Tomashi Jackson, Time and Space

Last week, my 50 undergraduate students and I visited the exhibition “Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe” at the Tufts University Art Gallery. They looked carefully and derived many insights from the work of this important artist. I highly recommend the show, which is open until Dec. 8 and free.

I illustrate this post with a photograph of Jackson’ 2020 work entitled “Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line)(1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act).” The photo does little justice to the original object, which is monumental (more than seven feet high) and structural, a multi-media painting mounted on a tilted wooden frame. In the photo with this post, you can see the shadows that the object casts on the gallery wall.

The materials listed on the gallery’s label are: “Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric.” Jackson collected the marble dust near the Acropolis in Athens, birthplace of democracy. The whole work is overlaid with red-white-and-blue stripes that are slightly askew.

We discussed the composition: Black citizens waiting to register to vote in Atlanta in the 1940s (at the top); recent election flyers (at the bottom); and in the middle, LBJ signing the Voting Rights Act. The President is larger than anyone else. Does that mean that he played a pivotal role? Or that his importance is overplayed in conventional accounts of American history? Is he responsible for the law, or was that really an outcome of a process that began with the people at the top of the picture?

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a constitutional crisis is not the end of history

In Forbes yesterday, Meg Little Reilly paraphrases and quotes me:

American students are generally taught that the U.S. Constitution is unbreakable — which has been true, thus far—but this narrative reinforces the notion that if the Constitution were to fall, so too would the nation. For many Americans, everything that comes after political unrest is a “blank page,” according to [Peter] Levine. It’s a paradoxically fragile characterization of a country.

But this isn’t how civilizations or humans respond to political chaos. In reality, an existential challenge to the U.S. Constitution would trigger the next chapter, not the end. Preparing students with this more comprehensive understanding of human history could be constructive in November and long into the future.

Reilly also quotes my friend Emma Humphries from iCivics, who says, “Teachers are going to be a safe and steady presence for their students” in the aftermath of next week’s election, regardless of who wins and whether the outcome is resolved immediately.

I’d elaborate my comment as follows: Love it or hate it, the US Constitution is the oldest in the world. It suffered a catastrophic crisis in 1860, but the people who sought to preserve it won the ensuing Civil War. Although explicit amendments and subtler reinterpretations have changed the Constitution significantly, its stability has been evident. As a result, Americans are taught to assume that the document will always govern us–for the rest of our lives. We learn to equate the Constitution with the nation, as if it had constituted us as a people. Given this civic religion, a constitutional rupture sounds like the end of our history.

The prospect of a possible second Trump administration (which is, of course, very far from guaranteed) is causing people to mutter phrases like “Game over,” as if there would be no future for the republic if Trump wins and overrides constitutional limits.

I do fear a constitutional rupture or a period of deep constitutional instability, especially if the cause is an authoritarian presidency (no matter how competent). We could be much worse off than we are now, and the rest of the world is at risk as well. I do not want our system to break down.

However, it is an idiosyncratic US trait to view the Constitution as both fixed and fragile and to equate that document with the people and the nation. France has had five republics, two monarchies, two empires, a nascent commune, and a Quisling dictatorship during the period that our Constitution has stood.

French history is not enviable. More people were executed during the suppression of the Commune in 1871 than during the Terror of 1793-4, to name just two cruel episodes. Yet the French nation and people have demonstrated deep continuities, even when their formal system has changed.

Between the Second and Third Republics, Napoleon III ruled as a quasi-dictator. This was a betrayal of democratic rights and values, yet the republic in a deeper sense persisted. French history continued, and the French continued to influence their own state–as well, tragically, as the subjected peoples of their colonies. When Napoleon III won his rigged 1851 referendum, I doubt that many French people thought that the game was over. In fact, there were three more republics to come. And their history is far more typical than ours.

We Americans must be ready in case we have to use vocabulary and concepts that are familiar around the world: coups and auto-coups, oligarchs and juntas, Bonapartism, unrest and disorder, state media and oppositional media, states of emergency, security forces (and security-force defections), popular fronts, civil service strikes, general strikes, electoral boycotts, mass civil resistance, and constitutional restorations and re-foundings.

I devoutly that hope we experience none of these things, but if we do, it will be up to us to determine how they turn out. In that sense, the republic will still be ours, whether we can keep it consistently or not.

See also: the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education; constitutional pietyhow to respond, revisited.

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what voters are hearing about in the 2024 election

It’s easy to imagine that our fellow citizens see the same political news that we do, and yet many of them draw the opposite conclusions about the candidates. But this impression is only partly true. To a significant extent, prospective voters are seeing and hearing different things, depending on their parties and demographic groups. Specifically, the most inflammatory comments often reverberate most widely among a candidate’s opponents and hardly reach his supporters at all.

This point is well known, but it would be informative to quantify it for the 2024 campaign. CNN and several partners have been asking an online panel an open-ended question about what news they have heard lately. The results are published after a significant delay (presumably due to the work involved in the analysis), and the only reports that I have found are rather cursory so far. They leave me with a methodological concern: individuals’ reports of what they hear may not match what they were actually exposed to, because their attentions and memories may be selective. Still, these simple reports offer insights.

