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Title: Army of Altruists Author: David Graeber Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: 21st century, altruism, egoism, morality, politics, rational choice theory, United States of America, United States Army, value, the Right, the Left Source: Retrieved November 30, 2017 from http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/RevolutionsInReverse-web.pdf Notes: This version appeared in the open access book Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination which is a collection of essays by David Graeber released in 2011 by Minor Compositions.
You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do
your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If
you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.
John Kerry (D-Mass.)
Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in
Iraq, who answered their country’s call because they are patriots and
not because of any deficiencies in their education.
John McCain (R-Ariz.)
THE ONE FLEETING MOMENT OF HOPE FOR REPUBLICANS DURING the lead-up to
the 2006 congressional elections came was afforded by a lame joke by
Senator John Kerry – a joke pretty obviously aimed at George Bush –
which they took to suggest that Kerry thought that only those who
flunked out of school end up in the military. It was all very
disingenuous. Most knew perfectly well Kerry’s real point was to suggest
the President wasn’t very bright.
But the right smelled blood. The problem with “aristo-slackers” like
Kerry, wrote one National Review blogger, is that they assume “the
troops are in Iraq not because they are deeply committed to the mission
(they need to deny that) but rather because of a system that takes
advantage of their lack of social and economic opportunities… We should
clobber them with that ruthlessly until the day of the election – just
like we did in ‘04 – because it is the most basic reason they deserve to
lose.”
As it turned out, it didn’t make a lot of difference, because most
Americans decided they were not deeply committed to the mission either –
insofar as they were even sure what the mission was. But it seems to me
the question we should really be asking is: why did it take a military
catastrophe (and a strategy of trying to avoid any association with the
kind of northeastern elites Kerry for so many typified) to allow the
congressional democrats to finally come out of the political wilderness?
Or even more: why has this Republican line proved so effective?
It strikes me that to get at the answer, one has to probe far more
deeply into the nature of American society than most commentators,
nowadays, are willing to go. We’re used to reducing all such issues to
an either/or: patriotism versus opportunity, values versus
bread-and-butter issues like jobs and education. It seems to me though
that just framing things this way plays into the hands of the Right.
Certainly, most people do join the army because they are deprived of
opportunities. But the real question to be asking is: opportunities to
do what?
I’m an anthropologist and what follows might be considered an
anthropological perspective on the question. It first came home to me a
year or two ago when I was attending a lecture by Catherine Lutz, a
fellow anthropologist from Brown who has been studying U.S. military
bases overseas. Many of these bases organize outreach programs, in which
soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental
checkups for the locals. These programs were created to improve local
relations, but in this task they often proved remarkably ineffective.
Why, then, did the army not abandon them? The answer was that the
programs had such enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of
whom would wax euphoric when describing them: e.g., “This is why I
joined the army”; “This is what military service is really all about –
not just defending your country, but helping people.” Professor Lutz is
convinced that the main reason these programs continue to be funded is
that soldiers who take part in them are more likely to reenlist. The
military’s own statistics are no help here: the surveys do not list
“helping people” among the motive for reenlistment. Interestingly, it is
the most high-minded option available – “patriotism” – that is the
overwhelming favorite.
Certainly, Americans do not see themselves as a nation of frustrated
altruists. Quite the opposite: our normal habits of thought tend towards
a rough and ready cynicism. The world is a giant marketplace; everyone
is in it for a buck; if you want to understand why something happened,
first ask who stands to gain by it. The same attitudes expressed in the
back rooms of bars are echoed in the highest reaches of social science.
America’s great contribution to the world in the latter respect has been
the development of “rational choice” theories, which proceed from the
assumption that all human behavior can be understood as a matter of
economic calculation, of rational actors trying to get as much as
possible out of any given situation with the least cost to themselves.
As a result, in most fields, the very existence of altruistic behavior
is considered a kind of puzzle, and everyone from economists to
evolutionary biologists have made themselves famous through attempts to
“solve” it – that is, to explain the mystery of why bees sacrifice
themselves for hives or human beings hold open doors and give correct
street directions to total strangers. At the same time, the case of the
military bases suggests the possibility that in fact Americans,
particularly the less affluent ones, are haunted by frustrated desires
to do good in the world.
