I haven’t left the house much over the last couple of days. My sheets are bunched up at the foot of the bed, clothes are strewn all over the floor, and containers of half-eaten soup and Emergen-C scan the wasteland from their perches on desktops and chairs.

It’s been wonderful. In fact, it’s a lot like a silent meditation retreat – just sitting and watching my thoughts and emotions arise and then fade away. Of course, the fact that I’m spending my time this way is for different reasons. In a retreat cabin in the woods with no electricity, it’s because there’s little else to do, and because that’s what you’re there for. Here at home, it’s because I don’t have the energy to do anything else.

And that’s a blessing. Because as I watch my mind churn out thoughts – most of which have to do with how I could entertain myself for fifteen minutes or half an hour – I’m getting a glimpse of just how much time I spend doing everything in my power to get away from myself. I want to be distracted, occupied, busy. I want to take up some activity that will make me feel like I’m doing something with my time – and it almost doesn’t matter what it is, so long as it feels productive. Watch reruns of Parks and Recreation again? Sure! Organize the spice rack? Why not! What I want, I think, is a feeling that I’m passing the time in a way that would be recognizable to other people, that would count as an answer to the question “What did you do today?”

But over these last few days, I haven’t had the energy to do those sorts of things. In fact, when I’ve considered them, I’ve often felt repelled by the sheer transparency of my strategies to stay busy, by my desire to do anything but spend time alone. In Buddhist terms, I’ve felt revulsion at the way my mind constantly grasps after something – something solid, something pleasurable, something other than this.

And even in those very moments of insight, the grasping instinct reasserts itself.  Too tired to get up and make dinner? Why not just stay here and check e-mail on your phone? Or tick off those little tasks you’ve accrued in your ‘Notes’ app. This instinct can even begin to sound like wisdom: You’re not dead, are you? So you ought to be able to get at least something done.

But if I listen closely, I realize that this isn’t the voice of wisdom – it’s the voice of neurosis, of an ego that doesn’t know how to be in the world except by creating a never-ending stream of tasks to accomplish. When I translate, this is how it sounds: do stuff do stuff do stuff do stuff do stuff.

This, I see, is the voice that’s always in the background – the one that’s forever planning my next activity in the midst of this one. (What will I do after I finish this draft? Will I post it right away? Will I take a break and review it later? If I take that break, how will I spend my time? A snack? A shower? And so on, without end.)

The voice begins to sound petty, needy, small; uneasiness courses through my body. I didn’t realize I was quite this sick.

Chris Helali

Christopher Helali – Marxist, U.S. Army Officer, community college professor, and graduate student at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology –  has some things to say.

In what follows, we discuss Buddhism, Marxism, Carl Sagan, the Acropolis, Keynesian economics, Ayn Rand, intersubjectivity, Bill Clinton, John Locke, and Slavoj Žižek.

MATT BIEBER: You describe yourself as a Marxist. What does that mean for you?

CHRIS HELALI: For me, I’ve realized that the current situation that we live in is unsatisfactory and that there are inherent contradictions within the system that perpetuate inequality. Growing up and reading history and political theory and, of course, hearing of the tales of my family, who participated in ideological conflict both in Greece and in Iran, I realized that there must be another alternative, there has to be another path. So that led me down the road of identifying myself as a Marxist.

MB: When did that begin?

CH: It began in high school. Growing up, I had heard, of course, the stories of my grandfather’s brother – who was a freedom fighter, in Greek, adarti. He was a mountain guerrilla in southern Greece who was killed because of his affiliation with communism.

So for me, I understood what that meant, and I understood the classic yiayia tale – if you have two coats and somebody needs a coat, give that person your coat. That was all good, but it wasn’t until high school that I truly began to learn and immerse myself in it rigorously, to understand the theory behind it.

My high school, which was a private, all-boys Catholic school, had a teacher, Mr. Carl Wilson, who specialized in Russian and Chinese history. So I learned about Russian communism and Chinese communism through that class, and it allowed me the opportunity to really delve into the history of communism and the theory that went behind Leninism, Stalinism and later on, Soviet revisionism and Maoism and then what would happen with Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Communist Party today. So I was fascinated by that. I continued my studies along those lines.

For me, Marxism today is more relevant than ever before. I think that we’ve realized the economic disparity which has emerged in this country. I think that this country understood what the two positions were in the early part of the 20^th century. We had a large socialist movement in this country under the leadership of Eugene Debs. We had the IWW, a prominent, active and militant union. On the other hand we had the fears of fascism and corporate monopolies. I think our politicians realized that there had to be a balance. That’s when they turned to Keynesian economics.

But what we’ve seen is a turn away from that economic model, the model of a welfare state, and a return to that laissez-faire, Milton Friedman (inspired by Ayn Rand) ethical egoism that is at the heart of the capitalist system today – and financial capitalism, where we really see it. I see that that is the path that leads to the destruction of our species. We are becoming so abstracted by this new Chicago School economic principle that the disparity, the depression, the anxiety that has developed in society – not only in ours but in many societies around the world – has thrown us off-balance. And of course, people like my wife and others, my friends, look towards the spiritual path to overcome these difficulties.

Recently, my wife and I spent a month in a Buddhist monastery, and she really took value in that. I took value in the fact that the Dalai Lama proclaims himself to be a Marxist, and I took value in the fact that the Nepalese people are fighting right now for freedom in alliance with a Maoist insurgency. So whereas some people want to find their way out in meditation or yoga or a variety of practices and spiritual traditions, I really see the importance of changing the political makeup –

MB: Let me jump in here. I want to come back to this question of whether there’s really an opposition between deep contemplative practice and political change. But for the moment, I want to ask about this term “ethical egoism” that you mentioned. In particular, how do you conceive the relationship between ethical egoism and the kind of economic system that we have today.

CH: I think that the perfect example is at the beginning of The Fountainhead, one of Ayn Rand’s seminal works. There’s a scene in which a young man, an aspiring architect, goes against the architectural establishment in his school. He basically says that he, himself, will redefine architecture, and the principal, the leader of the school, says something to the effect of, “You can’t do that. Architecture is a group project, created when people come together. Architecture doesn’t happen with one person.” But the young man is adamant that he, himself, will create architecture for himself.

Ayn Rand was very loose in how she understood morals and ethics. In the society she envisions, individuals make themselves. It’s the individual who propels him- or herself forward.

The problem is that individuals do not exist on their own. It’s a fallacy; it’s an illusion. How can I be individual when I require so many people to maintain that individuality? Somebody picks up my trash. Somebody pumps the water and cleans the water that comes into my house. Somebody takes care of the electrical power plant that gives me light and heat.

So to say that I’m an individual and that I make myself just isn’t true. We can talk about intersubjectivity or other things, but what it really is, is that we are a social species. Nobody exists apart from one another. Even in our upbringing—and this is where I find a lot of common ground with the Buddhist tradition—the idea of the mother-child relationship, what a fantastic example for this. The child cannot exist on its own. First of all, it needs two people to procreate. It needs the mother to develop within, and the mother to nurture and to bring forth life. Children do not magically appear out of the air and then become themselves. No. Children are raised in a certain family context, within a certain social context.

MB: I think we can probably go farther in this direction. You mention Milton Friedman earlier, so let me speak to that for a moment. The way I conceive the political spectrum is that almost everyone–right and left–is invested in the ethical egoism you were describing earlier. Roughly speaking, people on the right conceive of everybody as atoms and they’re okay with that. People on the left conceive everybody as atoms but think that those atoms ought to be nicer to each other and work together to form a molecule or something.

But the truth of the matter is that we don’t just pick up each other’s trash and power each other’s homes – we are each other. We are not discrete, freestanding entities that choose to enter relationships with each other. We are comprised of those relationships. To conceive of ourselves as independent is existentially incoherent.

This is why I think that the spiritual and meditative practices at that monastery you visited might have everything to do with politics. In other words, conceived in the right spirit, meditation isn’t actually seem an escape at all. Rather, it’s a way to confront reality. Because as we watch our minds in meditation, we discover, “Oh my gosh, I’m not a solid entity. I’m not a thing. Instead, I’m just a confluence of thoughts and memories and aspirations and dreams and hopes and fears, most of which have to do with other people and come from my relationships with other people. I am, in fact, an effect of other people. My fate is intimately linked with theirs, because at least in some sense, we are the same.

My sense is that realizing this – way more than any slogan or ideology – is key to establishing the motivation necessary to carry out liberative political work.

CH: Absolutely. The first time you do meditation, your mind is referred to as the monkey mind. You’re constantly bombarded by images, by thoughts, by whatever’s going around you the minute you close your eyes. And the point is to silence that and to — you know, single-pointed concentration—to train yourself to so that you’re not so all over the map, to focus on one thing, and to thereby understand it and to really grasp it.

When I meditate, it calms me; I feel a sense of comfort, solitude. I think that in the society we live in, now more than ever, people want that. People want a sense of solitude, of peace, of tranquility. For many people, nature provided that in older times. We see the Transcendentalists going out, looking at nature. We see philosophers looking at the sky, trying to understand our relationship with the cosmos.

This is where I can understand the theologians’ point. The priest that I grew up with, Father Clapsis, would say that we need to have a theocentric vision. Not putting ourselves at the center, but understanding that we are one part of a big process, of a process that goes on all around us.

Well, I don’t have a theocentric vision. I definitely don’t think that the anthropocentric image that is promulgated either on the radical left or on the radical right is a good alternative, either.

I’m more inclined to go to physics, to Carl Sagan. He says that the minute we look up, we realize that we are created of the same matter that everything in the universe is created of, and that we are just one planet in a solar system in a galaxy that is at the far edges of the universe. And at that point you realize that you are inconsequential, that you don’t really matter.

