Required
Reading for 2004 Essay Contest
The
Ideal Society
The following are excerpts from a
book review by Martin Aronson
The book reviewed was “The Bank
Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning” by author Peter Gabel
Published
May, 2001 pages 64-65 California Lawyer
Seeking the Just Society
America is a profoundly divided, if not polarized society. …We see social splits along the familiar fault lines on such hot-button issues as abortion, gun control, health care, taxes, welfare reform, environmentalism, and the role of government itself. Behind the struggle lie different conceptions of moral responsibility in both our private and public lives. Peter Gabel’s book…focuses on our shattered polity and our need for community. …
In the title essay, Gabel examines the hierarchical structure and rigid social roles of a typical institution such as a bank and how the tacit acceptance of such impersonal roles establishes a routine sense of alienation from both self and others. That alienation permeates the particular institution and the society at large. For example, the bank tellers must remain polite, cordial and professional even thought they may feel great stress or tedium when performing their duties. …
Gabel does manage to hammer home his pet theme of how the impersonal mores that govern relations in civil society end up breaking the bonds among people, frustrating the intrinsic human need for meaningful social connection. This defeat of community is accomplished in a myriad of ways in our culture, such as the unrelenting glorification of individualism, a dominant ethos of so-called utilitarian self-interest, and an intensely competitive economic system….
Gabel criticizes American-style capitalism; “It’s time to stop thinking of capitalism as an economic system, a kind of giant machine that determines our existence from the outside. Our society is not some kind of external machine organized for profit but an alienated social reality, suffused with paranoia that fosters domination in both the economic and noneconomic spheres of life. Its Achilles’ heel is that no matter how much economic prosperity it generates, it cannot address the spiritual impoverishment and the pain of isolation that haunts everyone’s lives, even those in the ruling class whose interests society supposedly serves, because it cannot satisfy our most fundamental desire for connection and meaning.” …
When first elected, Gabel argues, Clinton embodied the warmth, informality, and promise of reviving in public life the “liberatory energy” of the sixties generation, which had long been repressed, manipulated, and then even expropriated in the right-wing cant about community by Ronald Reagan and later George Bush the elder. But then, Gabel laments, Clinton “crossed over” after the defeat of his health care plan in 1994 and embraced world trade and ruthlessly competitive global capitalism.
In one of his most readable and powerful essays, Gabel calls for abolishing the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), casting it as a sort of metaphor for the whole dehumanizing and pointless nature of American society in our times. He argues that the SAT (and all standardized testing for that matter) not only traumatizes impressionable youngsters as the rawest expression of an inhuman educational and social system, but it doesn’t even come close to accurately measuring what it purportedly claims to: intelligence, aptitude and “merit.” Gabel claims that the tests measure “meaningless thought” because its format forces kids into an abstract, alienated consciousness, totally divorced from any sense of context or engaged human understanding. Gabel claims that “meaningful thought requires that there be a relationship between thinking (representing or imagining the world) and a heartfelt end that motivates the activity of thinking itself.” …
Gabel calls for a spiritual renewal in public life that will transform our social institutions. By this he means once again connecting spirituality, or at least some sort of communal moral sense, to social and political life, fostering a reinvigorated ethic of cooperation and mutual concern rather than narrow self-interest and rampant individualism. The driving force behind this renewal, as Gabel sees it, is simple reciprocity of human caring----empathy extended toward all members of society based on their intrinsic human value. If this were done, it would lead to social and political engagement out of concern for all people’s well-being and the political issues that affect it.
One important area for this to occur in, of course, is the realm of work, where an ethic of meaning and communal cooperation must supplant that of competition, money and status as the prime motivation. Another is education, where Gabel calls for a shift in values from competition and machinelike thinking to a pedagogy that recognizes the value of intuition. This renewal of education would emphasize contextual learning, in which thought and understanding are rooted in human values and consequences. …
[Health Care] He argues for an openness to reach out toward one another in a sort of new social contract, where caring for one another’s health reveals itself as much more satisfying than, say, buying a new television with the money from a tax refund. Gabel even applies his political philosophy to the practice of law, making the case for a less adversarial and “objectified” legal system. Specifically, Gabel calls for breaking down the intense “techno-rational” character of legal reasoning, another form of disembodied thought in his view, and moving in the direction of “ethical-emotional” thought. …Gabel also calls for some minimal moral responsibility on the part of defense lawyers: When presenting their cases, they should show some concern for the welfare of the larger community.
