What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  We have come to a place where these assumptions are being tested, in reality, at least, if not in our universities and think tanks. Reality is that turbulent region our thoughts visit seldom and briefly, like Baedeker tourists eager to glimpse the sights that will confirm our expectations and put us on shared conversational ground with decades of fellow tourists. We leave trash on Mount Everest, we drop trash in the sea, and reality goes on with its life, reacting to our depredations as it must while ages pass, continents clash, and infernos boil over. It is true that our carelessness affects the world adversely, and it is also true that the world can fetch autochthonous surprises up out of its fiery belly. The metaphor is meant to suggest that we are poor observers, rarely seeing more than we intend to see. Our expectations are received, therefore static, which makes it certain that they will be like nothing in reality. Still, we bring our expectations with us, and we take them home with us again, reinforced.

  Historical time also has a fiery belly and a capacity for devastating eruptions. It has equivalents for drought and desert, for glaciation. Its atmosphere can dim and sicken. Any reader of history knows this. If the changes that occur in it are very substantially the result of human activity, they seem rarely to reflect human intention, at least when they are viewed in retrospect. They seem always to elude human notice until they are irreversible, overwhelming. Western civilization had had a significant place among world cultures in articulating the sense of vastnesses and richnesses in its painting, poetry, music, architecture, and philosophy. Then rather suddenly this great, ancient project was discountenanced altogether. The sacred has since been declared to have been a meaningless category, a name for something in fact compounded of fear, hope, and ignorance, and configured around certain ancient tales and ceremonies, a forgivable error in an earlier age. That it yielded works of extraordinary beauty and profundity was acknowledged fulsomely in modernist nostalgia, whose exponents saw themselves as the victims of the transformations they announced and, in a considerable degree, created. Grand-scale change was in fact imminent and inevitable, of course. Empires were falling, technology was rising. Whether the new age need have brought with it this mawkish gloom is another question. I propose that the thought we call modern was by no means robust and coherent enough intellectually to discredit metaphysics and theology, among many other things, though it did discredit them. To account for this I would suggest that its appeal to the upper strata of culture was in the fact that it closed questions rather than opening them. Its nostalgias made it resistant to reform and excused it from giving a rational defense of its resistance. It created the narrative of a breach with the European past by ignoring European history. Granting the horrors of the First World War, Europe seems to have comforted itself by arming for the Second World War. That is to say, humankind has always given itself occasions for grief and despair, and has seldom made better use of them than to store up grudges and provocations to prepare the next occasion.

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  Human cultural achievements may be thought of as somewhat apart from these periodic rampages. There are no grounds for thinking of high civilizations as less violent than any others—no grounds, that is, except in the histories and anthropologies that are written by them. So long as warfare and other enormities are treated as paradoxical, anomalous, aberrant, we lack a sufficiently complex conception of humankind. History can tell us that neither side of our nature precludes the other. The worst we do does not diminish the goodness of the best we do. That our best is so often artistic more than utilitarian, in the usual senses of both words, is a fact with which we should learn to be at peace.

  The arts have been under attack since Plato at least, on the grounds that they had no useful role in society. They are under attack at present. We have persuaded ourselves that the role of the middle ranks of our population is to be of use to the economy—more precisely, to the future economy, of which we know nothing for certain but which we can fairly imagine to be as unlike the present one as it is unlike the order that prevailed a few decades ago. If the present is any guide, we can anticipate further profound disruption. So such coherence as the economy has created in the culture to this point cannot at all be assumed. The reverence paid to economic forces, which, with the accelerating accumulation of wealth in very few hands, increasingly amounts to little more than faceless people with no certain qualifications playing with money, enforces the belief that our hopes must be surrendered to these forces. The coherence society might take from politics—that is, from consciousness that it is a polity, a human community with a history and with a habit of aspiration toward democracy requiring a capacity in its public for meaningful decisions about its life and direction—exists apart from these forces and is at odds with them. So far as they are determinist, and so long as they succeed in defining utility—that is, value and legitimacy—for the rest of us, we have surrendered even the thought of creating a society that can sustain engagement and purpose, beyond that endless openness and submissiveness to other people’s calculations and objectives that we call “competitiveness.”

  At the moment, two things are taken to be true: one, that our society must be disciplined and trained to compete in a global market, and two, that these competitive skills have no definable character. Who might not be displaced by a computer or a robot? Who might not be displaced by an offshore worker, an adjunct? Economics from its brutal beginnings has told us that cheapened labor will give its employers a competitive advantage, and that costlier labor will drive industries into extinction or into foreign labor markets. Oddly, even monstrously costly executives seem never to have this effect. Economics has told us that labor both creates value and is the greatest cost in the production of value. When Marx wrote about these things he was using a long-established vocabulary, still descriptive now, therefore useful. There is nationalism involved in all this, historically. The colonial system, which was entirely bound up in trade and industry, enjoyed the power and the sense of grandeur of the old European empires. The global reach of the early industrial system made mass poverty a national asset, as it is now. According to the theory that rationalized it, the worker’s wage could not exceed the level necessary to his subsistence—that is, the level necessary to leave him, more probably her, physically able to work. I believe this “brazen law,” as they called it, is still in force in many of those societies with which we are told we are competing.