It should not make you scared or worried or all of a sudden have this existential crisis. It should, in fact, empower you to realize that life is precious and that you have a gift and that you can rationalize everything that you see in some way. You can understand it. By doing that, it should propel you to make things better on this planet. It should propel you to unite with the fellow members of your species towards common goals.

MB: That’s interesting. I’m not sure I see the connection between “rationalizing everything we see” and doing good for the world. I was trying to suggest that real compassion might have to be generated in a more organic way, through a recognition that you are comprised of other people and that they are comprised of you. It isn’t a reason exactly; it isn’t the result of a logical process. It’s something that emerges from a certain state of mind.

I suppose I worry about trying to build political movements on reason, on arguments, as opposed to cultivating sensibilities out of which compassion emerges more naturally. Cultivating compassion isn’t necessarily easy either way, but I do think that there is a pretty big difference between these two approaches.

CH: In my humble opinion, I think that compassion means different things in different contexts. I think that compassion as espoused by Tibetan Buddhism doesn’t necessarily translate to the compassion espoused by other traditions. I think that by conceiving compassion as this monolith, you lose the particularities. I don’t think compassion in itself is a universal. I think the feeling that may arise from a compassionate state of being is universal for our species. But the way various traditions conceive of compassion can differ.

Granted, I think there are probably common elements and threads. But humans are products of a complex network of social relations, cultural relations, and language, and some of these things may get lost in translation. I think that the compassion that a Westerner practicing Buddhism feels may not necessarily translate to the compassion a Tibetan monk feels in the mountains.

Perhaps the Westerner grew up in a more privileged lifestyle that allows  him or her to try out a Buddhist tradition. The monk, on the other hand, may have been born into the tradition or forced into the monastic life by  his family’s economic need.

MB: Earlier, you described the political and economic status quo under which we live as unsatisfactory. Say more about how you conceive the problems we face, and how Marxism might provide some solutions.

CH: First and foremost, the issue is the things we value. In this country and in the capitalist system, we value competition, we value prosperity, we value the person on top, the winner. It’s in valuing those things, and most especially in valuing material success – in which success is defined by how much you have, what you have to show for it. This is the essential contradiction within the system. Because we know that the Earth does not have infinite resources and we know that the universe does not have infinite resources; there is a point at which that system will no longer be able to sustain itself.

Maybe this isn’t what our species should aspire to. Maybe we shouldn’t aspire to a world in which one group must suffer if another is to prosper. Statistics show that the top 20% in the world hold approximately 80% of the wealth. Those top 20% tend to think that they generated their own prosperity—the American model of “pick yourself up by the bootstraps”—but it came at the expense of the remaining 80%. We no longer live in a state of communal sharing.

The values that the system teaches us are wrong. The Keynesian economic model, on the other hand, taught us that we do in fact have an obligation to everyone in society. There is a need for healthcare; there is a need for unions; there is a need for higher wages and better working conditions and education. But that all was eroded by the values that lay at the base of the our current system.

You said it perfectly in the class when you spoke about Locke’s Second Treatise, where property is what I put into the land, what I form with my hands becomes mine. Well, that’s half of the equation. The land was there and you came from the land, right? So to say that the land is yours, the land could equally say that you’re a part of it. So we have this mentality that as humans, with our faculty of reasoning and our capacity to dominate, that we have a right to the land, that we have a right to everything that falls from the blue sky. The minute that we replace those value systems, we can have a more harmonious balance in the world.

MB: On one level, I’m really sympathetic with this argument about limited planetary resources, because I think it’s probably true. But I do worry that leading off with that argument re-instantiates the kind of self-interest that is at the core of what you’re trying to combat.

Imagine we develop some hyper-efficient technology for converting solar energy into electricity. All of a sudden, that argument goes away, and we’re still left with the deeper problem – the sense that the way we live isn’t actually good for us; the things that we’re taught to want don’t actually bring us deep wellbeing; that viewing our neighbors and fellow human beings as enemies or competitors in a zero-sum game is bad for all of us. It makes us small, and it forms us into these tiny little clinging egos that are fighting to defend and to protect their territory all the time.

You also mentioned this effort to dominate nature; that cuts into something very deep, which is a control-oriented mentality. More generally, it’s the sense that we can set goals – getting more stuff or producing more products or whatever – and that attaining those goals will lead to contentment. To me, the profound truth is that control over our lives constantly eludes us. If we base our own wellbeing on the possibility of control, we’re bound to fail.

But let’s return to something you mentioned earlier. You were speaking enthusiastically about Keynesian economics, and I got the sense that you have some good feelings toward FDR – toward a period in our history in which a somewhat more communitarian ethic was espoused at the highest levels of government. But here, we’re talking about the Democratic left – unions and poverty relief and so forth. If all of that can be accommodated within the framework of mainstream politics, then what do we need Marxism for?

CH: Well, it was accommodated but it’s failed, it’s gone; the majority of it is gone. Union membership has gone down to 8% in this country from a high in the 30s. The Democratic left was a good experiment at the time. But it failed because the Democratic left got corrupted; it got corrupted by itself, by being a part of the system. So when the money started coming in, they went against what the Democratic left had fought for.

So for example, Bill Clinton, a figure highly revered by Democrats today, right? Under Clinton, the leader of the Federal Reserve was Alan Greenspan, and Alan Greenspan was a disciple of Ayn Rand. We had a variety of economists who promulgated laissez-faire deregulation, and Bill Clinton gave them the green light. Both Republicans and Democrats gave them the green light. This deregulation started with Jimmy Carter and progressed through the Reagan years into the Bush, Clinton, and then Bush II years. Along the way, we see unions collapsing and NAFTA being passed.

I identified with the left in America for a while, but no longer. I don’t understand the mentality of the left today, saying that it’s okay that we want cheap goods, but we’re not willing to pay higher prices. We’re going to speak one way – we’re going to pander to the large unions, and we’re going to say, “Oh, yes, we fight for you,” but at the same time we’re going to pass free trade agreements that, at their core, send good manufacturing jobs out of this country to countries where these products can be produced for pennies.

The Democratic left isn’t as radical as it used to be; it’s lost that. It’s slowly being brought towards the right. Meanwhile, the right has become so radical and corrupted by xenophobic and nationalist politics – “build a wall against the immigrants” and so on and so forth. Whereas in the past, the left brought the right towards itself with a massive socialist movement, with the fear of communism, with the unions in powerful positions; it brought the dialogue leftward.

Now we’re going in the opposite direction – that’s the problem. That’s why we need to radicalize the left once again. That’s how we can rediscover the balance this country once knew.

MB: If I understand you then, you’re not really after Marx’s original goals–proletarian revolution and collective ownership of the means of production. It’s more about creating a new center; it’s about pushing the dialogue in this country far enough left that the place we end up in is closer to where we once were. Is that right?

CH: I realize that there are limitations within our contemporary Marxist framework. Theorists like Poulantzas, Erik Olin Wright, and others have tried to overlay a Marxist class structure today on western countries like America. For me, I do not believe that even capitalism “with a human face”— to use Žižek’s term – is necessarily a good thing.  I want to move toward a new society, toward a new economic framework, toward the eradication of money, toward the eradication of the system in which we operate.

We may never get there – and I’ve accepted that. It’s a utopian vision that I realize is comforting for me, just like I’m sure heaven or nirvana is comforting to people. Realizing our limitations is important. Marxism in this country has declined. There was a little bit of renewed vigor after Occupy Wall Street, and I think that it’s still there. But I don’t see a proletarian revolution coming, not even in the distant future.

Still, we can move beyond this economic system that we have today. It poses an existential crisis for our species.

I would like to see the potentiality of the human species realized. We went to the moon. I think our species could learn a lot more about this universe instead of being so fixated on material wealth. We can do more to educate people. We can build a better society. But I don’t think that those in power today want to do that. They may pander about education and things of that sort, but having been a tutor in a university and now serving as an adjunct professor at a community college, I can tell you that students are in need of an education, and that it is easier for the system to keep its people ignorant than to give those students a wealth of information so they can decide for themselves.

MB: You teach about Marxism at MassBay Community College.

CH: Yes, I do – absolutely. I give them a unique perspective, and I think that many of my students have been very receptive to that. They’ve seen that there are good things in it. For me, Marxism works; for others it may not work. What we need to do is open up a dialogue where we can discuss the merits and limitations of the system. Every system has limitations. If I didn’t recognize that, I would probably be the same as an evangelical Christian would be, with this all-encompassing and very deterministic view of things – you know, either you accept Christ or you burn in hell.

I don’t say that about Marxism. I simply say that we face a crisis, and that crisis needs to be solved. We can look to Marx for some good tools to solve that crisis, and to help us see that our system may not necessarily be the end-all-be-all. Our system should not be the end; it should not be the ultimate creation of the human mind. We can move beyond it.

If people are willing to believe in heaven and hell and to joke about vampires on HBO, I think that we should also believe that another world is possible. I don’t understand why that has to be a vision that’s relegated to the sidelines – that it’s easier for people to believe in metaphysical things. But to believe that we can change the conditions here and now, that is pure fantasy – never achievable. Well, why not?

MB: I suspect that one of the tensions and contradictions that constrain the way we think about some of these challenges is the nation-state itself. Earlier, you were talking about Democratic politicians who, on one hand, promise to protect union jobs, and on the other hand, pass free trade agreements that result in union jobs going overseas.

As I was listening to you, I was thinking about two things. The first is that we’re all human beings, and that while it’s very difficult to watch communities that we know suffer, there might at least be some comfort in knowing that somebody is going to be employed somewhere. I’m not sure how to feel about that.

The other thing is that Marx believed that the proletarian revolution couldn’t happen in just one place. It had to take place around the whole world all at once – that that was the only way to achieve escape velocity from the constraints of capitalism.

