "invisible hand" as moving the actions of the rich in a particular direction, but that's a rather nebulous explanation. It seems more reasonable to expect that people who act in their own self-interest are much less likely to do anything in the interests of other people, and if you have an economic system which is ruled by self-interest, then you would expect that if some people receive* a disproportionate share of benefits that they would be motivated to keep it, rather than allow much or any of it to "trickle down" to the less fortunate. That is to say, if people are interested in looking out for themselves, and operate in a system which is based upon self-interest, then you can't expect them to look out for the good of society. If the good of a society as a whole is the goal, then our motivations should arise from concern for the increasing benefit of all the members of our society, not just ourselves.

John Maynard Keynes is quoted as having said, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” I think this describes the problems with Adam Smith's theories very astutely. 




*I'm not addressing how a person receives their share of benefits or burdens, as I'm trying to make a point about the motivations and inclinations of persons operating in a system based on self-interest.