The graphic with this post shows the main topics that a sample of Americans say they heard regarding Donald Trump during several days in September. At that time, some of us were hearing his lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH–which echoed the inflammatory and hateful slanders that have preceded massacres of vulnerable minority groups here and around the world–and we wondered how anyone could consider voting for this man. But the people who heard about Trump and pets and immigrants had something in common: they were generally Democrats.

Republican and Independent voters remembered hearing one main news item about Donald Trump in late September: he had survived a second assassination attempt, this one on his own golf course. For them, Trump was a victim of crime, and the main events of this campaign were attacks on him. In general, many Americans get a diet of news about crime and unrest. According to Pew, crime is usually the second-most common news topic, after weather, and 77 percent of people see crime news. That is the context in which Republican and Independent voters processed the news that Trump was a crime-victim.

A more recent article about news consumption from Oct 11-14 doesn’t divide the data according to the respondents’ choice of candidates, which makes it less relevant for my purposes. But it is interesting that the word “assassination” continued to be prominent in news about Trump in mid-October.

It’s worth asking whether “the media” is responsible for our balkanized news environment. There are many competing news sources, and people can choose among them, so it’s possible that balkanization is inevitable.

It’s also worth asking whether individuals are responsible for choosing to follow–and remember–high-quality news, and if so, what that is. (I am far from perfect in that respect, spending too much time on polls and horserace news and not enough on troubling issues.)

In any case, it is an analytic mistake to assume that many people support the most awful things that one observes. To understand is not to forgive, but I can at least understand why people would feel differently about Trump if they didn’t hear what I hear about him.

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a garbage-can model of political ideologies

Summary: This short essay explores four models for understanding political parties and ideologies:

  1. Each party has an ideology that represents positions that fall somewhere on the left-right spectrum;
  2. Each party represents a temperament or underlying principle, such as traditionalism or progress;
  3. Each party represents an interest-group coalition, such as the workers or business;
  4. Each ideology represents whatever its major associated political party stands for at the moment. In turn, per Cohen, March and Olsen (1972), any political party is a “collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”

I argue that the first three models don’t fit US politics by themselves, and the last one (a “garbage-can” model) has some validity.

We are familiar with a model in which each political party promotes an ideology, and we can place the various parties’ ideologies on a spectrum to tell how far apart they are, where the median lies, and whether the right or left is more influential. When this model is applied to US politics empirically, the typical finding is that our parties have moved apart or “polarized.”

Verlan Lewis (2021) has argued that most empirical measures of polarization do not inquire into the content of the left or right positions. They identify statistical clusters that they label as ideologies, but they do not tell us what the ideologies stand for. Closer inspection reveals that the meaning of the ideological labels has changed drastically over time.

As Lewis notes, “in the 1960s, liberal MCs [Members of Congress] tended to vote against tax increases and in favor of tax cuts, while conservative MCs tended to vote just the opposite.” This statistical relationship was very strong. The words “liberal” and “conservative” later changed their meanings so that conservatives are now the tax-cutters.

Lewis also illustrates his critique of the standard “static” model with the examples of three 20th-century senators: “‘Cotton’ Ed Smith (D-SC, 1909–1944), Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson (D-WA, 1953–1983), and Ron Wyden (D-OR, 1996–present).” All three have the same ideological score–left of the median–on the influential DW-NOMINATE scale, yet “Smith was a racist demagogue who opposed the New Deal, Jackson was a ‘neoconservative’ who supported both the Great Society and the Vietnam War, and Wyden is a ‘progressive liberal’ who opposes racism, has sought to reform entitlement spending, and opposes militarism.”

Lewis concludes, “As we can see, what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ MC in the 1930s was very different from what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ MC in the 1970s, and both are very different from what it means to be a ‘liberal’ MC today.” 

We might try to detect some underlying values or dispositions that define ideologies over time. One candidate: conservatives want to preserve something or return to the past, whereas progressives want to move forward.

I think that American progressives from 1932 until 1970 were, indeed, temperamentally oriented to change, while conservatives during that period wanted to hold onto traditions. Since then, however, I observe that progressives often want to preserve and conserve institutions that have become traditional (neighborhood public schools. welfare programs, unions) whereas conservatives from Reagan and Gingrich to G.W. Bush (not to mention Trump) embrace radical change. The temperamental orientation of the ideologies has switched.

A third possible model assumes that parties change their positions–and even their temperaments–but they retain the same core interest groups over time. We might expect a given country to have a party for the workers and one for the bourgeoisie, with potentially a third for the peasants. Perhaps the US has only bourgeois parties, but Republicans rely on business-owners and professionals from suburbs and small towns in the North, while Democrats depend on farmers plus urban industrial workers.

The problem with this third model is that the parties prove surprisingly likely to change their interest groups. Indeed, upscale professionals in northern suburbs are now at the heart of the Democratic coalition, while rural people in the South are core Republicans; and Northern industrial workers tilt to the GOP. Each of these groups has switched sides.