When we operate within the confines of the nation-state and try to create economic security for our own fellow citizens, we do so knowing that other countries do it differently and that we have to interact with them economically. In a certain sense, then, I would love to imagine a politician who’s in that jam – on the one hand, wanting to protect his constituents, and on the other hand, believing that a certain type of free trade agreement will do good for countries that are in more dire economic straits than we are. Because at least that person sees these moral contradictions.

CH: You bring up a good point. Marxism is an international ideology. It’s an ideology motivated by the breaking down of those borders that constrain us. I remember a quote by a member of the IWW. He was asked, “What are you?” and he said, “I’m a worker.” He was asked, “What country are you a citizen of?” and the worker replied, “I am a citizen of industry.” There are no borders. A worker is a worker; a worker here is the same as a worker overseas. They both have terrible conditions, some more than others, and they both live a hard life. They toil and they try to make a better existence for themselves in a system that is inherently keeping them down.

I think now more than ever we see that we can’t progress as easily as we wish. The American dream is dead. I actually think it was a fantasy to begin with. Not everybody can be a winner in this system; not everybody can win. I enjoy seeing in schools how “Everybody did a good job” or everybody gets a trophy. That is not how it operates in the real world, not within a capitalist framework. Somebody wins; somebody loses. Somebody gets a big house; somebody gets a shack. That’s just it.

The bottom 10% and the top 10% are father apart than ever and growing even farther apart. Going back to what you said about finite resources, let’s connect all of this with a concept that exists in some traditions, that of the transitory nature of all things.

I love science. I consider myself an empirical man and a scientific man. The universe will end, it’s a guaranteed fact. Either with a big crunch –with the universe coming back in on itself – or a big rip, a big tear, everything being stretched apart.

The universe is expanding. When Einstein realized this, he got very worried and it caused an existential crisis for him. He didn’t really believe it. But once Edwin Hubble showed that that was indeed what was going on, Einstein came to terms with the fact that the universe is expanding. Which means that there will come a point where everything that we’ve done, all of our monuments, will be gone. That’s it!

It’s a very hard thing for people to swallow. We like to think in eternal terms because of our own mortality. We like to try to envision a time where we will live forever – and we won’t. This recognition – that I don’t believe that I’m going to last forever, that I will die at some point – is important to me.

This is where I think Buddhism comes into play. Given that I’m going to die, how do I change the conditions here and now – not only to make my life a happier, more tolerable one, but for those around me?

I do not believe capitalism provides that opportunity. I think that we need another path. Is Marxism the answer? For me, it offers a lot of good things. That said, I think we can go beyond Marxism. That’s the beauty of Karl Marx; he critiques everything, and by doing that, he encourages us to critique him as well. We must be radical critics of ourselves too; we must radically and consistently critique the current state of things. The moment we become apathetic is the moment that we go back to this way of living, this clamoring after success and power. We can move beyond that.

MB: The fact that everything is destined to end strike a deep chord with me, too. We can think about so many of the ways we live as attempts to avoid that reality, efforts to grasp at permanence or build monuments for our own egos. The irony is that we can’t win that game; we absolutely lose that game. The only way we have a shot at ‘winning,’ so to speak, is by giving up that particular game and realizing that there isn’t anything to hold onto. There is, however, the possibility to live a much bigger, vaster, deeper, more profound life – and I think that can happen when we’re truly living with and for one another, as opposed to keeping one another at bay.

CH: If I can just interrupt you.

MB: Please.

CH: I love the fact that when I look at history – and being ethnically Greek, I love my history – the Greeks wanted to keep things eternal. Plato believed that matter itself was eternal, and there was this sense that true success came from living far beyond your mortal years, right? In the Orthodox Church, we have the ceremony where we commemorate the dead. The hymnal refrain of the service says, “May your memory be eternal.” There is this need for eternal memory, eternal monuments.

That is why it’s fascinating to see that the Acropolis and the monuments built by the Greeks will far outlast the monuments built by capitalism. Capitalism claims that it wants to be eternal, but its monuments are transitory. For the Greeks, building the Acropolis – a center piece, a temple for Athena, for wisdom – was a crowning achievement. It lasts because it was built that way – to last. It lasts because that’s where they invested everything. The people around the Acropolis, their houses and their things are now shattered vases and little trinkets here and there, but the Acropolis remains.

Today, we create all of these monuments of steel and glass that will not last. We build bigger and better and more beautiful, but we use all of the cheapest materials and we get the cheapest labor. We don’t put our own blood, sweat, and tears into creating things that will last. We build these huge apartment complexes, and in 20 or 30 years, we bring them down. I think that in itself shows a lot about the system.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are those of the interviewee and do not reflect the opinions of the United States Army, the Department of Defense or the United States Government.

Steve Jungkeit

Steve Jungkeit is a Lecturer on Ethics at Harvard Divinity School. He holds a PhD in Modern Christian Thought from Yale, and he is the author of Spaces of Modern Theology: Geography and Power in Schleiermacher’s World. Jungkeit is also an ordained Presbyterian minister and a father of three.

This semester, Jungkeit is teaching the only course at Harvard dedicated to the Marxist tradition. (Full disclosure: I am a student in the class.)

MATT BIEBER: Marx, Marxism, socialism – these are dirty words in America. Was that always true? Or was there a time – perhaps around the time of Marx’s original publications – when you could self-describe as a Marxist in the United States and not get shouted out of the mainstream?

STEVE JUNGKEIT: I don’t know about the time of Marx’s original publications, but I’d like to believe that in the 1890s perhaps, 1920s, when there was a strong labor movement going on in the country, a lot of civil unrest, my sense of things is that it was possible to describe oneself as a Marxist, to use Marxist ideas, to appropriate Marxist categories and language, to use the ideas of socialism in a fairly overt and mainstream way for the purpose of social organization.

In the past, it was possible to do that. I think maybe in the 1960s as well. That may be one of the last moments where it seemed that Marxist categories were out in the open somewhere, maybe even just in a pocket of intellectuals or activists working for civil rights or women’s rights or whatever. But there have been these moments in American culture and American history when it seems like it’s manifested itself, it seems like it’s been allowed to come to the forefront. But not lately. I think you’re right to say lately it does seem like almost anathema to talk about these categories. And it’s been that way since the middle 70s or so.

I think that’s beginning to change. More and more I’m picking up the chatter out there in the airwaves; I think people are open to reading Marx, thinking about Marx. Especially after [the economic crisis of] 2008, but even before that. I don’t know where it’s leading or whether we’re leading into a new moment like the 60s or the 1920s or maybe the 1890s. I don’t know.

MB: You’re teaching a course on “Marx and his Readers.” Obviously, that covers a lot of ground. Which aspects of the Marxist tradition do you see as most urgent, useful, or applicable to our contemporary situation?

SJ: What I’m not interested in doing is gaining converts or getting people to join a party or something like that. I don’t even know where to go to join a party. What I am interested in is getting people to think about class consciousness. I think more and more we need to be thinking through that stuff. Again, after 2008, after Occupy Wall Street, more and more I think that conversation is probably happening, but I think we need to keep having that conversation and keep thinking about it. In order to have that conversation, it makes all the sense in the world to turn to Marx and the Marxist tradition, to see what one of the finest thinkers on class consciousness has to say about this stuff.

Thinking through, for example, how capital works and how it creates this labor pool and underclass that capitalism depends upon in order to function. I think it’s a really helpful thing to witness as Marx makes these grand assertions in Capital. So working that through in Marx, but then working it through in Lenin, working it through in Lukacs and Althusser and seeing the ways others have run with this idea too.

Here’s the other thing I think we need to figure out, the big public conversation that needs to happen: how do you organize? If you’re worried about these issues, how do you organize resistance? How do you organize counterpunches? I mean, it’s one thing to sit and read these texts in a seminar, but how do you organize something?

I remember sitting through a seminar that David Harvey led at Yale at one point, and he took us through this project he was working on – I don’t know, in 2007 or 2008 – about the history of neoliberalism. He was walking us through how neoliberalism started to arise, how it gained its power, its force, and he concluded this whole grand sweeping history of the last 30 years by saying, “Look, for the last 30 years, neoliberalism has been waging a kind of class warfare. It’s incredibly potent, it’s incredibly organized.” He ended the whole talk by saying, “We need to wage class warfare back.”

So the first question is: What do you mean by “we”? Who’s “we”? And the next question is: How do you do that? How do you wage class warfare? What would that look like?

I think in a way, that’s started to happen, as people are starting to talk about tax codes. People are starting to talk about income inequality. People are starting to talk about wages that corporate executives make, tax rates that executives pay versus the tax rates that middle class and lower-income people pay.

So two of the major things that we’re drawing from these texts: 1) How do we become increasingly class-conscious?—because I think it’s everywhere around us and we just need to take off the blinkers to see it—and, 2) How do you get organized to do that?

Marx does a great job with the class-consciousness business, not so great on organization. Lenin is good on class consciousness but he’s great on organization. I think there needs to be more contemporary analysis. I don’t have any illusions about duplicating or replicating their projects–I wouldn’t want to.

MB: Class-consciousness feels like one of the most complicated pieces. In Capital and elsewhere, Marx divides the world into pretty stark categories: there’s the capitalist and there’s the laborer, and it’s pretty clear where you fall. Subsequent thinkers have elaborated that hierarchy with lots of subclasses and categories and so forth.

I wonder if this is part of what’s so difficult about even recognizing class dynamics – the difficulty of locating yourself in such a complicated hierarchy. And the subtler the distinctions, the more incentive there is to identify yourself with the particular rung you’re on, as opposed to the more general class of folks who are in roughly the same situation you’re in.

Marx actually talks about labor as a form of slavery – that if she wants to eat, the laborer doesn’t have any choice about whether to sell her labor; she can only choose which capitalist to sell it to. Unless you’re independently wealthy or you have a bunch of capital, that’s the situation you’re in.