  The most obvious evidence that the United States proceeded for a long time on other assumptions is our educational system, which is by now seen by very many people as an obstacle to our recruiting ourselves to the great project of competing in the world economy. If it is no longer clear what these singular institutions should be doing, it is pretty clear what they should not be doing, which is disseminating knowledge and culture, opening minds. The dominant view now is that their legitimate function is not to prepare people for citizenship in a democracy but to prepare them to be members of a docile though skilled working class. It has been characteristic of American education that it has offered students a great variety of fields of study and a great freedom to choose among them. It has served as a mighty paradigm for the kind of self-discovery Americans have historically valued. Now this idea has gone into eclipse. The freedom of the individual seems to have been reduced to a right to belligerent ignorance coupled with devotion to a particular reading of the Second Amendment. Other than this they are offered a future in which their particular interests, gifts, and values will have very minimal likelihood of expression, since they are very likely not to suit the uses of whatever employment is on offer. They must give up the thought of shaping their own lives, of having even the moral or political right to try to stabilize them against the rigors and uncertainties of the markets, those great gods. All this assumes, of course, something that has never been true in this country, that the society and economy will be dominated by great industries that make more or less uniform demands of their workers, as those primordial cotton mills did. We are en
couraged to accept the inevitability of a dystopia, the brightest hope being that we or our children will do better than most people.

  An early step in making all this inevitable is the attack on higher education, a resurgence of that old impulse to force society into the form that is considered natural and necessary, an impulse that only grows stronger when society as it exists seems recalcitrant. The fact is that, in general, our system of higher education could hardly be less suited to serve the unspecific but urgent purposes of the economy of the future presently imagined for us, which really bears more resemblance to that forgotten past, that dark age, which taught the benefits to the few of cheapening the labor, that is to say, depressing the living standards, of the very many. This is an object mightily assisted by high levels of unemployment and by access to labor markets where large-scale poverty is endemic. A rationale for all this is that Western prosperity sprang from the dark age of early industrialism. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. This is a tendentious reading of a very complex history. Henry Ford’s realization that workers should be paid enough to be a market for the things they made, an inversion of the old model, might be said to have come from his experiencing the limits of what Marx quite accurately called the expropriation of the worker. The so-called consumer society followed on Ford’s innovation. This was novel, an object of derision at home and abroad, and it is what we are losing now as unemployment and the exploitation of cheap labor in other countries exerts a continuous downward pressure here. A consumer society is one in which people in general can engage in discretionary spending. It is characteristic of Americans that whatever they are or do is what they also ridicule and lament. But in fact the margin above that grim old standard, subsistence, is the margin of personal freedom. And, granting fads and excesses, interesting uses have been made of it.

  And as one important instance, for a long time, by world and historical standards, we have educated a great many people at great cost. Our discretionary spending has also been expressed as a willingness to be taxed for the common benefit. Without question the institutions we have created have added tremendous wealth to society over time. But we have been talked out of the kind of pragmatism that would allow us to say: This works. No comparably wealthy society has proceeded on the utilitarian principles that would ration access to varieties of learning in the name of improving a workforce. One might reply that there has never been a country to compare with this one in terms of wealth. True enough. One conclusion we might draw from this fact is that what we do works. At the very least, it does not impede the great cause of wealth accumulation that, come to think of it, never is the stated object of competitiveness, any more than is liberty or the pursuit of happiness, the general welfare, or, indeed, the examined life. By its atavistic lights we should be prepared to navigate uncharted seas, assuming always that nothing else is offered or owed to us but work, which is itself highly conditional, allowed to us so long as no cheaper arrangement can be found. With all the urgency of this argument, holding up to us this dismal, threatening future, no mention is made of the fact that great wealth will indeed accumulate. It will not be distributed, however. The most efficient system ever devised for the distribution of wealth is a meaningful wage. The most effective means of depressing wages ever found is the mobility of capital, that same accumulated wealth, which can move overnight to a more agreeable climate. Our workers—that is, all of us, more or less—are already prepared to understand that in abandoning America it is only obeying that brazen law. There will be a hint of rebuke, as there is now, in the fact that we failed to be competitive, which might have something to do with currency fluctuations or with the misfortune of living in a place that is a little too fastidious in the matter of breathable air and drinkable water. This rebuke will echo through society, demonstrating to many the absolute need to jettison these standards, their immediate cost precluding any thought of their long-term benefit. Attending to public health is distributive, since it entails particular costs to achieve a general benefit associated with a general ability to prosper. I avoid the more familiar term redistributive, since it implies a real, prior ownership of wealth from which a general wealth is subtracted. This notion is not supportable, philosophically or economically, though at the moment it is very powerful indeed.

