A word from Nils Gilman:
Piketty is precisely my age, and has apparently been on precisely the same political trajectory. That trajectory is defined by two formative aspects of our youth: on the one hand, we’re both children of post-68 leftist intellectuals, who passed to us in equal measure a respect for the values of socialist humanism and a distrust for the institutions of political power; on the other hand, the central political experiences of our childhoods were the belligerent revanchism of Reagan/Thatcher, the corrupt cynicism of Mitterand/Gonzalez, and the feckless foolishness of Gorbachev—capstoned by the collapse of Eastern European Communism in the very year we reached our majority.
Along with the impression left by post-Tienanmen China's capacity to generate (highly inegalitarian) wealth, this collapse produced two crucial psycho-political instincts in people of our specific age and political upbringing. First, it generated a deep disbelief in the utopian nostrums of so-called actually existing socialisms, which we were just old enough to have believed was a “permanent alternative” to liberal capitalism, but just young enough never to have personally committed to, despite our upbringings. (This is a very microgenerational experience: for those even four or five years younger or older than us, at least one of these does not apply.) Second, it led us to appreciate the economic importance of price mechanisms, innovation and competitiveness, without generating any love for capitalism as a system or any respect for the self-regard of the rich, who people with our background regard less as exemplars of meritocracy than as avaricious parasites. For us, TINA is the Big Lie of our times: just because socialism failed as a political project was no reason to believe the story (that the Right in our countries told about the lesson of this failure) that capitalism was humane, and not still an ecologically rapacious form of social vampirism.
What I find beautiful about Piketty’ s book is that it crystallizes and speaks to and for this worldview — that is, to the sensibility of a “red diaper” GenXer. It is a book written by someone who watched the socialist-utopian eidolon of his elders implode, without ever buying into the liberal-utopian promises made (or the sense of political limits imposed) by the successor regime(s).
Whoa. That is very nearly me, as well.
It is at once comforting and discomforting to see myself reflected in this way. To find that one is not alone is always a pleasant surprise ... but it also demonstrates how a lot of the way I see the world is historically and culturally contingent. Which is to say: likely wrong.
Reminds me of G. A. Cohen's "Paradoxes of Conviction", collected in /If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?/
ReplyDeleteCohen had a choice of doing graduate work in philosophy at either Harvard or Oxford, and chose Oxford, not for philosophical reasons, but because he'd grown up in Montreal and Europe was more exciting than Massachusetts. He tells how at Oxford he became skilled at using the distinction between analytical and synthetic truths, while "people of my generation who studied philosophy at Harvard rather than Oxford for the most part /reject/ the analytic/synthetic distinction". He did carfully examine the arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction, but they did not convince him. But was that because they were bad arguments, or because he studied at Oxford rather than Harvard? He continues "So, in some sense of 'because' and in some sense of 'Oxford', I think I can say that I believe in the analytic/synthetic distinction because I studied at Oxford. And that is disturbing. For the fact that I studied at Oxford is no reason for thinking the distinction sound."
He tells this story at the end of the essay, which is mostly about the more "heavy-duty matters of religious and of moral and political conviction", and how we very likely hold those conviction more because of our upbringing than because they are true. The story is an argument against people who when confronted with this say "'those idelogical and religious beliefs are garbage anyway; their sensitivity to upbringing only confirms that. ... stick to scientific and technical matters'". But acceptance or rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction is a pretty technical matter!
P.S. I'd say how our upbringing or how we rebelled against our upbringing — Cohen was a red-diaper baby who remained a socialist all his life, so his convictions are more an evolution of than a rejection of those his working-class communist parents held held.