The Good Life
I take Alan’s point that it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to quantify all experiences economically. Nor should we account for lives and societies purely on the basis of lucre.
Yet it doesn’t strike me that the Human Development Index is at all wrong in using (relatively) easy to quantify measures of human physical progress — health, education, and income — as key indicators of social progress. It is, after all, these measures that government is primarily tasked with improving.
Moreover, in the Leon Kass speech that Alan cites, I see a troubling tendency — not merely a recognition that wealth is not the only way to measure a good life, but an unsubstantiated romanticization of the hard, sad lives of the economically destitute.
Kass glorifies and elevates the poor and uneducated, granting them, purely on his own relatively brief observations, a special moral standing. They are Noble Savages, Poor But Good, living the glorious Simple Life, exemplars of the sort of lives the well-off might live should they ever get Back To Nature. It’s a habit that’s rather common amongst environmental advocates (who also tend to shy away from economic views of human development), as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger pointed out in their excellent TNR piece, “The Green Bubble”:
Nonetheless, it has become an article of faith among many greens that the global poor are happier with less and must be shielded from the horrors of overconsumption and economic development—never mind the realities of infant mortality, treatable disease, short life expectancies, and grinding agrarian poverty.
It’s a view that, frankly, can easily slip into condescension: Kass actually seems impressed that these lowly, uneducated people could manage to lead honorable lives, and drawing comparisons to the petty behavior of his Harvard cohort, seems to suggest that their decency and their poverty are connected. I don’t think we have any reason to believe they are. It’s not hard to concoct nostalgic visions of a simpler, more communal life free from the headaches of modern life. But ask those struggling farmers — or the Third World poor — which life they’d rather lead: their lives, or the lives of middle class ease and comfort shared by Kass and his educated colleagues. I think the answer is obvious. And I think that the vast majority of the privileged middle class would answer the same way, too.
I might be more sympathetic to Kass’s viewpoint if he could actually back up the claim that the poor he encountered were of greater moral character. But he has nothing to offer except his own observations. It’s a difficult thing to quantify, admittedly, but what evidence we do have suggests that poverty does not, in fact, result in tougher moral fiber: poorer societies tend to be more corrupt and produce more human rights abuses than richer countries.
So no matter what Kass might think he saw, there’s simply no reason to believe that being poor instills virtue. Alan’s absolutely right that economic development is “not the whole story of what it means to be human and what it means to be developed.” But one needn’t romanticize poverty, or equate it with goodness and virtue, or sour on economic progress, as Kass implicitly does, in order to understand that.
I didn’t take Kass to be equating poverty and virtue in that passage. I took him to be rejecting his own callow view of the “close connection between intellectual and moral virtue.”
Yes, there’s a slight tendency toward the romantic view of poverty there, but nowhere in the passage do I detect a suggestion that poverty and decency are somehow inextricably linked.
— Kate Marie · May 22, 10:46 PM · #
Peter, I think you may be over-reading Kass’s speech, or at least that part of it. I don’t think he was making a universal argument, but rather saying how those particular experiences he had in Mississippi called his pre-existing simplistic narrative into question. As I read it, he’s not telling the story to elevate the Noble Savage but rather to deflate the idea that education (even more than wealth itself) leads to higher moral awareness. To say that the poor people he knew in Mississippi displayed “more integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less self-absorption and self-indulgence” than people in Kass’s own cohort is not to say that they had those virtues because they were poor. In fact, Kass seems to say pretty straightforwardly that their poverty was an impediment to the cultivation of these virtues — which is why he asks the “How can this be?” question. They had to have something else going for them, and he wanted to know what.
In the same way we might ask why poorer Americans give a higher percentage of their income to charity than rich ones do. Surely this is not because they are poor. Something else must be going on, and Kass is just telling the story of how he was set on the path of trying to figure out what.
— Alan Jacobs · May 22, 11:07 PM · #
For Christians, though, one has to come to grips with Jesus’ firmly expressed opinion that wealth is just about the greatest impediment to virtue that there is.
— Stuart Buck · May 23, 12:49 PM · #
Alan,
I think I am with Peter here.
The crucial point, it seems to me, is not Leon Kass’s ideas on human dignity but the policies they are used to justify. If all they are used for is to argue against any expansion of the American welfare state then I am not sure I buy it. It’s nice that Kass worries that Huxley’s Brave New World of self-gratification is the place we’re all going to end up in ultimately, if we continue doing what we’re doing now, but frankly, we’re far far far away from that place. Maybe we can start worrying about it when everyone in the world is middle-class but till then it seems to me that the main thrust of our policies should be that as many people as possible enter the middle-class.
And frankly, after reading that passage about eating ice-cream cones in public, one doesn’t know how seriously to take Kass.
— scritic · May 23, 03:25 PM · #
scritic, I don’t understand your response. Kass wasn’t delivering a policy paper, you know — that was was a lecture about what it means to be a truly committed student of the humanities. I think we can disagree with people’s politics without thinking that they have nothing of value to say about anything else.
And do you really want to judge Kass’s thought as a whole by his dislike of eating ice cream in public? If so, you should remember that when Socrates was faced with a difficult moral decision, he always heard a little voice in his head telling him what to do and he always did what the voice told him. That eccentricity surely makes his philosophy worthless, doesn’t it?
— Alan Jacobs · May 23, 05:29 PM · #
The core problem with Kass’ ‘philosophy’ is that he claims to be seeking the core truth of human-ness through a classical study of great thinkers and a life of contemplation and the answer he finds is “true humans don’t do things I find gross, such as eating ice cream in public and buttsex.” I find it hard to take him seriously because his view of human dignity boils down to “hey kids, get off my lawn” when he actually articulates the activities that work against human dignity.
scritic is absolutely right to point out the policy implications of Kass’ view because he IS (well, WAS) a policy maker. Sure, Alan, it’s possible to consider Kass’ views of human dignity separately from his political/policy views, but Kass seems unable to do it, so I won’t give him the benefit of the doubt on that account. I actually agree with Kass that ethics is best bent toward questions of human flourishing. But he has a stilted, antiquated, and politically conservative view of what human flourishing looks like.
— Loneoak · May 23, 06:27 PM · #
“true humans don’t do things I find gross, such as eating ice cream in public and buttsex.”
Can’t seem to find that quote — can you point me to it?
Sure, Alan, it’s possible to consider Kass’ views of human dignity separately from his political/policy views, but Kass seems unable to do it.
Except that he just did. Read the lecture and see.
— Alan Jacobs · May 23, 06:32 PM · #
Does anyone really believe that Swedes are better morally than Ethiopians? Is that the point of the HDI?
I thought the point was that Ethiopia would be better off being more like Sweden, and possibly that Sweden has better institutions and better policies.
— Pithlord · May 24, 04:52 AM · #
It’s a very poor argument, to attempt to refute what Kass says about X by mocking—or even brilliantly demolishing—what he says about Y. I don’t think Kass’s views about bioethics (about which I know very little) have some tight connection with his views about the value of humanistic education.
In fact, Kass is making the same point that others have made with a different observation: that the nation of Beethoven and Geothe and von Ranke and Nietzsche doesn’t furnish much of an argument for the morally uplifting effect of either humanistic scholarship or economic development.
— y81 · May 25, 11:53 PM · #