Nor is this pattern unique to the USA. The UK Labour Party, formed to represent industrial workers, drew 38 percent of the most advantaged social stratum in the 2024 General Election, compared to the Tory’s 18 percent. Labour performed a little worse among semi-skilled and skilled laborers than among managerial and professional employees. In France, the supposedly left-wing New Popular Front performed worst among workers (ouvriers), and was the top choice of the managerial class (cadres). The German Social Democratic Party, formed in 1875 to represent workers, now performs better among white-collar workers with high education.

if these models based on issues, temperaments, or interest groups fail, what model could work? I’d turn to Cohen, March and Olsen (1972), who posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated” (Cohen, March & Olsen 1972).

If this model applies to politics, then a given party is not a manifestation of any specific principles, nor an agent for a given demographic coalition. It is a space within which various actors can participate, yielding various outcomes over time. In turn, an ideology–at least in a regime like the USA–is mainly the name for that set of views that is currently held by one of the parties.

In that case, it is not illogical if the word “liberal” comes to mean entirely different policy positions over time; that is the outcome of people dumping “various kinds of problems and solutions” into the garbage can of the Democratic Party, which then represents “liberalism.” (And the same for the GOP and conservatism.)

In fact, I don’t think the garbage-can model quite works for US parties. They do retain some philosophical premises and portions of their coalitions over substantial periods, and to some extent, their changes in positions reflect changes in the external world. For example, the parties may have switched their positions on isolationism versus interventionism because the main perceived adversary was communism for 45 years–but not before or after that.

Still, the first three models don’t fit by themselves, and the garbage-can model has some validity.


Sources: Lewis, V. (2021). The problem of Donald Trump and the Static Spectrum Fallacy. Party Politics27(4), 605-618; Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly, 1-25. See also: Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas; in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”; what if political parties structure our thinking for us?; UK election results by social classsocial class inversion in the 2022 US elections;  class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesisclass inversion in France and what does the European Green surge mean?

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three takes on the good life: Aristotle, Buddha, Montaigne

I am attracted to two views that have been enormously influential for thousands of years.

The first view began with Aristotle and has influenced billions of people by being incorporated (with variations) into all three Abrahamic faiths. 

According to this theory, humans can be happy in the same way that we might describe a lush and towering tree as happy–or a fox that is busy hunting rabbits. It’s not about these organisms’ sensations of pleasure or pain, but whether they are doing what they are designed to do. “Flourishing” may be a better translation than “happy” for Aristotle’s Greek term, eudaimonia.

How do human beings flourish? Aristotle says it is by thinking, since that is our distinctive characteristic and evidently the advanced task for which we are optimized. But we think many things, including ugly thoughts and idle ones that fail to motivate our actions. We know the difference between good and bad thinking because we are taught to recognize virtues

Unfortunately, it is not always evident what a given virtue means, or even whether something called a virtue deserves the title; and the various virtues can conflict. We need a master virtue that is about deciding which virtues to deploy in each situation; call that “practical reason.” 

At least some people may also flourish by exercising a purer kind of reasoning that does not motivate action; for Aristotle, the very best way to spend one’s time is by contemplating the divine. 

To sum up, a happy human life is one guided by practical reason, perhaps with a dose of contemplative reasoning (also known as worship). A person of virtue is fortunate and happy in the same way that a fox flourishes if it can hunt rabbits all day. They live their best lives.

A very different view is also influential, because it is the root of Buddhism, which has about half a billion adherents today. In contrast to Aristotle, Buddha taught that we are not designed for any particular end. Like everything else in the universe, we exist because previous things just happened before. Since we have turned out to be sensitive creatures, we are bound to suffer; suffering is intrinsic (the First Noble Truth). It arises wherever there is a will, because desire is inevitably frustrated (the Second Noble Truth). 

However, we can introspect and discover that the self that we have valued so highly and that seems to intend and to want so many elusive things does not really exist. Specific phenomena just happen one after another, resulting from previous phenomena. This realization allows us to stop attaching our will to things. Instead of feeling wilful and frustrated, we can allow our minds to fill with compassion for ourselves and for everyone else, understanding everyone as determined by events beyond their control. 

This escape can be complete and final, so that we no longer suffer (the Third Noble Truth). No supernatural force is required for escape; it is just a matter of realizing how things really work. Once that happens, we can live a life of active compassion toward others (the Fourth Noble Truth). The conclusion is rather like Aristotle’s vision of a virtuous life, but with a different underpinning and a more dramatic moral.

I am no means against either view, both of which instruct and inspire. But I am skeptical that we are designed or optimized for anything. We emerged as a result of impersonal forces, especially biological evolution. Insofar as we have intrinsic purposes, I doubt that they are all about reasoning, since we have bodies as well as brains, and our brains are embodied. In essence, for me, the First Noble Truth trumps Aristotle’s idea that any natural species has a special natural purpose or end. 