It may be easy to scoff at…many of Gabel’s ideas, even cringing when he interjects words such as love, compassion, and spirituality into the political lexicon. That is the lot of the idealist dabbling in politics. But sometimes we have to acknowledge that many progressive programs we now take for granted in our society, such as Medicare, Social Security, food stamps, and WIC, to name a few, rest on those very concepts, however uncomfortable we may be in using such personal language to describe them.
Gabel’s book reclaims both morality and community in American life from the stranglehold of the religious right. He reminds us that these issues have always been at the heart of the American progressive tradition---including the abolitionist, suffrage, civil rights, antiwar, feminist, environmental, and gay rights movements---and that the ever-widening web of moral connections they outline is the single most powerful instrument of both personal and social change.
Excerpts from a book review by A.E.
Smith, a junior at the University of Texas and published in the fall 2002
edition of Campus magazine.
The book reviewed was “The West and the Rest” by author Roger Scruton
Culture as Antidote to Terror
“Constructing his idea of a battlefield of the West versus “the Rest,” Scruton begins by describing the differences in the political cultures of Islam and the West at the most fundamental level. He argues that the basis for the rule of law in Western civilization is the social contract, a pact that binds all citizens within a certain territorial jurisdiction---the nation-state---in obligation to each other.
These civic duties of citizenship apply to all people within the nation-state, making no exceptions to these requirements for differing creed communities or sub-citizen identities (i.e., ethnicities) within the territory.
This philosophy of secular law has its roots in the writings of the early Greek tragedians such as Sophocles, who wrote in Antigone of the conflict between religion and the state. Antigone, her loyalties divided by contradictory commands of the gods and the state, chooses obedience to the former, citing it as the higher authority. Although the ruler Creon realizes that his order has placed Antigone in an irresolvable dilemma between personal beliefs and the public interest, he cannot allow this to be a reason to jeopardize the state by sparing her life.
Hence, as the rule of law must be constant over all citizens of the state irrespective of religion, religion must remain a personal matter with no claims to legal authority or exemption. Similar principles can be found in early Christianity and the Roman Empire. The Gospel of Mark gives an account of Christ being asked if it is permissible to pay taxes to the ruler to which he replies, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s (12:17,KJV).
Ultimately, the Church is treated as a universal and corporate political entity: governing its own internal affairs and the religious lives of its members, while subject to the law in whatever land it is present.
Scrunton details the prerequisites in Western societies for citizenship---a sense of patriotic public spirit, and a commitment to the preservation of the social contract. The good citizen recognizes that the state is an entity that strives to be eternal, existing outside the narrow life of the individual; the state consists not only of the present generation, but those deceased and unborn, as well.
Therefore, duty may require the individual to jeopardize his own life at times for the sake of the political order’s future survival (i.e., a defensive war). All citizens, family, friends, and strangers are bound in these civic obligations to one another, regardless of creed, sub-national identity, or prior nationality. The public maintains this pact by adhering to the rule of law and by passing these patriotic values on to their children. The Greek vision of a secular political order based upon the social contract is an absolute contradiction to the edicts of Islam, contends Scruton.
Traditional Islamic society holds that there is no distinction between “The Mosque” and the state. The rule of law is derived not from the consent of the governed within accepted territorial boundaries; rather, civil and religious law are inseparable, established by divine revelation, and the edict of submission to that law is universal. The lands where the law of God is obeyed in the Islamic interpretation are known as dar al-islam (“land of peace”); those that remain outside that sphere of influence are referred to as dar al-harb (“land of war”).
The obligations of the individual, in the Islamic conception, are not to other citizens, but rather to God. A Muslim must abide by the sharia (“holy law”), be prepared to engage in jihad (“religious struggle,” in either the personal or military sense), and tithe his income to the zakat (“the impoverished”). Lacking a societal web of interwoven obligation to strangers, national identity holds little influence in the Muslim world. Nationality typically takes a secondary role to religion and tribe and is usually imposed from the top down.
Political winds of change in the West, adds Scruton, reflect a strikingly similar disdain among the people for national sovereignty. The modern “multi-culturalism” movement is indicative of a “culture of repudiation” seeping into Western society---a sociopolitical tide-change that seeks to expunge a unified national identity in favor of ethnic fragmentation.
The author argues, quite effectively, that an erosion of national unity endangers the social contract that holds the nation-state together. If the people of a given nation cease to view themselves primarily as members of the same unit, then their willingness to engage in patriotic self-sacrifice is undoubtedly diminished.
From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn
Rand
“I support my life by my own effort so I do not seek or derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as my goal in life so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them
The moral symbol of respect for human beings is the trader. We who live by values, not by loot, are traders both in matter and in spirit. A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.
A morality that holds need as a claim holds emptiness---nonexistence---as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect; weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster….”
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here for the links to the questions that need to be answered.
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