It would not be difficult to assemble evidence that this is the case.
Studies of charitable giving, for example, have always shown the poor to
be the most generous: the lower one’s income, the higher the proportion
of it that one is likely to give away to strangers. The same pattern
holds true, incidentally, when comparing the middle classes and the
rich: one study of tax returns in 2003 concluded that if the most
affluent families had given away as much of their assets even as the
average middle class family, overall charitable donations that year
would have increased by 25 billion dollars. (All this despite the fact
the wealthy have far more time and opportunity). Moreover, charity
represents only a tiny part of the picture. If one were to break down
what the typical American wage earner does with his money one would
likely find they give most of it away. Take a typical male head of
household. About a third of his annual income is likely to end up being
redistributed to strangers, through taxes and charity – another third he
is likely to give in one way or another to his children; of the
remainder, probably the largest part is given to or shared with others:
presents, trips, parties, the six-pack of beer for the local softball
game. One might object that this latter is more a reflection of the real
nature of pleasure than anything else (who would want to eat a delicious
meal at an expensive restaurant all by themselves?) but itself this is
half the point. Even our self-indulgences tend to be dominated by the
logic of the gift. Similarly, some might object that shelling out a
small fortune to send one’s children to an exclusive kindergarten is
more about status than altruism. Perhaps: but if you look at what
happens over the course of people’s actual lives, it soon becomes
apparent this kind of behavior fulfills an identical psychological need.
How many youthful idealists throughout history have managed to finally
come to terms with a world based on selfishness and greed the moment
they start a family? If one were to assume altruism were the primary
human motivation, this would make perfect sense: The only way they can
convince themselves to abandon their desire to do right by the world as
a whole is to substitute an even more powerful desire do right by their
children.
What all this suggests to me is that American society might well work
completely differently than we tend to assume. Imagine, for a moment,
that the United States as it exists today were the creation of some
ingenious social engineer. What assumptions about human nature could we
say this engineer must have been working with? Certainly nothing like
rational choice theory. For clearly our social engineer understands that
the only way to convince human beings to enter into the world of work
and the marketplace (that is: of mind-numbing labor and cut-throat
competition) is to dangle the prospect of thereby being able to lavish
money on one’s children, buy drinks for one’s friends, and, if one hits
the jackpot, to be able to spend the rest of one’s life endowing museums
and providing AIDS medications to impoverished countries in Africa.
Where our theorists are constantly trying to strip away the veil of
appearances and show how all such apparently selfless gesture really
mask some kind of self-interested strategy, in reality, American society
is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave
altruistically. Selflessness – or at least, the right to engage in
high-minded activity – is not the strategy. It is the prize. If nothing
else, I think this helps us understand why the Right has been so much
better, in recent years, at playing to populist sentiments than the
Left. Essentially, they do it by accusing liberals of cutting ordinary
Americans off from the right to do good in the world. Let me explain
what I mean here by throwing out a series of propositions.
PROPOSITION I: Neither egoism nor altruism are natural urges; they are
in fact arise in relation to one another and neither would be
conceivable without the market.
FIRST OF ALL, I should make clear that I do not believe that either
egoism or altruism are somehow inherent to human nature. Human motives
are rarely that simple. Rather egoism or altruism are ideas we have
about human nature. Historically, one tends to arise in response to the
other. In the ancient world, for example, it is precisely in the times
and places as one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also
sees the rise of world religions – Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If
one sets aside a space and says, “Here you shall think only about
acquiring material things for yourself,” then it is hardly surprising
that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space,
declaring, in effect: “Yes, but here, we must contemplate the fact that
the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.” It was these
latter institutions, of course, that first developed our modern notions
of charity.
Even today, when we operate outside the domain of the market or of
religion, very few of our actions could be said to be motivated by
anything so simple as untrammeled greed or utterly selfless generosity.