This radically changed the way I think about the proletariat. In one sense, I’m incredibly lucky – I have lots of rare opportunities. But in another sense, I share something with many –

SJ: We all sell our labor.

MB: Yes. It makes me think about the American dream – how most versions of it are wrapped up in ideas of financial advancement, being capable of purchasing more. There’s a built-in disincentive to recognizing the commonality of your economic situation with other people, because you’re trying to keep up with the Joneses.

SJ: I think that’s true. Walter Rauschenbusch had that quote that I drew from in one of our classes – he talks about how most ministers are actually proletarians, living hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck, and worrying about how to live once the paychecks end. I think that’s actually the state that most people who come into this culture wind up in – a job that’s going to pay but not super-well. And, increasingly, massive debt. I think probably a lot of folks are living that proletarian existence, as Rauschenbusch describes it.

That’s a different kind of proletarian existence than, say, what Marx described when he was touring the factories in Manchester – it’s a middle class proletarian existence.

We also need to think about social capital. People coming to Harvard Divinity School (or anywhere like this) might live a proletarian existence, but they have this immense social capital that confers privileges that are less tangible, but they’re privileges nonetheless. So it’s a different kind of proletarian existence. But nevertheless it’s still hand-to-mouth, can still be hand-to-mouth. But we do need to nuance what we mean – this is not people going down into the mines.

MB: I was thinking something similar – that there’s something about the original imagery that carries through ‘til today. When I think ‘proletarian’, I think of someone covered in soot and working in some really dangerous, unhealthy situation. And in this room, our situation is not that.

SJ: That stuff’s now been globalized. It’s been largely removed from the purview of most of our urban lives. We don’t see it, but it’s out there. So, yes, it’s gone from the factories in Michigan or Boston or New Haven or Bridgeport; now it’s in Bangladesh or Jakarta or Shenzhen. So it’s still out there; that’s the deep proletarian existence. I don’t want to confuse that with the thing that Rauschenbusch was talking about.

MB: Does this help explain why Marxist thinking is so marginal in America? That some of the most dangerous, dehumanizing jobs – jobs that might have once generated or fanned the flames of a robust class consciousness – just aren’t here anymore. And that when they’re gone, they’re “out of sight, out of mind.” When that becomes the case, it’s easier to find yourself back in this neoliberal, rising-tide-lifts-all-boats way of looking at the world – because most of the boats around you aren’t particularly leaky.

SJ: Or we don’t see them as leaky, because of, say, a credit system. But if you looked a little bit deeper and a little bit harder, they’d be pretty leaky, and without the buttressing of credit, I think a lot of those boats would be going under. This complicates things even more; it makes it harder to see what kinds of lives people are actually capable of leading, what wages are actually capable of buying.

But anyway, I think you’re exactly right – that by pushing those jobs offshore, it removes it from our purview, and it removes it from our consciousness as well. So it makes it incredibly hard to organize. Once you disperse labor like that, it’s hard to get people to talk, it’s hard to get people to strike – anything like that. So it has all kinds of consequences.

Hardt and Negri think that the rise in network power, the rise of the internet, Facebook and Twitter and things like that, actually provides the capability for organizing these dispersed populations. That might be – I don’t know; I’m open to that. I’m a little suspicious – I don’t quite know that these tools are actually going to unify us, but it’s an interesting thought. There might be something there.

MB: You’ve said previously that you view the US as existing within a pretty tight ideological bubble. Within that bubble, it becomes easy to imagine that Marxism isn’t just dead here, but is dead, full-stop, for the entire world. But as you’ve pointed out, there are lots of places around the world where the inspiration and insights of the tradition are alive and well, motivating people and movements for change.

SJ: When I was first reading this material, I used to go to this bar off-campus in New Haven. I ran into an old classmate of mine; he said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, it’s our Marxist reading group.” He just thought it was laughable. “What are you even talking about? Why are you reading this stuff? What’s the point?” He seemed to think that Marxism was a conversation that maybe had been going on 30 years ago, but maybe not even then. That’s kind of the typical reaction here, I think. “What is even the point?”

Well, the response is that there are all kinds of pockets of Marxist thought around the world. It doesn’t take long to uncover, it doesn’t take long to unpack. One really easy example is every couple of weeks, the London Review of Books arrives in my mailbox, and I guarantee there’s going to be an article in there that’s going to be informed by some current of Marxist thought – Perry Anderson just had this obituary reflection on Eric Hobsbawm, or Terry Eagleton’s going to say something, or Zizek. So even in a fairly mainstream European publication, offshore from America, it’s able to thrive.

I think that’s true in Continental thought in general. I think about some of the things that are happening in, say, French thought, especially since Derrida’s death in 2004 – this resurgence of Marxist-inspired thought. It had been there, but I think now it’s more prevalent. Zizek all of a sudden gets a phenomenal hearing. Badiou, Agamben, and Hart and Negri started putting their stuff out and getting more of a following.

But then I think of all the political regimes, say, in Venezuela, all over Latin America. Marxism is still alive and well in a new idiom, a new frame and guise. Bolivia, Cuba – think about what’s going to happen in Cuba in the next five or ten years – who knows, tomorrow? It seems like it’s prevalent across Latin America and Asia, Europe as well, and it’s a shame that Americans can’t engage that more carefully and more fully.

MB: Right. It feels like something that is just so toxic that it can’t even be approached. I remember in the 2008 presidential campaign, just a couple of days before the actual election, a reporter from a local station in Florida was interviewing then-candidate Biden and said “You may recognize this famous quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?”

It was amazing on a couple of levels: one, because she apparently didn’t seem to recognize that we already have a redistributive tax system –

SJ: That’s what taxes are – redistributive.

MB: Right! And more than that, what struck me was that she seemed to think that the redistributive impulse – and maybe sharing more basically – was somehow morally suspect.

I was talking to a friend of mine, a PhD student in business economics here, who told me that if economic growth had been 1% less over the last 50 years, average incomes would be 40% less. He concluded by suggesting that perhaps the best thing we can do for the poor is to grow the economy.

I don’t want to misconstrue his views – I think he supports raising taxes on the wealthy for other reasons - but there was this really interesting note in what he was saying. That we may not be able to afford to help one another now, because we have to grow the economy so we can help each other in the future. In other words, we can’t afford compassion, we can’t afford generosity.

I remember when President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. There was this whole controversy when Obama talked about how Sotomayor has empathy, and how that’s a valuable trait in a judge.

It seems as if the discourse of the last 30 or 40 years has made it more difficult to imagine empathy and compassion as anything other than evidence of a weak, lily-livered mentality. That we just can’t afford to be good to one another.

SJ: It’s too sentimental.

MB: And this is the amazing thing about some of the early Marxists. Whatever you think of Marx’ and Lenin’s political conclusions, what you can’t get away from is the fact that they were driven by a profound compassion for the suffering of their fellow human beings under conditions of brutal exploitation. And that stuff is deeply moving.

The tradition has been so marred by the failures and brutalities of particular Communist regimes that that original motivation, I think, gets lost, and all people see is the Red menace or the specter of Stalin or whatever.

SJ: Those original moments of Engels seeing these factory conditions, and then Marx, those long passages on the working day. What happens to people in these kinds of conditions? What happens to human lives? What happens to their sense of time? What happens to bodies? How are they maimed? I think that’s the moral core of this tradition in a sense: what happens to human lives and human bodies when capitalism is unleashed and runs amok?

So I agree with you. I think that’s a fundamentally good question to be asking, to be noticing. What are the working conditions in capitalist regimes? What’s the price it’s exacting from bodies and lives?

Marx doesn’t begin his analysis there; that comes through in the middle of Capital. But insofar as it’s in the middle, I feel like that’s one of the core pieces that he’s working with, and it becomes this voice of moral outrage: “Look what’s happening here!”

So if nothing else, if we got back to that, noticing what’s happening to concrete bodies, concrete lives, that might be a good thing. Maybe we construct something different than what Marx, Engels, Lenin and all the rest did. I tend to think we’ll probably have to – if we’re going to do anything, then the outcome’s going to have to be different. Whatever’s been tried, we have to do it better.

So I don’t know what the next stage or the next move is, but I think we need to learn from their outrage and imagine what our world would look like without these maimed bodies and maimed lives for the sake of consumption and production. That, to me, is an urgent moral question. And it doesn’t feel sentimental to ask that; I think it’s profoundly realistic, having our eyes opened wide to the conditions that a lot of people exist in. We’re all touched by it and we all participate to a degree, but many of us exist at a safe remove from those harsh conditions.

Once you have that moral vision, once you have that realization, how do you change it? How do you organize something different? Lenin in particular makes for very interesting reading. I don’t know how I feel about him – I love him in a lot of ways but I’m not entirely confident I would want to live under his regime. Working with what he had to work with, he made some very interesting choices, probably some necessary choices. But for many of us in the American context, the liberal democratic context, that would be a hard sell to make.

So, yeah, I myself feel the tension there – how far would I be able to take this? But this is where these texts can push me too.

MB: When we left off, we were talking about living in a world in which we know that many of the most difficult or physically dangerous jobs have been shipped overseas.

There’s a tension that comes with knowing that your way of life is based on other people’s suffering, is based on knowing that there’s a class of people who have dangerous, painful jobs somewhere else. And in this situation, the incentives to repress or self-deceive or adopt ideologies that pave over these tensions are incredibly high.

SJ: I want to be made uncomfortable. I want to read stuff and be made aware of stuff that I don’t know what to do about, but that nags me, that bothers me, that haunts me. That, in and of itself, feels like the beginning of an ethics. I often read this stuff and feel confused about it. I don’t know how to appropriate it necessarily. I sometimes feel like a lone reader. I go to the library and read something; I don’t why that’s particularly noble. It’s good material; I come into conversation with other folks who are invested in it.