Aristotle defines a virtuous life as happy or eudaimonic. He draws this link because he sees human beings as naturally designed for virtue. If we doubt this premise, then there is no reason to hope that virtue will bring happiness. On the contrary, virtue can easily enhance suffering in the form of guilt, disappointment, and frustration. We should strive to live virtuously for the good of others but not expect it to make us happy.

At the same time, I am also skeptical about the Third Noble Truth, the idea that a complete escape is possible if one fully embraces the truth that there is no self or any intrinsic purposes in nature. 

I just used the word “skeptical” in relation to both Aristotle and Buddhism. Skepticism was one of the ancient Greeks’ philosophical schools, a rival to Aristotle’s tradition. In 16th-century France, Michel de Montaigne read and developed the Skeptics’ ideas, and his work has influenced–or at least found echoes–in many subsequent authors, European and otherwise. 

Montaigne’s skepticism does not rest on a theory of the natural best life for human beings, nor on the idea that human selves are illusory and can be transcended. Montaigne views each human being, including himself, as something imperfect, a bit miscellaneous, without clear boundaries, and largely opaque–yet complex, distinctive, fragile, and precious. “For sure, man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and wavering subject. It’s a queasy business to try to base any constant and uniform judgment about him” (Montaigne 1580, 1:9).

For creatures like this, there is no natural best way to live, nor any escape from suffering. But there is much to be appreciated–even relished–if one attentively studies any particular person. Close, appreciative listening brings moments of compassion and consolation.

Montaigne wrote mostly about himself. “I wish to be seen in a simple, natural, and ordinary manner, without striving [he changed the word to “study” in the 1592 text] or artifice, for it is me that I paint” (Montaigne, 1580, “To the Reader”). This was his revolutionary contribution. Before him, authors in the European languages had never made subjects of themselves in a similar way. St. Augustine had written a great autobiography, but he had seen his life as an illustration of a universal story: the sinner finds God and is saved. Montaigne, in contrast, saw himself as himself. Inventing the very word “essay,” he inaugurated practices of self-description that have become ubiquitous. And he made the search for himself interesting by demonstrating how elusive we are to ourselves.

Today, we probably suffer from a bit too much self-exploration and self-description. The Romantic movement and some of its successors have encouraged writers and other artists to focus on themselves to a far greater extent than Montaigne could have imagined. In a secular and individualistic market-economy, self-presentation literally sells. Some memoirs and confessions are valuable, particularly when the authors have compelling stories. But people like me–we whose lives are quite unremarkable– should pause before we assume that anyone else needs to hear about us.

That brings me to the other side of Montaigne’s essays. He says that his subject is himself, but what does he do with his life? He spends it in his library. The self that he presents in his Essays is a devoted reader, that is, a compassionate observer of many other people, both authors and subjects, living and dead. 

I’ve posted a book-in-progress on this blog entitled Cuttings. My main purpose there is not to understand texts or to explain them to anyone, but rather to experiment with compassionate attention as a modest form of consolation. This is not an original ideal. I take it from Montaigne and many others. In the book (¶20-21), I even criticize originality as another Romantic ideal that has been overemphasized. Generalizations about important matters that are right and good are also likely to be clichés, because why would any of us suddenly discover truths that had been hidden before? Still, the book is full of concrete observations rather than generalizations. It is, in fact, a collection of “cuttings.”

...
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

-- Theodore Roethke, "Cuttings (later)," 1948

Source: Montaigne, Michel Eyquem (1580), Les Essais. See also: some basics; Montaigne and Buddhism; varieties of skepticism, etc.

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we treat facts and values alike when we reason

Years ago,  Justin McBrayer found this sign hanging in his son’s second-grade classroom:

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

This distinction is embedded in significant aspects of our culture and society. For example, science aspires to be about facts, not opinions. And values are often assigned to the category of opinions. But this distinction doesn’t describe the way people actually reason.

After you utter any standard sentence, another person can ask two questions: “Why did you say that?” And, “What does it imply?” Any standard sentence has premises that entail it and consequences that it, in turn, implies. Any sentence is in the middle of a network of related thoughts, and you can be asked to make those relationships explicit (Brandom 2000).

Imagine a rooster who wakes you up by crowing at a dawn, and a parent who wakes her child in time for school. Both have brains, perceptions, and desires. But only the parent shares a language with another party. As a result, the child can ask, “Why are we waking up now?” or “What do I have to do next?” These are upstream and downstream implications of the sentence: “Wake up!”

Upon receiving an answer, the child can ask further questions. “Why do I have to go to school?” “Why is learning good?” The parent’s patience for this kind of discussion is bound to be finite, but the very structure of language implies that it could go on virtually forever.

The same process works for sentences that are about facts and for those that are more about values. A child asks, “Why do I have to go to school?” The answer, “Because it is 8 am,” is factual. The answer, “Because it’s important to learn” involves values. Either response can, in turn, prompt further “why” questions that can be answered.