When we are dealing not with strangers but with friends, relatives, or
enemies, a much more complicated set of motivations will generally come
into play: envy, solidarity, pride, self-destructive grief, loyalty,
romantic obsession, resentment, spite, shame, conviviality, the
anticipation of shared enjoyment, the desire to show up a rival, and so
on. These are the motivations that impel the major dramas of our lives,
that great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immortalize, but that
social theorists, for some reason, tend to ignore. If one travels to
parts of the world where money and markets do not exist – say, to
certain parts of New Guinea or Amazonia – such complicated webs of
motivation are precisely what one still finds. In societies where most
people live in small communities, where almost everyone they know is
either a friend, a relative or an enemy, the languages spoken tend even
to lack words that correspond to “self-interest” or “altruism,” while
including very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity,
pride and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise
tend to be based on much more subtle principles. Anthropologists have
created a vast literature to try to fathom the dynamics of these
apparently exotic “gift economies,” but if it seems odd to us to see,
say, important men conniving with their cousins to finagle vast wealth,
which they then present as gifts to bitter enemies in order to publicly
humiliate them, it is because we are so used to operating inside
impersonal markets that it never occurs to us to think how we would act
if we had an economic system where we treated people based on how we
actually felt about them.
Nowadays, the work of destroying such ways of life is largely left to
missionaries – representatives of those very world religions that
originally sprung up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries,
of course, are out to save souls; but this rarely interpret this to mean
their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more
altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to
be more selfish, and more altruistic, at the same time. On the one hand,
they set out to teach the “natives” proper work discipline, and try to
get them involved with buying and selling products on the market, so as
to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them
that ultimately, material things are unimportant, and lecture on the
value of the higher things, such as selfless devotion to others.
PROPOSITION II: The political right has always tried to enhance this
division, and thus claim to be champions of egoism and altruism
simultaneously. The left has tried to efface it.
MIGHT THIS NOT help to explain why the United States, the most
market-driven industrialized society on earth, is also the most
religious? Or, even more strikingly, why the country that produced
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spent much of the twentieth century trying to
eradicate both the market and religion entirely?
Where the political left has always tried to efface this distinction –
whether by trying to create economic systems that are not driven by the
profit motive, or by replacing private charity with one or another form
community support – the political right has always thrived on it. In the
United States, for example, the Republican party is dominated by two
ideological wings: the libertarians, and the “Christian right.” At one
extreme, Republicans are free-market fundamentalists and advocates of
individual liberties (even if they see those liberties largely as a
matter of consumer choice); on the other, they are fundamentalists of a
more literal variety, suspicious of most individual liberties but
enthusiastic about biblical injunctions, “family values,” and charitable
good works. At first glance it might seem remarkable such an alliance
manages to hold together at all (and certainly they have ongoing
tensions, most famously over abortion). But in fact right-wing
coalitions almost always take some variation of this form. One might say
that the conservative approach always has been to release the dogs of
the market, throwing all traditional verities into disarray; and then,
in this tumult of insecurity, offering themselves up as the last bastion
of order and hierarchy, the stalwart defenders of the authority of
churches and fathers against the barbarians they have themselves
unleashed. A scam it may be, but a remarkably effective one; and one
effect is that the right ends up seeming to have a monopoly on value.
They manage, we might say, to occupy both positions, on either side of
the divide: extreme egoism and extreme altruism.
Consider, for a moment, the word “value.” When economists talk about
value they are really talking about money – or more precisely, about
whatever it is that money is measuring; also, whatever it is that
economic actors are assumed to be pursuing. When we are working for a
living, or buying and selling things, we are rewarded with money. But
whenever we are not working or buying or selling, when we are motivated
by pretty much anything other the desire to get money, we suddenly find
ourselves in the domain of “values.” The most commonly invoked of these
are of course “family values” (which is unsurprising, since by far the
most common form of unpaid labor in most industrial societies is
child-rearing and housework), but we also talk about religious values,
political values, the values that attach themselves to art or patriotism
– one could even, perhaps, count loyalty to one’s favorite basketball
team. All are seen as commitments that are, or ought to be, uncorrupted
by the market. At the same time, they are also seen as utterly unique;
where money makes all things comparable, “values” such as beauty,
devotion, or integrity cannot, by definition, be compared. There is no
mathematic formula that could possibly allow one to calculate just how
much personal integrity it is right to sacrifice in the pursuit of art,
or how to balance responsibilities to your family with responsibilities
to your God. (Obviously, people do make these kind of compromises all
the time. But they cannot be calculated). One might put it this way: if
value is simply what one considers important, then money allows
importance take a liquid form, enables us to compare precise quantities
of importance and trade one off for the other. After all, if someone
does accumulate a very large amount of money, the first thing they are
likely to do is to try to convert it into something unique, whether this
be Monet’s water lilies, a prize-winning racehorse, or an endowed chair
at a university.