But I think there is something to it in that what it does is create a lived tension at least in my existence – and I hope in the existence of others who encounter this material. That something doesn’t quite add up in my life and I am dependent upon these nefarious, malignant realities.

I think the first step – and maybe the only step that a lot of us make – is confusion. What do we do? But maybe there are other steps too that I, in a way, am offering the class. Continually reading the stuff, trying to figure out: What is to be done? Again, it might not be Lenin and his answers to that question. But at the end of the class, I want the class to be thinking: How do we answer that question? What is to be done? I’m pretty open about saying, “Hey, I need help with that question and I’m glad I have a lot of other smart people to think through it with me.”

But I do think what these texts and this tradition can do is to create an interruption in our thought-worlds and maybe in our lived worlds, maybe in some small ways, maybe some big ones as well. I don’t know quite where that takes everybody individually or collectively. But thank God for that interruption. It’s small, but it’s something.

MB: It’s an offering.

SJ: It’s an offering, right. That’s a good way to put it.

We were talking earlier about how factory jobs have been shipped overseas. This comes back to a connection to the aesthetic side. So this figure who operated/operates within the Marxist sphere—Jacques Rancière, he’s getting a lot of press these days—has a notion of the “distribution of the sensible” and spoke of the politics of aesthetics. He’s taking Foucault’s notion of the distribution of bodies, the distribution of spaces, how these things are arranged in such a way that modern life can function.

Rancière is taking that notion and applying that to aesthetics, saying that we need aesthetics in order for new things to become visible to us, in order for new sensations, experiences, to become cognizable to us. And one of the things that I think he means is that there is an aesthetics to the arrangement of city spaces, to the arrangement of factory spaces, to the placing of those jobs, those factories elsewhere, out of sight.

That’s a distribution of the sensible, and perhaps we need to be aesthetically renewed, re-educated in order to be able to see into it and to empathize with those folks. I do think that’s an aesthetic practice actually.

MB: Right. When an American manufacturer opens a factory in Bangladesh, there are obviously cost savings and the like. But doing so also renders what goes on in that factory insensible to us. Not only is it far away, but the doors are closed, the gates are locked, and the guards are out front. You can’t see even if you want to. Unlike Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, who could get into the factory floors and see the effects on man and beast.

SJ: Yeah, that’s true.

MB: Today, every now and then you get a video smuggled out that makes it onto YouTube or something, but it takes a real operation to get that kind of access.

SJ: Yeah, that’s the distribution of the sensible. Again, we don’t have access to – what does its smell like? What do the human bodies that gather there smell like? What does it look like? I mean, we have these YouTube videos, but – I’m kind of awed by it, the scale of it, the immensity of it. But we’ve kind of deodorized our world.

We’ve created an aesthetic universe where those kinds of smells, sights, taste, touch, of bodies pressed together – that does not exist for us. I think that requires a new aesthetic understanding. That’s the connection that I think Ranciere helps us to make.

MB: There’s also a question of how much data would you need to make sense of that world?

There’s a documentary about the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal called Casino Jack and the United States of Money which features an extended sequence about the whole Saipan economic development project they were involved in. All of these congressional bigwigs, Tom DeLay and the like, would show up and go on factory tours for a few minutes. But even seeing the conditions of the factory doesn’t necessarily tell you what you need to know. You might see folks in decent garb in a relatively clean environment, but if you’re taking a 15-minute tour, you’re not seeing what it looks like, what it feels like to labor for 12 hours a day at a sewing machine. You’re not seeing what the workers get to eat, or the conditions of the places where they sleep at night, or whether they’re free to move around. It becomes this huge information challenge to actually know what’s going on.

SJ: There’s this factory in Shenzhen that is essentially a city in and of itself. It’s got a little downtown, restaurants, weight rooms and swimming pools and all the stuff, all the civic infrastructure of a small city. So I’m going to guess that, sure, you can see exactly what you want to see:  “Look, it’s a good way of life. People exercise here and shoot hoops and go and have coffee at the little coffee shop on campus.” But to your point, it doesn’t really provide access to what it’s like to be there for years, performing these tasks that are incredibly mundane for 12 hours a day.

MB: Ron Fricke’s new movie, Samsara, depicts some of this in really powerful ways. As you might guess from the title, it’s a pretty tortured and pessimistic picture of human reality. I don’t know how he got access to do this, but it includes some sequences depicting a factory ‘campus’ in China.  

There’s a shot maybe ten seconds long of a woman standing at a conveyor belt. The bodies of chickens are suspended from the conveyor belt, and as one comes by, she reaches out, grab its legs, and snaps them forward, breaking the wishbone or something like that. That appeared to be her job. She would reach out, snap the bone, put her hands down for a moment, and then another chicken would arrive.

After just three or four seconds, I was in tension. I couldn’t get my head around the idea of an hour, much less eight hours, much less twelve, much less weeks, much less months and years and so forth. It took a minute, and then I thought, “Oh, my God, that’s her world.”

SJ: Yeah. It’s not going down in the mines per se; it’s not labor that’s going to break your back — some of it might. But what it does to your mind, what it does to your spirit, what it does to your emotional life, this constant repetition – that’s an acute source of suffering, maybe on par with the kind of damage that takes place to bodies. And the scale is kind of unfathomable.

But it also points out the differences between, say, what Marx was talking about and the kinds of conditions that we’re encountering now. I mean, Marx is talking about these labor conditions and factory conditions akin to this stuff in Shenzhen and other places. But it seems to me that Marx’ critique has to do with maimed bodies – mostly it’s things like that.

But I think more and more these days, it’s that mental suffering that long, repetitive motions create. It’s not necessarily that it’s physically dangerous per se – it might be — but it’s got a psychically burdensome quality that’s vicious.

MB: And there still are those physically dangerous places.

SJ: Yes, I don’t mean to undermine or neglect that. It’s definitely there.

MB: I get the sense that it’s a harder to create public concern around the kind of suffering we’re talking about now. There is something vivid and undeniable about a broken leg or somebody losing a finger in a meat processing plant. But things like the profound boredom or the stark craziness that goes on in a mind that is totally unoccupied with anything meaningful – it seems harder to generate sympathy for that.

Maybe that’s because things like boredom are more universal. Lots of white-collar workers in office jobs, for example, feel boredom all the time. And I wonder if there’s some subtle cultural narrative whispering in our ears: “What are you complaining about? These are jobs with physical security. This is progress.”

SJ: Right. It provides a wage; you’re probably not going to get a digit sawn off or something. So yeah, thank God it’s only boredom. And yet I do wonder why people aren’t more worried about boredom. We should be profoundly grateful when the only danger is boredom. But I wonder why white-collar folks that work boring jobs aren’t more concerned about the fact that they’re bored out of their skulls by what they do – that it has no meaning whatsoever, no existential importance.

I just have this sense that we get one life to live, and to spend our lives being bored seems like a waste. I don’t want to be too judgmental about that, because look, having meaningful work is, in a way, a luxury, and having any work at all is helpful and good. Thank God for that. Nevertheless, I do want to push back a little bit and say, why do we settle for so little? Shouldn’t meaning be on the table within the work we do, in the kinds of activities and labor that we engage in? We all have to pay the bills and we all have to do stuff that we don’t like sometimes. But shouldn’t we be able to talk about what provides purpose and meaning, what provides a deep sense of satisfaction in one’s work? But that’s not part of the conversation, and it’s not a rallying cry for any kind of political change. I wish it were.

MB: Me too.

SJ: I don’t want to evaluate any particular job, because some things could be exciting that I would find boring but other people find incredibly stimulating and lively. Conversely, I am sure that some people think what I do is unbelievably boring. I sit and turn pages and try to put paragraphs together – I mean, what a boring job! I don’t know, I find it exciting, I find it kind of fun.

To my mind, meaning is a category on par, close to on par, with wages. That’s something that ought to be on the table.

MB: All of this raises the question of our collective ambitions. In this last presidential election, so much of the debate was about who could create more jobs. It was just jobs, full-stop – not what kinds of jobs.

SJ: Or what kind of conditions people are going to be subjected to.

MB: Right. In a certain way, it’s a very low bar.

To be fair, creating jobs is hard; I certainly don’t know how to do it. And obviously, jobs matter – unemployment is devastating in part because it cuts people loose from the meaning that comes with work and being able to provide for oneself and one’s family.

That said, there’s something a little depressing to me when that’s all we’re talking about. We’re not talking about how people are going to spend the bulk of their waking lives. We just want to make sure that they have a place to go and get some income. There’s a sadness about that.

SJ: Here’s what I would say to that. What I would love to see happen – I mean, this is totally utopian and crazy and any economist would laugh me out of the room – but in addition to, say, both the education you need for a job or the physical exertion and danger that’s required for it, I would love to see meaning and purpose be brought into that economic equation of how jobs are rated and how jobs are compensated. I feel like it ought to be reversed, so the jobs that have an inherent meaning to them, that people feel they get deep sense of satisfaction from – maybe they pay less; they should pay less. Maybe university professors should be proletarians. And conversely, the jobs that are dull and mundane and require deep submission to tedium, boredom, things like that – maybe the reward for that should be cash money.

It sounds nuts to say that the person who’s doing the custodial labor should be paid as much or more than the CEO. But I think that there’s already a value that’s being paid out to the CEOs in terms of the kind of labor that’s being performed there. It’s interesting, it’s engaging. To be fair, it’s probably stressful too. But there’s a value that’s already inherent in the labor and I don’t know that we need to duplicate compensating for that labor with additional funds. Whereas it may well be that the person doing the most mundane, dull labor – that that person does need additional compensation to make up for the fact that it’s a service, that the particular value that we take for granted isn’t there. Reverse that, or at least factor that into the way income distribution happens – that would be a moral gain and a cool thing.