The positivist assumption that values are opinions rather than facts suggests that values are conversationally inert, connected to the speaker but not to any other sentences. When you say that you value something, a positivist understands this as a fact about yourself, not as a claim that you could justify. However, we do justify value-claims. We state additional sentences about what implies our values or what our values imply.

In real life, people sooner or later choose to halt the exchange of reasons. “Why do you think that?” “I saw it with my own eyes.” “Why do you believe your eyes?” At this point, most people will opt out of the conversation, nor do I blame them.

Note, however, that the respondent probably could give reasons other than “I saw it with my eyes.” Statements typically have multiple premises, not just one. Further, a person could explain why we typically believe what we see. There is much to be said about eyes, mental processes connected to vision, and so on. I realize that discussing such matters is for specialists, and most people should not bother going into them. But the point is that the network of reasons could almost always be extended further, if one chose.

And the same is true for value-claims. “Why do you support that?” “Because it’s fair.” “What makes it fair?” “It treats everyone equally.” “Why do you favor equality?” At this point, many people may say, “I just do,” which is rather like saying, “I saw it with my own eyes.” But again, the conversation could continue. There is a great deal to be said about premises that imply the value of equality and consequences that equality entails if it’s defined in various specific ways. By spelling out more of this network, we make ourselves accountable for our positions.

Driving a distinction between opinions/values and facts would artificially prevent us from connecting our value-laden claims to other sentences, which we naturally–and rightly–do.

Source: Robert R. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. (Harvard 2000). See also: listeners, not speakers, are the main reasoners; how intuitions relate to reasons: a social approach; we are for social justice, but what is it?; making our models explicit; introducing Habermas; and “Just teach the facts.

[Additional note, Oct 18: David Hume originated the fact-value distinction. For him, reasoning was essentially about perceiving things. The mind formed representations, especially visualizations. As Hilary Putnam writes (p. 15), Hume had a “pictorial semantics.” But you can’t see values. Nor can you see the self or causation. If we use visual metaphors–lenses, paintings, or images–for the mind, then it can’t seem to reason about values.

Nowadays, we think of reasoning mainly in terms of symbols that are combined and manipulated. The reigning metaphor is not a lens but a computer. We absolutely can compute sentences that include values. It’s true that a mind that manipulates and combines symbols must ultimately touch the world beyond itself, and there remains a role for sensation. Computers have input devices. But the connection between a mind and the world cannot be a matter of separate and distinct representations, since many things that we reason about–not only values, but also neutrinos, diseases, and economies–do not appear to our eyes. Source: Hilary Putnam (2002) The collapse of the fact/value dichotomy and other essays. Harvard.]

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The Healthy Democracy System Map

The National Civic League has launched its Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map, with data from 1,257 organizations in 10 states. The map will expand to include the whole country, and you can add organizations to it. The categories of work represented on the map are:

  • Civic associations
  • Civic education/civic learning
  • Civic media
  • Civic research [research about or in support of civic life)]
  • Civic technology
  • Connecting across differences
  • Deliberative, participatory, and direct democracy
  • Electoral reform
  • Faith-based efforts
  • Organizing and advocacy
  • Service and volunteerism
  • Voter engagement

The literal map is useful for seeing the physical locations of organizations. The database also supports other visualizations apart geospatial ones.

I attempted scans a bit like this in previous decades. I put diagrams of what I called the “civic renewal” field on this blog in 2005 and 2016. For people who are interested in global examples–especially in the categories of deliberative or participatory democracy and organizing and advocacy–Participedia.net is the go-to site. You can trace relevant funding at the US Democracy Hub. But for an extensive database of US civic organizations, the Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map is the place to go.

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generosity as a virtue

Summary: I will argue here that generosity is a virtue when it is involves respectful care for an individual. Therefore, paradigm cases of generosity involve acts of personal attention and two-way communication, such as carefully selecting an appropriate gift or making a kind remark. To assess a transfer of money, it is better to ask whether it manifests justice, not generosity. Aristotle launched this whole discussion by drawing a useful distinction between generosity and justice. However, because his ideas of justice were constrained, and because he analyzed generosity strictly in terms of money, he left the impression that generosity was not a very appealing virtue. We can do better by focusing on acts conducted in the context of mutually respectful relationships.


To begin: virtues are traits or dispositions that we should want to cultivate in ourselves and in others to improve these individuals’ characters, to raise the odds that they will benefit their communities, or both.

Generosity is found on famous lists of virtues, such as Aristotle’s twelve (or so) and the Buddha’s six paramitas. However, generosity receives much less attention than most other virtues in contemporary English-language philosophy. Miller (2018) finds only three “mainstream philosophy” articles about generosity prior to his own. Ward (2011) finds little discussion of generosity in scholarship on Aristotle, notwithstanding that a whole section of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is focused on it.

I would propose this explanation. Aristotle continues to provide the most influential framework for theories of virtues in the academic world, partly because he is often insightful, and also because he shaped ethics in the three Abrahamic religions. However, his account of generosity (eleutheriotes–more literally translated as “liberality”) makes it a problematic trait. And that is why the virtue does not receive much attention in Anglophone and European academic philosophy.