What is really at stake here in any market economy is precisely the
ability to make these trades, to convert “value” into “values.” We all
are striving to put ourselves in a position where we can dedicate
ourselves to something larger than ourselves. When liberals do well in
America, it’s because they can embody that possibility: the Kennedys,
for example, are the ultimate Democratic icons not just because they
started as poor Irish immigrants who made enormous amounts of money, but
because they are seen as having managed, ultimately, to turn all that
money into nobility.
PROPOSITION III: The real problem of the American left is that while it
does try in certain ways to efface the division between egoism and
altruism, value and values, it largely does so for its own children.
This has allowed the right to paradoxically represent itself as the
champions of the working class.
ALL THIS MIGHT help explain why the Left in America is in such a mess.
Far from promoting new visions of effacing the difference between egoism
and altruism, value and values, or providing a model for passing from
one to the other, progressives cannot even seem to think their way past
it. After the last presidential election, the big debate in progressive
circles was the relative importance of economic issues versus what was
called “the culture wars.” Did the Democrats lose because they were not
able to spell out any plausible economic alternatives, or did the
Republicans win because they successfully mobilized conservative
Christians around the issue of gay marriage? As I say, the very fact
that progressives frame the question this way not only shows they are
trapped in the right’s terms of analysis. It demonstrates they do not
understand how America really works.
Let me illustrate what I mean by considering the strange popular appeal,
at least until recently, of George W. Bush. In 2004, most of the
American liberal intelligentsia did not seem to be able to get their
heads around it. After the election, what left so many of them reeling
was their suspicion that the things they most hated about Bush were
exactly what so many Bush voters liked about him. Consider the debates,
for example. If statistics are to be believed, millions of Americans who
watched George Bush and John Kerry lock horns, concluded that Kerry won,
and then went off and voted for Bush anyway. It was hard to escape the
suspicion that in the end, Kerry’s articulate presentation, his skill
with words and arguments, had actually counted against him.
This sends liberals into spirals of despair. They cannot understand why
decisive leadership is equated with acting like an idiot. Neither can
they understand how a man who comes from one of the most elite families
in the country, who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and whose
signature facial expression is a selfsatisfied smirk, could ever
convince anyone he was a “man of the people.” I must admit I have
struggled with this as well. As a child of working class parents who won
a scholarship to Andover in the 1970s and eventually, a job at Yale, I
have spent much of my life in the presence of men like Bush., everything
about them oozing self-satisfied privilege. But in fact, stories like
mine – stories of dramatic class mobility through academic
accomplishment – are increasingly unusual in America.
America of course continues to see itself as a land of opportunity, and
certainly from the perspective of an immigrant from Haiti or Bangladesh,
it is. No doubt in terms of overall social mobility, we still compare
favorably to countries like Bolivia or France. But America has always
been a country built on the promise of unlimited upward mobility. The
working-class condition has been traditionally seen as a way station, as
something one’s family passes through on the road to something better.
Lincoln used to stress that what made American democracy possible was
the absence of a class of permanent wage laborers. In Lincoln’s day, the
ideal was that it was mainly immigrants who worked as wage laborers, and
that they did so in order to save up enough money to do something else:
if nothing else, to buy some land and become a homesteader on the
frontier.