Just for a moment, let’s put aside questions of economic policy. Let’s also put aside questions about how Mitt Romney made his money, or about the moral legitimacy of the system that allowed him to make money in the ways that he did. For just a second, let’s focus on the money itself and what it might mean.

Mitt Romney has a quarter of a billion dollars.

If you have that much money and you’re doing anything other than giving it away  or thinking about how to give it away, then you have been overrun with greed and self-absorption.

I don’t say this in order to bash Mitt Romney. We all have our weaknesses, and I suspect that the greed and insecurity that drive him are at least as painful, somewhere deep down, as many other forms of suffering. But that doesn’t mean that he’s ready to be president, either. Because with this kind of greed and self-absorption comes a weakened capacity to see the world around you. If you have $250 million and you’re doing anything other than giving it away or thinking about how to give it away, then it’s hard to see how you could have the compassion and concern for your fellow human beings that is the starting point of a decent presidency.

Peter Hershock is the author of Buddhism in the Public Sphere, one of the most interesting books about public policy that I have ever read. The book presents a set of Buddhist perspectives on a series of political and policy challenges. Each chapter – which cover issues as varied as the environment and terrorism – is worth a read. The final chapter, which serves as the jumping-off point for this interview, is a tour de force of wide-ranging theory and fresh insight about the purposes and practices of contemporary education.

Hershock is an education specialist at the East-West Center in Honolulu. In addition to Buddhism in the Public Sphere, he has written or co-edited many other books, including Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation Among Cultures.

MATT BIEBER: In your view, much of contemporary education concerns itself with three goals: transmitting information and knowledge, imparting “circumstantially useful skills”, and forming young people through “principle-structured character development and socialization.” Many educational theorists would argue that this forms at least a partial list, if not a complete list, of appropriate educational goals. For you, however, this educational paradigm is deeply inappropriate and, in fact, in crisis. Why?

PETER HERSHOCK: Well, that’s a big question, and we’re going to need a lot of history to be able to respond. Here are some quick thoughts, and then we can do more background if need to.

One of the arguments that could be made about the contemporary world is that because of the kinds of complex interdependencies that have developed – economically, politically, socially, technologically, and so on –we no longer live in a world in which it’s possible to export the negative consequences of the actions that we undertake to pursue our own interests. So with industrialization, it used to be that we could just send our pollutants downstream and nobody would be any the wiser or troubled by it. We could downstream all the negative consequences of our actions. We’re now no longer able to export the negative effects of the kinds of industrial processes we have; we know that because of things like climate change. And we can’t export the developmental inequalities that are associated with particular patterns of economic development that have become globalized in the corporate world.

Whether it’s at the environmental or economic or political level, we know that we can’t effectively export these negative consequences any longer. The patterns of recursion are too dense; we have to deal with them.

Unfortunately, dealing with these consequences (both the good and the bad side of things) and deciding what’s worth working on and how to deal with negative consequences, is not something that we’re doing just within a society. Within a society, you could at least have the pretension of a shared set of values and principles according to which to make decisions, and you could reduce what you’re dealing with to problems.

MB: You argue that we’re not just facing problems – we’re facing something more.

PH: A problem consists in the occurrence of an event that makes you realize that you’re no longer going to be able to continue to pursue the aims and interests that you want to continue pursuing, based on current techniques and practices. You need some new techniques and new practices. You know where you want to end up; you’re just not sure how to get there. So you innovate, you solve problems. Problem-solution is finding a response to something that allows you to continue to pursue the same complexion of values and interests that you’ve had until now and that you want to maintain.

Because of the recursions that we’re experiencing that are affecting multiple communities, and affecting multiple levels within societies, we no longer have the unanimity of a single set of values according to which we can even decide what a solution to a so-called problem would be. If climate change was just a problem we should be able to deal with, we should be able to set the parameters for what would count as a solution; but that’s precisely what eludes us. You go to somewhere like Copenhagen and all these countries get together at the meeting, and you ask every individual representative, “Do you want a good, clean environment for your people?” “Yes.” Nobody says “no” in response to that question. When you start to ask, “Well, what do you mean by good, clean environment?” then the differences really start to come up. And if you say, “Well, what are you willing to pay for that? What are you willing to give up for that?” then you get an even wider range of views about what’s appropriate.

We live in a world of predicaments, not problems. Predicaments occur when something happens that makes you aware of the fact that there’s a conflict among your own aims and interests. You can’t solve a predicament. You can only resolve it, and doing so requires greater clarity and commitment (both of which are connotations of the word “resolution”). And if you’re doing that inter-culturally or between societies, if you’re doing that in an international arena, you can’t do that without an appreciation of cultural differences and uncommon assumptions about what a good life consists in. That takes a fairly sophisticated understanding and appreciation of others – not just as an embrace of pluralism and saying everybody’s got their own view, but saying, in fact, we need to somehow work through this to the point that we develop not just greater clarity about what we’re facing in a given situation, but to the point that we develop certain shared commitments. We don’t necessarily have to come to a single point of view on things, but we do need to get to the point that we can actually share in responding to the situation that we face together.

That requires a real shift from just knowledge about how things work and the skills that we’re accustomed to using when we innovate. It involves developing a capacity for ethical improvisation, and that’s something that’s not been part of the curriculum thus far.

MB: You’re not very impressed with knowledge generation and transmission as educational goals. You argue that given the nature of our contemporary economy – which you characterize as an “attention economy” – we should be focused on “shared meaning making” instead. Unpack these ideas for us.

PH: The “attention economy” idea has been developing relatively slowly – for me, surprisingly slowly – since this seems like a natural evolution from the kind of economic systems that we had, say, 200 years ago when industrialization started. It’s generally agreed that we’ve moved from a strongly material economy into the so-called “knowledge economy” or “information economy.”  But if economics is deciding how to allocate scarce resources, it makes very little sense to talk about an information or knowledge economy. Information isn’t scarce; knowledge isn’t scarce.  What is scarce is attention. The kind and quality of investment that people have, in terms of their consciousnesses—that’s really what we’re talking about. That’s what’s driving the global economy.

In 2007, the oil industry had a bumper year – $1.7 trillion globally. In the same year, media and entertainment was $1.6 trillion. If you asked the question: What kind of energy does the global economy run on? Is it really running on oil (or coal or what have you, some kind of material energy), which is what a lot of people would claim? Or is it running on the energy of the people that are invested both in production processes and in consumption? I would make the argument that it’s really the latter.

In 2008, human beings spent an estimated 40 billion hours over a two-week period watching the Olympics. What could people on the planet have done if they took those 40 billion hours and did something nice for somebody else?

The average person in the world spends 3.5 hours a day watching television, 3.5 hours a day average globally.  What new languages could you learn? What musical instrument could you learn to play? What charitable acts could you engage in? What could you do for your parents or your grandparents, or children down the street, if you took the 3.5 hours a day that you spend on being entertained, through which your attention is exported into an environment where you get very little in response? Media entertainment doesn’t give you something you can use for the future; it’s not productive consumption.

We’re exporting attention out of our local environments into an economy where the benefits of the media and entertainment industries percolate up to the very top – so that the 1% that are getting the greatest benefit out of that and maybe the top 20% of the world’s population benefits from that kind of economic activity. What about the 80% from whom that energy is being exported?

If you look at it in thermodynamic terms, there’s this energy export from the family, from the local community, into the media sphere (if you want to call it that), which is the basic “fuel” of the attention economy. This massive export of energy increases entropy within the family, at the local level—a dissolution of the conditions in which our differences from each other are conducive to making a difference for one another. In other words, we’re seeing a dissolution of the possibilities of meaning making.

If that’s really what’s going on, how do we start to work against that? It has to do at least in part with being able to pull back and say, “I’m not getting the meaning-making part of what I need as a human being.” We’re not fully human if we’re not engaged in meaning-making processes. Basic subsistence for human beings involves meeting needs for food, clothing, shelter, medical care,  education, and emotional support or meaning making. If we’re not engaged with others in a way that we at least perceive as fruitful, the result of that is depression.

We know from World Health Organization statistics that depression is the number one cause of morbidity among women in the developed world and increasingly in the developing world. What does that mean? What does that mean that depression is one of the top causes of morbidity – that is, ill health, an inability to engage the environment around you? If you look at these statistics or the studies that have been done on depression, both with humans and with animals, the correlation is pretty clear. When you feel that you are making a contribution to others, that you can make a meaningful difference in your own life and in the lives of others, depression doesn’t occur. In animals, depression occurs – at least insofar as it is an observable behavioral phenomenon – when they’re no longer able to engage their environment in a meaningful way, when regardless of what they do, it doesn’t affect getting their food or some reward. When there’s a disconnect between what you’re doing with your time and attention, and the results you’re getting – the patterns of outcome and opportunity that are coming your way—conditions are ripe for depression, or anger.

In that sense, I think meaning making is really crucial to addressing a lot of issues that are connected with the attention economy. If we’re not able to take on meaning making ourselves and instead “offshore” it to globally produced mass media or to smaller scale media that you might find on YouTube or some other so-called “user-contributed medium” – if we’re not really doing it ourselves, not taking the time to create the meaningful connections ourselves, then I think we’re losing something basic about what it means to contribute to one another’s lives in a productive way, to really have a sense of family or community that is robust enough to  allow us to move forward productively together.

Those things are all connected together, and without the kind of attention training that goes along with being able to engage one another meaningfully, we’re just not going to be able to resolve the kinds of predicaments that we face in the world today. We’re not going to be good enough citizens to do it; we won’t be good enough politicians to do it.