Aristotle introduces his discussion of generosity with an explicit mention of money:

Let us speak then of freeness-in-giving [eleutheristes, generally translated as generosity or liberality]. It seems to be a mean in respect to needs/goods/property [chremata], for a man is not praised as generous in war, nor in matters that involve temperance, nor in court decisions, but in the giving or taking of goods, and especially in giving them–“goods” meaning all those things whose worth is measured with coins (NE 1119b–my translations).

For Aristotle, generosity does not mean transferring money to people who have a right to it, because that is the separate virtue of justice. Rather, generosity means donating material things voluntarily because one is not overly enamored of them, and doing so in an excellent way.

Things that are done in virtue are noble and are done for their nobility. The generous man therefore will certainly give for the nobility of it. And he will do it rightly, for he will give to the right people, in the right amount, at the right time, and whatever else counts as right giving; and he will give with pleasure or at least painlessly, for whatever is done virtuously is pleasant and painless, or at least not distressing (NE 1120a).

The appropriate recipient is not one who deserves the money (again, that would be an act of justice), but rather someone whom a person of generous spirit would desire to help. I imagine a land-owner being generous to his tenant or to a retainer of long standing.

Aristotle acknowledges that a person with less money can be as generous as a rich man, since the appropriate measure is the proportion of one’s wealth that one donates. Nevertheless, his paradigm of a generous person is a man of inherited wealth who is liberated enough from the base appeal of material things that he voluntarily gives some money away in a gentlemanly fashion (NE 1120b).

I will not claim that the ideal of generosity in the Buddhist canon is the same as in Aristotle, but the early Buddhist texts also appreciate people who give things away because they are free from a desire for goods:

Furthermore, a noble disciple recollects their own generosity: “I’m so fortunate, so very fortunate! Among people full of the stain of stinginess I live at home rid of stinginess, freely generous, open-handed, loving to let go, committed to charity, loving to give and to share.” Then a noble disciple recollects their own generosity, their mind is not full of greed, hate, and delusion. This is called a noble disciple who lives in balance among people who are unbalanced, and lives untroubled among people who are troubled. They’ve entered the stream of the teaching and develop the recollection of generosity (Numbered Discourses 6.10.1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato).

One difference is that Aristotle mainly thinks about generosity to people who are poor against their will, whereas the paradigm of generosity in early Buddhism is a wealthy layperson’s donation to monks, who have voluntarily renounced worldly goods. In fact, I am not sure that monks can be generous in the Pali Canon, because their role is to receive alms. Another difference—typical when comparing Aristotle to classical Buddhism–is that the Buddhist path leads toward complete liberation, whereas Aristotle expects us to navigate happiness and suffering until death.

In any case, for Aristotle, generosity is relational (one person is generous to another), and it usually accompanies an unequal relationship. As Ward writes, it “abstracts” from justice. When we are being generous, in Aristotle’s sense, we do not have justice on our minds, although we might also act justly.

If one accepts inequality and suffering as natural, then justice is simply a matter of paying one’s debts, honoring contracts, and otherwise following the current rules; and generosity easily accompanies justice. A true aristocrat exhibits justice by paying his bills and taxes. He may also make generous gifts, although never giving so much as to threaten his social standing. (Aristotle defines prodigality as giving so much as to ruin one’s own resources: NE 1119b–1120a.)

However, if we decide that the current distribution of rights and goods is unjust and should be changed, then we will not be impressed by a person who is generous yet not just. More than that, we may feel that justice is the only standard, and generosity is virtuous just to the degree that it approximates justice. Then a gentleman’s holiday gifts are virtuous insofar as they diminish an unjustifiable disparity between the lord and his tenants. The effect is probably quite small. It would be better if the gentleman were prodigal or if his lands were reallocated. Meanwhile, if he takes satisfaction in his own gift-making–as evidence that he is free from base material desires–then he looks worse, not better. If he makes gifts, he should demonstrate respect for the recipients by making the payments seem obligatory and insufficient.

By alluding to land reform, I am suggesting that a social system should be egalitarian, and some powerful force, such as a modern government, should make it so. This is not necessarily correct. Adam Smith makes a different argument for generosity. In his view, a market economy is best for everyone because it continuously increases prosperity. But rich people should be generous, not only for the sake of those with less but also because a reasonable person will not be overly attached to his own wealth and will know when he has more than enough.

When “a man of fortune spends his revenue chiefly in hospitality” (benefitting friends), he demonstrates a “liberal or generous spirit” and also puts his wealth into circulation, thus contributing to the “increase of the public capital.” On the other hand, by hoarding his money for himself, a person would manifest “a base and selfish disposition” (Wealth of Nations, ii:3). It is less clear whether Smith recommends generosity toward poor people who are not one’s friends (discussed in Birch 1998). But in general, virtues are good for the individual and contribute to a civil society. Generosity is just one example; “humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem” are others (Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV).