The point is not how accurate this ideal was; the point was most
Americans have found the image plausible. Every time the road is
perceived to be clogged, profound unrest ensues. The closing of the
frontier led to bitter labor struggles, and over the course of the
twentieth century, the steady and rapid expansion of the American
university system could be seen as a kind of substitute. Particularly
after World War II, huge resources were poured into expanding the higher
education system, which grew extremely rapidly, and all this was
promoted quite explicitly as a means of social mobility. This served
during the Cold War as almost an implied social contract, not just
offering a comfortable life to the working classes but holding out the
chance that their children would not be working-class themselves.
The problem, of course, is that a higher education system cannot be
expanded forever. At a certain point one ends up with a significant
portion of the population unable to find work even remotely in line with
their qualifications, who have every reason to be angry about their
situation, and who also have access to the entire history of radical
thought. During the twentieth century, this was precisely the situation
most likely to spark revolts and insurrections – revolutionary heroes
from Chairman Mao to Fidel Castro almost invariably turn out to be
children of poor parents who scrimped to give their children a bourgeois
education, only to discover that a bourgeois education does not, in
itself, guarantee entry into the bourgeoisie. By the late sixties and
early seventies, the very point where the expansion of the university
system hit a dead end, campuses were, predictably, exploding.
What followed could be seen as a kind of settlement. Campus radicals
were reabsorbed into the university, but set to work largely at training
children of the elite. As the cost of education has skyrocketed,
financial aid has been cut back, and the government has begun
aggressively pursuing student loan debts that once existed largely on
paper, the prospect of social mobility through education – above all
liberal arts education – has been rapidly diminished. The number of
working-class students in major universities, which steadily grew until
at least the late sixties, has now been declining for decades. If
working-class Bush voters tend to resent intellectuals more than they do
the rich, then, the most likely reason is because they can imagine
scenarios in which they might become rich, but cannot imagine one in
which they, or any of their children, could ever become members of the
intelligentsia? If you think about it, this is not an unreasonable
assessment. A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that
his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is
possible. There is virtually no chance on the other hand that his child,
no matter how talented, will ever become an international human rights
lawyer, or a drama critic for the New York Times. Here we need to
remember not just the changes in higher education, but also the role
that unpaid, or effectively unpaid, internships. It has become a fact of
life in the United States that if one chooses a career for any reason
other than the money, for the first year or two one will not be paid.
This is certainly true if one wishes to be involved in altruistic
pursuits: say, to join the world of charities, or NGOs, or to become a
political activist. But it is equally true if one wants to pursue values
like Beauty or Truth: to become part of the world of books, or the art
world, or an investigative reporter. The custom effectively seals off
any such career for any poor student who actually does attain a liberal
arts education. Such structures of exclusion had always existed of
course, especially at the top, but in recent decades fences have become
fortresses.
If that mechanic’s son – or daughter – wishes to pursue something
higher, more noble, for a career, what options does she really have?
Likely just two. She can seek employment with her local church, which is
hard to get. Or she can join the Army.
This is, of course, the secret of nobility. To be noble is to be
generous, high-minded, altruistic, to pursue higher forms of value. But
it is also to be able to do so because one does not really have to think
too much about money. This is precisely what our soldiers are doing when
they give free dental examinations to villagers: they are being paid
(modestly, but adequately) to do good in the world. Seen in this light,
it is also easier to see what really happened at universities in the
wake of the 1960s – the “settlement” I mentioned above. Campus radicals
set out to create a new society that destroyed the distinction between
egoism and altruism, value and values. It did not work out, but they
were, effectively, offered a kind of compensation: the privilege to use
the university system to create lives that did so, in their own little
way, to be supported in one’s material needs while pursuing virtue,
truth, and beauty, and above all, to pass that privilege on to their own
children. One cannot blame them for accepting the offer. But neither can
one blame the rest of the country for resenting the hell out of them.
Not because they reject the project: as I say, this is what America is
all about.
As I always tell activists engaged in the peace movement and
counter-recruitment campaigns: why do working class kids join the Army
anyway? Because like any teenager, they want to escape the world of
tedious work and meaningless consumerism, to live a life of adventure
and camaraderie in which they believe they are doing something genuinely
noble. They join the Army because they want to be like you.