MB: Let’s focus on training and education for a moment. You’ve contrasted education that focuses on developing improvisational, responsive, appreciative, attentive capacities with another kind of education, one that falls prey to what you call “competence traps.” What is a competence trap?

PH: The competence trap is that you’ve got some end result that you know you want to get to. You’ve already predefined that, so it’s problem-solution. You know what’s going to count as a solution. And once you predefine your educational goals, you can certainly train or discipline students to arrive at them.

But we live in a world of increasing unpredictability. One of the outcomes of having more complex patterns of interdependence is that complex systems are prone to behave in ways that are in principle unpredictable, un-anticipatable, but which after the fact make perfectly good sense. In a complex world, it’s very difficult to determine what competencies will be required down the line in order to be able to respond to the future needs of, say, the market or society.

The education system is saying, “We’re trying to prepare students to be competent to work in the markets as we now know them, to enter the labor force” and such. It’s a typical claim made on behalf of mass education. “We’re preparing this generation to enter the work force, to be competent in some way, even if it’s to be competent as citizens.”

We’re defining that in terms of our present understanding of what is needed. Unfortunately, the half-life of scientific knowledge changes is about 18 months – that’s the speed at which the cutting edge of scientific knowledge dulls.  And if it’s knowledge in the stock market, that half-life is about 18 seconds. If you don’t act on a tip in 18 seconds, you’re behind the curve.

If we live in a world where there’s that kind of time-space compression, plus unpredictability, the idea that you predefine a set of educational goals for students to achieve, and see that as productive and successful education – well, I think it’s really shortsighted. What we need instead, I think, is skills that enable us to enter situations with the kinds of attentive capacity and responsive capability needed to improvise.

Innovation and problem solving aren’t really what we need right now. I mean, yeah, we need a bit of that in the everyday world, solving problems; but to face the bigger issues  and to develop a workforce that’s responsive to a very rapidly and unpredictably changing set of contexts, then we need improvisational ability.

And we can train people to improvise. We can train them through concrete stuff, like musical improvisation, from which  one can then generalize. But improvising is something we all do; we do it in just speaking. I mean, it’s what we’re doing in this interview; you’ve got some scripted sentences that you’re reading out to me, and maybe when we go down the line, you start to ask questions that aren’t scripted. But I’m speaking off the top of my head, and sure, maybe using some phrases that I’ve used in the past, but I’m not them putting together in a way that I planned out at all because I didn’t know the questions you were going to ask. This is improvisational, and I’m trying to figure out: What’s gonna be meaningful for you? How am I going to make sense to you? Am I doing a good job of it? Maybe not so good right now! But we’ll keep working at it and see whether or not the conversation starts to take off.

That kind of ability, that ability to improvise with others is what we need to promote in working with students – shaping education in ways that are going to be productively aligned with developing capacities for and commitments to improvising. Because improvising isn’t easy; there’s a lot of risk involved in it. You don’t know where it’s going to go. You don’t even know what the measures of success are going to be. The measures of what’s qualitatively good and what’s worth continuing are the things that emerge out of the situation that you find yourself in.

MB: Is there a tension between the kind of improvisation that you’re advocating here and the fact that all of this improvisational work is, after all, in the name of something?

PH: One thing that’s really crucial to many Buddhist traditions is a skepticism about the possibility of establishing a means-end relationship between practices and attainments. This skepticism applies regardless of what you’re engaged in, whether it’s meditation or ritual activities associated with practicing Buddhism, as well as to the so-called goal of the alleviation of conflict, trouble, suffering, whatever you want to call that. A lot of Buddhist traditions are really sensitive to the fact that if you set up a means-end relationship – a goal to end suffering, nirvana, or whatever you want to call that – then the real difficulty is that you, at least mentally and at a certain level emotionally, feel like, “Well, if I’m going to achieve that goal, it only makes sense that I’m going to go partway first – that there’s some distance I need to traverse to get there.”

You’ve objectified the goal. You’re not exemplifying it. You’re just looking at it from a distance, knowing that you’re not there yet. And you get this kind of Zeno’s paradox of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual development. You feel like you’ve got to go halfway before you can go all the way, and before that, you’ve got to go halfway of that, and then most people are like, “Well, shit, I might as well just stop now, because I’ll never get there.” It starts to feel like an infinite task.

So, from a Buddhist perspective, what is usually said is, “Drop the idea of there being a destination at all. You’re not working for a goal. We’re not trying to get somewhere with this. There’s not a destination at which we’re aiming to arrive. The point is just to establish a certain direction and quality of action.” It’s orientation as opposed to goal.

I think that’s an important distinction. The root of the word “curriculum” on which all of our formal educational systems are now based, the root meaning of the term is a circular racetrack for chariots. So the idea is you have a starting point and a stopping point,  a defined racetrack that you go around. In the 16^th century, Peter Ramus was the first person to apply the word “curriculum” to educational processes, and since then we’ve bought into the idea. It’s a powerful idea that you can methodize instruction so that if you want to arrive at a certain level of competence—again we go back to that—in a given knowledge or skill domain, you can define how to arrive at that particular goal, and you can establish a timeframe for getting there. It will take you a year; it will take you three years; it will take you seven years to get your Ph.D. and then you’ll be there.

That’s certainly one way to do education. The problem is that the world we live in requires us, I think, to respond without establishing those kinds of goals, because the contexts in which we’re acting are changing so much that the idea of a fixed goal is now no more plausible in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish than it is to say, “We already know what the market is going to need in terms of the job force, so we can train a generation of young people to get out of university in four years and be ready to go to the job market. They’ll have the skills and the knowledge that the market wants.”

We now know that we can’t do that. If you ask people in higher education if they really think they’re preparing people for the job, they’ll say, “Yeah, maybe in a very, very generic way, giving them some very basic skills, but as to what they’re going to actually need on the job, that’s going to come from on-the-job training. The market changes too fast, so we can’t really give them that. We can just give them really basic skills.” It’s sort of like—I’m not even going to bother to teach you how to play football or basketball or baseball or soccer. I’m going to get you running so that you’re basically in shape, and you can run for a certain amount of time, you’re working at your maximum speed, you’ve got some strength and some flexibility – it’s basic training.

We could do that in education and have certain training goals – that everybody ought to be able to do certain things with math and language, for example. There’s nothing wrong with establishing those as benchmarks for a certain kind of training. If you’re going to meditate, you should be able to sit still for 30 minutes at least and not have to get up and fidget, and yes, that’s a goal you can work to achieve. But what we’re trying to accomplish isn’t arriving at that. It’s not being able to sit for 30 minutes. It’s not being able to run a mile in less than six minutes and do a hundred pushups or something.

What we need is a responsive capability that’s partly attention, that’s partly physical skill, that’s partly emotional demeanor, that’s partly intellectual capacity—we need to pull all those together. That’s why I resist the idea of goals. It’s really about establishing a direction as primary, as opposed to goals as primary.

MB: When you think about the contemporary American educational scene, are there any institutions or individuals that you think are carrying this off effectively?

PH: I think that the place that you find people doing this sort of stuff is at preschool and elementary levels. You’ve got a lot of people who are working out of Montessori theories or other theories about early childhood development that try not to impose a rigid structure on children. Take, for example, what we know about brain research. You can try force-feeding the average population of children mathematics until age 10 or 11, and there’ll be a spectrum of competency that will result across the population. Or you can wait until they’re 10 years old and give it all at once to them at that point, and what you discover is that with a lot less emotional anguish and a lot less difficulty, students in one year, from age 10 to age 11, can acquire all the mathematical knowledge that you would have been forcing down them for five years, from kindergarten through grade five. It’s possible to do it all in one year. Then the question is, “Well, what else will you do with those four years?” If you’re not going to do math, is it another language? Is it music? Is it cultural phenomena? Is it acting? Is it knowledge-building stuff? Is it exploratory? Is it science? Do you have them do experiments?

Of course, this is partly a function of how the brain develops. There are children who are really ready for math when they’re two or three years old – they’re just biologically, biomechanically set up for it. Other kids, their brains are simply not ready until they’re 10 or 11 years old, and if you force it down them when they’re two or three or four or five or six or eight years old and they’re not getting it and they have a sense of failure from not being able to get something and they’re called “stupid” and they’re told that they’re not progressing and they’re put in a special class for kids that are remedial, which kids internalize to mean that they’re somebody who needs remediation – you can imagine where that goes.

I think that you do find some schools that are doing that at pre-K and elementary. It’s certainly not the norm.

I think that the University of California Irvine campus started without departments, as an interdisciplinary research project-oriented school. That changed over the years. So there’ve been some experiments like that at the higher education level.

There was a project that I was involved in that was coming out of Berkeley for a while, where they were trying to reframe the engineering curriculum, so that the students would be required to take courses that would introduce them to the religious and philosophical systems of the world. If they were going to work in Asia, they would have an introduction to the culture of the peoples of Asia – so that the parameters that they would be taking into account in their engineering work would not be just material stresses, cost factors and so on, but the kinds of cultural considerations needed to be truly successful. How do we do urban design in a way that meets with the needs and value systems of the particular people that we’re going to be working with?

Great idea, wonderful stuff, they had money from the National Science Foundation to fund a series of workshops and so on, and the alumni of the Berkeley engineering school said, “No way! We want these students to be trained the way we were trained. We want the students to be able to do exactly the kind of things that we know you should be able to do when you graduate with your degree in engineering from Berkeley. All this other stuff is extraneous. We don’t need that; we don’t want it. If you’re going to change that, we’re not going to make donations.” So it’s a leveraging of higher education by the business community and the engineering profession. They were basically saying, “We like things the way they are. We like the controls of it. There’s an unpredictability that emerges if you change education and have an open-ended structure where it’s direction-biased rather than goal-biased.”