Whether you endorse or reject Smith’s view of markets, at least his theory of generosity is connected to his theory of social justice. Ward argues that Aristotle also considers generosity in the context of his view of a good community. She discusses the sections in the Politics where Aristotle says that the best regime empowers the middle classes. They are neither arrogant, like the rich, nor craven, like the poor (Pol. 1295b5).

A democracy dominated by the middle classes enables deliberation among peers. Equal citizens can look one another in the eye, say what they think, and cast equal votes to set policy. To the extent that Aristotle appreciates this kind of political system, then his discussions of generosity (giving moderate amounts of money to individuals) and munificence (giving lots of money to the city) begin to seem ironic. These are virtues of oligarchy, and Aristotle prefers democracy (albeit with qualifications).

I appreciate Ward’s argument, but I suspect that for Aristotle, equal standing or eisonomia can only work for an elite (even if it extends to the middling sort), and they should be generous to those who are naturally inferior. Members of the Assembly should treat the large majority of humans who are non-citizens generously, while treating one another with equal respect. However, once we embrace universal human rights, then everyone should be a citizen–somewhere–and the Aristotelian versions of generosity and munificence begin to look problematic.

As long as we are thinking primarily about the transfer of money or goods that money can buy, then I think that justice is the relevant virtue, and generosity is a poor substitute. This point does not depend on a radically egalitarian theory of social justice, because a libertarian should also put justice first and generosity well behind.

However, we naturally use the word “generous” for things other than money. For instance, “generous reading” is a common phrase for interpretive methods that seek to reconstruct persuasive positions from texts. Ann Ward reads Aristotle generously by combining his discussion of generosity in the Nicomachean Ethics with his analysis of democracy in the Politics.

Likewise, we can make “generous remarks” at a colleague’s retirement party, and our words will offer real insights about the colleague’s contributions. We can also give things or people our “generous attention.”

Our partner the Vuslat Foundation defines generous listening as “active, empathetic engagement with another person’s thoughts and feelings. At its core, generous listening is about creating a space for authentic dialogue.”

Think of a colleague who skillfully chooses holiday gifts, wrapping them nicely, and adding thoughtful notes. The objects may have limited monetary value yet reflect generous attitudes toward their recipients because they match each person’s desires and needs. Finding the gifts required time, and during that time, the donor focused on the recipient. We would not object if the skillful donor takes pleasure and pride, just as we generally appreciate cases when people derive happiness from their own virtue.

Whereas money is fungible, the generosity in these examples is specific to the individuals involved. Aristotle (like the Buddhist sutra I quoted earlier) is most interested in generosity as a display of freedom on the part of the giver, but in the cases I am sketching, the donors focus on the recipients. And these forms of generosity are relatively independent of the social system. I presume that generous speeches at retirement parties are appreciated alike in state socialism, corporate capitalism, and the nonprofit sector.

We might, then, agree with Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that generosity is one of the virtues that “appear in every respect agreeable to us.” Generosity is agreeable regardless of the social or economic system, and apart from justice. But it is a virtue that requires benevolent respect for the recipient, listening and speaking as well as giving. Contrary to Aristotle, it is least relevant to monetary transfers and does not reflect a gentlemanly insouciance about private wealth. Rather, it is best manifested in reciprocal relationships, when the parties devote time and attention to one another.


Sources: Christian B. Miller, “Generosity,: in Michel Croce and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, eds., Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy (Wiley, 2018): 23-50; Ann Ward, “Generosity and inequality in Aristotle’s ethics.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 28.2 (2011): 267-278; Thomas D. Birch, “An analysis of Adam Smith’s theory of charity and the problems of the poor.” Eastern Economic Journal 24.1 (1998): 25-41.my translations of Aristotle use the text from Project Perseus.

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Cezanne’s portait of Gustave Geffroy

In “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the critic Paul Geffroy (1895-6), which led me to some congruent reflections.

Merleau-Ponty notes that the table “stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture.” In a photograph of M. Geffroy, the table’s edges would form parallel lines that would meet at one point, and the whole object would be more foreshortened. That is how an artist who followed what we call “scientific perspective” would depict the table. Why does Cézanne show it otherwise?

Imagine that you actually stood before Paul Geffroy in his study. You would not instantly see the whole scene. Your eye might settle on your host’s face, then jump to the intriguing statuette next to him. The shelves would at first form a vague pattern in the background. Objects for which you have names, such as books, would appear outlined, as borders filled with color. On the other hand, areas of the fireplace or wall would blend into other areas.

You would know that you could move forward toward M. Geffroy, in which case the table would begin to move below you. Just as you see a flying ball as something moving–not as a round zone of color surrounded by other colors–so you might see the table as something that could shift if you moved your body forward.

A photograph of this real-world scene would be a representation of it, very useful for knowing how M. Geffroy looked in his study, and possibly an attractive object in its own right. But the photo would not represent anyone’s experience of the scene. Instead, it would be something that you could experience, rather like the scene itself, by letting your eye move around it, identifying objects of interest, and gradually adding information. You would experience the photograph somewhat differently from the actual scene because you would know that everything was fixed and your body could not move into the space.