  I mentioned before that all this is somehow entangled with patriotism, with nationalism. There is a great scrum going on, now and also forever, since this model of economy has taken over so much of the world. China seems to be slowing, so India will emerge as the great competitor, presumably. We will marvel at the vast percentage increase in one measure or another of their well-being, as we always do, which any country in the world with a big enough population will demonstrate, since there are smart people everywhere and since infusions of money and industrial technology will have these effects anywhere. Their middle class will expand, as ours would too, given capital and new infrastructure and manufacturing, though it would grow less dramatically percentage-wise since it has been very large historically. Still, at some point these measures of the prosperity of, say, India would begin to be presented to us as alarming trends. They would be taken to mean that we were about to be vanquished, left in the dust of mediocrity and decline. Our cult of competition does not seem able to entertain the idea that two or more countries could flourish simultaneously, unless, of course, they are European. It does not permit the thought that our response to the economic rise of India or China or Brazil might properly be to say: Good for them. This is the use that is made of the old habits of nationalism. We are always ready to be persuaded that we are under threat. While care for our terrain and people and future can be tarnished as socialism, to be swept up in a general alarm that impoverishes them all is somehow American. What nonsense.

  Let us call the stripping down of our society for the purposes of our supposed economic struggle with the world the expropriation of our workers. Academics have made absurd uses of Marx’s categories so often that there are risks involved in even alluding to them. But Marx was critiquing political economy, and so am I. And nothing was more powerful in that brutal old system, now resurgent, than downward pressure on wages. Americans think Marx was criticizing America, an error of epochal consequence, propagated in the university as diligently as in any right-wing think tank. They think that political economy, that is, capitalism, was our invention and is the genius of our civilization—the greatest ever, by grace of capitalism, so they say. Indeed, unread books may govern the world, not well, since they so often are taken to justify our worst impulses and prejudices. The Holy Bible is a case in point. Then again, there is the history of academic so-called Marxism to misinform us. It is certainly true that as colonies created as extensions of the British industrial system, notoriously involving the Atlantic slave trade, our earliest beginnings have always haunted us and harmed us, too. Still, access to land, scarcity of labor and its mobility, and the communitarian ethos of the northern colonies changed the economy in fact, then in theory. The iron law of wages lacked the conditions that enforced it in the old country. If Jefferson’s “happiness” is given its frequent eighteenth-century meaning, prosperity or thriving, then the pursuit of happiness—a level of life above subsistence—would become possible as it had not been for any but the most exceptional members of the British working class. If political economy is capitalism, then the American colonies began to vary away from capitalism long before the Revolution. In this new environment only chattel slavery could preserve certain of its essential features, notably the immobilization of a workforce maintained at the level of subsistence and a radical polarization of wealth. Again, these were the plantations of the British industrial system, producing cotton for the cotton mills of Manchester. It is remarkable how often they are treated as if they were preindustrial, precapitalist, as if cotton and indigo were comestibles and sugar was a dietary staple, and as if the whole arrangement did not run on credit and speculation.

  Well, obviously I am very critical of the universities, too.
They give prestige to just the kind of thinking that undermines their own existence as humanist institutions, especially in economics but in many fields influenced by economics, for example, psychologies that subject all actions and interactions to cost-benefit analysis, to—the phrase should make us laugh—rational choice. And this bleeds out to the humanities, of course, which are utterly, hopelessly anomalous by these lights, and have run for cover to critical theory, which is tortuous and dreary enough to look like a lot of work and impenetrable enough to evade scrutiny. In every case the conception of what a human being is, and with it the thought of what she might be, is made tedious and small. The assumption current now, that the test of a university is its success in vaulting graduates into upper tiers of wealth and status, obscures the fact that this is an enormous country, and that many of its best and brightest prefer a modest life in Maine or South Dakota. Or in Iowa, as I find myself obliged to say from time to time. It obscures the fact that there is a vast educational culture in this country, unlike anything else in the world. It emerged from a glorious sense of the possible and explored and enhanced the possible through the spread of learning. If it seems to be failing now, this is true because we have forgotten what it is for, why the libraries like cathedrals, why the meadows and the flowers. They are all a tribute and an invitation to the young, who can and should make the world new, out of the unmapped and unbounded resource of their minds.