A representation of this scene using perspective’s “laws” would make the image useful for certain purposes–for instance, for estimating the size of the table. Michael Baxandall (1978) argued that Renaissance perspective originated in a commercial culture in which patrons enjoyed estimating the size, weight, and value of objects represented in paintings.

But other systems have different benefits. Here is a print in which Toyoharu Kunichika (1835-1900) uses European perspective for the upper floor and a traditional Chinese system (with lines that remain parallel and objects placed higher if they are further away) for the lower floor. As Toshidama writes, this combination is useful for allowing us to see as many people and events as possible.

Print by Toyoharu Kunichika from Toshidama Japanese Prints

Perspective does not tell us how the world is–not in any simple way. The moon is not actually the size of a window, although it is represented as such in a perspectival picture (East Asian or European). Perspective is a way of representing how we experience the world. And in that respect, it is partial and sometimes even misleading. It overlooks that for us, important things seem bolder; objects can look soft, cold or painful as well as large or small; and some things appear in motion or likely to move, while others seem fixed. We can see a whole subject (such as a French intellectual in his study) and parts of it (his beard), at once and as connected to each other.

Merleau-Ponty writes:

Gustave Geoffrey’s [sic] table stretches into the bottom of the picture, and indeed, when our eye runs over a large surface, the images it successively receives are taken from different points of view, and the whole surface is warped. It is true that I freeze these distortions in repainting them on the canvas; I stop the spontaneous movement in which they pile up in perception and in which they tend toward the geometric perspective. This is also what happens with colors. Pink upon gray paper colors the background green. Academic painting shows the background as gray, assuming that the picture will produce the same effect of contrast as the real object. Impressionist painting uses green in the background in order to achieve a contrast as brilliant as that of objects in nature. Doesn’t this falsify the color relationship? It would if it stopped there, but the painter’s task is to modify all the other colors in the picture so that they take away from the green background its characteristics of a real color. Similarly, it is Cézanne’s genius that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes.

The deeper point is that a science of nature is not a science of human experience. Third-person descriptions or models of physical reality are not accounts of how we experience things. And even when we are presented with a scientific description, it is something that we experience. For instance, we actively interpret a photograph or a diagram; we do not automatically imprint all of its pixels. And we listen to a person lecture about science; we do not simply absorb the content.

There are truths that can be expressed in third-person form–for example, that human eyes and brains work in certain ways. But there are also truths about how we experience everything, including scientific claims.

And Cézanne is a scientist of experience.


Quotations from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1946), in Sense and Non-sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press 1964); image by Paul Cézanne, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The image on the Mus?e d’Orsay’s website suggests a warmer palette, but I don’t know whether it’s open-source. I also refer to Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy : A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1978).

See also: Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing; trying to look at Las Meninas; Wallace Stevens’ idea of orderan accelerating cascade of pearls (on Galileo and Tintoretto); and Rilke, “The Grownup.” My interactive novel, The Anachronist, is about perspective.

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what you need to know for collective action

The graphic with this post shows the outline for “Introduction to Civic Studies,” which I am offering for 50 Tufts undergraduates this spring, and also for my 2022 book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (with an associated website).

To trace one portion of the argument: There is not much point in asking what’s wrong with the world or how things should be unless you can also address the question: “What should we do?” And there is not much point in asking that question unless you are part of–or can form–a functioning “we” that is able to act collectively, assembling and deploying assets.

Functioning groups require rules (broadly defined) as well as attitudes, such as trust.

In order to create rules and trust, it is helpful to know how to:

  • Develop explicit models (simplified representations) of the social situation that can guide your action and that you can modify in the light of experience
  • Analyze institutions in terms of components, such as their biophysical circumstances, the choices that they create for participants, and their outcomes. You should be able to analyze institutions that you want to launch or sustain, so that these entities can persist and even grow. You may also need to analyze institutions that you oppose, to reveal their vulnerabilities.
  • Treat your own group as a common-pool resource: that is, as a good that benefits everyone involved but that can be used up or degraded. Common-pool resources are difficult to finance and sustain, yet some flourish. The ones that succeed usually employ wise principles. Therefore:
  • Apply design principles that enable successful collective action, such as establishing clear boundaries around the the group and its assets, developing efficient processes for resolving conflicts, and using light but graduated sanctions for members who violate the rules.
  • Preserve and expand social capital (otherwise known as “collective efficacy” or “community cohesion”): the social ties and interpersonal commitments that enable further action.
  • Practice skills that organize people (rather than simply mobilize them to take specific actions), such as one-to-one interviews and decision-making meetings.

The second through fifth points come from the work of Elinor Ostrom, although you may decide to analyze institutions into different components from the ones she identified, or apply different design principles, if your experience yields different lessons.

This is not all you need to know, because additional challenges arise when you face conflicting beliefs about good means and ends or when you encounter oppressive power. We will move onto those topics for the rest of the semester. But the list shown here is necessary.

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