It’s really hard. I don’t know of systems where they embrace this, and I think that it’s this generation that’s going to decide whether or not we’re going to move in that direction, whether we’re going to break free of a curricular approach and say, “Maybe there was something to the studio model of education that prevailed prior to the 16^th century and that we need to go back and look at more closely.”

In the studio model, you apprentice to somebody, and there’s no term length for your apprenticeship. You get into it and you go until you become a master. Does it take 10 years or 15 years or 20 years? Or maybe you never complete it and you leave and you do something else. It was open-ended, non-formalized learning; it wasn’t regulated. It was a very different approach.

In the US, we do have the idea of community colleges as being places that you can go back and retool yourself, go back for further education. And if you look at higher education in the US, the average age, I think, is 27 or 28. By contrast, the average across Asia is 20 years old – your typical college or university student. That’s significant, and I think there’s something positive in what US higher education has done in terms of opening up non-tracked educational opportunities for people. But the courses themselves are still designed as curriculum. They’re still designed to leverage a specific amount of content in a specific amount of time with specific outcomes and so on. It’s goals.

MB: You acknowledge that your ambitions are lofty. You also acknowledge that in order for policymakers to begin to pursue these kinds of changes, they must cultivate the ways of thinking that you’ve described. In particular, they must begin to cultivate a greater awareness of our interdependence.

Is there any way to accelerate the cultivation of these sorts of mentalities among educators and policymakers? Or must we simply rely on pursuing changes in ourselves, and trusting that as we change ourselves, we change the world as well? Your work on faculty development programs certainly suggests the latter.

PH: There is definitely the possibility of moving forward with them. It’s about accelerating the processes of change so as to direct them in the ways we’re talking about. You take certain values and start running with them really strongly at the policy level.

So to just take the one term that I return to over and over in my recent work – diversity. We talk a lot about diversity in education, not just in the US but everywhere in the world now. What most people mean by it is really just the co-existence of different kinds of things in the same place. So if you can get students from Africa and Europe and Asia and the US together in a classroom, we talk about there being diversity in a classroom.

We also talk about the campus as having a certain amount of cognitive diversity if you’ve got humanities being taught, as well as social sciences and the natural sciences and so on. We don’t split those up and say, “You can only take courses in the hard sciences.” We want students to be well-rounded.

But you can also take the term “diversity” and push it harder, as I try to do, and say that we haven’t given that term enough conceptual depth and let’s tweak it a little bit. To me, diversity consists of the activation of differences as the basis of mutual contribution to sustainably shared flourishing. If we look at it like that, it’s no longer simply a matter of co-existence; now it’s a particular quality of interdependence. We’re talking about a particular kind of sharing that’s going on, a shift of relational dynamics; it’s not just simply being in the same place together.

You can impose variety, and we impose academic variety by saying, “Students have to take a minimum number of courses in humanities, a minimum number of courses in this and so on and so forth, in order to get their distribution requirements.” You can mandate that. What you can’t mandate is cultural and cognitive diversity, where you’re able to work from different points of view on a given issue or predicament, and have the differences of cognitive style and ability contribute meaningfully in responding to and resolving that predicament or that issue.

If you’re talking about problem-solution, you don’t need cognitive or cultural diversity.  You just have the appropriate expert come in and do the job and that’s it. (I’ll give you a concrete example and make this a little clearer in a second.) But sometimes you need people to work together on something that’s not just a problem, but rather a predicament where you’ve got a conflict that is really about values and interests. Statistically it has been proven—and you can read Scott Page’s book on diversity; he cites lots of studies on this—that  cognitively diverse groups outperform single expertise groups in what I’m referring to as “predicament resolution.”

So, I’ll give you an example of how that works. There’s a farming community in northern India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where they were bringing in pesticides and fertilizers and so on. The fertilizers were going down through the soil into the groundwater, the groundwater is being pulled up by wells, and wells are being used for the fields and for human consumption. People are getting sick because the groundwater has been contaminated from all the fertilizer which has made it a perfect medium for growing any and all kinds of bacteria.

So, they got some engineers to come in and say, “Well, what can we do with this?” They look at it and they go, “Well, if you’re not going to stop using these fertilizers, then there’s nothing you can do about it. You simply have to ship water in. You could try to stop using these chemicals it will take X amount of time for the groundwater to clear out naturally and clean up, but we’re a little uncertain whether it’s going to work, and you might have to do other stuff to deal with it.” The government decided that the most appropriate thing was to ship drinking water in and entertain the possibility of building an industrial-scale water purification plant, if they got enough international money to be able to fund the project.

Another group sent in a scientist named Susan Murcott who I think incidentally had an interest in Buddhism. So she comes in and consults with  a team of people, including geologists, anthropologists, geographers, environmental studies experts, and so on. She said, “Let’s look at the local situation and see what we can do and how we can respond.” It turned out that one of the jobs of the women in the area was to carry water from the well back to the families for daily use. When the government started shipping the water into the area as a stop-gap measure, the women were no longer able to carry these big five-gallon purified water containers back up the hills to their homes. They had to get their husbands to do it. Since the husbands had to do the woman’s work, they’re getting a little unhappy with having to do both their work and woman’s work. You start to get cases of domestic abuse; you’ve got women being beaten by their husbands who feel like they shouldn’t have to do the woman’s work.

This starts to come out as Susan’s team digs into the ethnography of what’s going on. The team is seeing a range of problems: the women are no longer going to the well, which means they don’t share information, they don’t know who’s sick, who’s not sick, how they can help one another out; the community was starting to break down, all because of the removal of the use of the well.

So the team did some research. They got the geologists together, they got the engineers together, and they came up with a very, very simple water purification system that the women could make by gathering locally available materials. This allows the women to purify the water at their homes, having drawn water from the well and carried it up to their homes. It led to a change of status for the women, who now were able to do something the men couldn’t do. This leads to higher status for the women, domestic violence stops, and women can still go to the well and have the social interaction that’s part of the village life. It’s a resolution to the predicament.

Now, you could have solved the problem with the water purification plant, and potentially that wouldn’t have led to the unintended consequences of domestic violence. Unfortunately, shipping in the five-gallon containers of purified water did. Nobody planned on that, but because of a really complex set of cultural and biological factors, that’s what happened.

This cognitively diverse group was able to respond to that. It’s a simple, concrete case in which cognitive diversity was able to mount a really different kind of response that took into account what you might think of as the full spectrum of considerations, from the social and economic to the cultural.

Imagine if we had schools that were not organized  around different bodies of knowledge – physics and history and philosophy and religion and literature and so on – but rather as  environments within which it’s possible to realize ecologies of knowledge, in which the different disciplines don’t disappear but the relationship between them is consciously massaged, set up, conditioned in such a way that there’s the potential for the emergence of cognitive diversity, where the differences between the disciplines become the basis of sustainable and shared contribution to the flourishing of a community as a whole.

So that’s the aspiration, that’s the direction – and I think that there are ways in which we can do that. We can have projects, like this project on water, in which students would be encouraged to say, “Let’s work on it collectively. You guys are going to specialize at this part of the project, you’ll do the research on that part, I’m going to do this, and then we’re going to come together as a team and see whether or not our different perspectives can be informed by what everyone else is bringing to bear.” With the idea that “We’re dedicated to pulling that off.” It’s not “Let’s choose the best response out of the four of five responses on offer.” Instead, it’s “Let’s see whether there’s a sixth response, something different from what anyone or any individual team has brought to this, something that really shows this diversity coefficient taking off.”

That’s the challenge. The real difficulty as a policy matter is that you can impose variety—cognitive, cultural, etc.—but you can’t impose diversity. It’s a relational achievement. It’s something that happens, if you’re really lucky, because people have committed to making an effort to contributing and sharing in a certain way, with a certain kind of openness and a readiness to improvise. You can’t make people do that.

It’s a little bit like the conundrum we face with issues of equity. We can force educational institutions to offer access universally. What you can’t do is mandate respect – and we know that. You have to somehow elicit that; it has to be drawn out of the situation. Diversity is like that – it’s something like respect; it’s a relational quality. It’s not a given and you can’t impose it. You can’t legislate it.

That makes it hard to directly endorse in the political process because of so-called accountability issues. Can you be accountable if you’re striving for diversity in education? You know ahead of time that you can’t force it to happen. It’s not a controlled event. It’s like a fantastic performance, when the musicians come together, improvising, and it all just clicks – and everybody knows it. Whether you’re a player or you’re a member of the audience listening, things just take off. You’re drawn up into it; you’re part of it. It’s exciting, it’s gratifying, it’s cathartic – it’s all the wonderful things that art can be. We know what it is, but you can’t force it to happen.

Again, it’s that difference from a directional approach to a goal-oriented approach. Diversity isn’t a goal; it’s a direction in which we’re working.

MB: The conceptual distinctions you’re making here actually remind me of another one you’ve challenged – the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Let’s talk about that distinction, and why you think it deserves challenge.

PH: Well, I want to recognize the combination of factors that came along with modernization, which includes a certain level of separation of church and state (for very good reasons). This is a period in which knowledge was divided up. Some things are public and repeatable, and science took a lead in those areas. I mean, a scientific method was developing for a long time, but modernity picked up that idea of repeatedly demonstrable, universalizable knowledge and really ran with it, and education came to be about that kind of knowledge – knowledge that you could duplicate. It’s knowledge about things and it’s knowledge about how to do things: knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. Simply stated: knowing-that and knowing-how.

By contrast, knowing whether to do something was left to the family or the church or the private sphere. Government wasn’t going to get involved in that. At that time, Europe had just come out of the Thirty Years’ War. You had eight million people killed over a 30-year period; it was pretty horrendous interreligious warfare (or religiously stimulated and abetted warfare). There were really good reasons to say, “Let’s leave those kinds of values that are informing decision-making in the private sphere, and publicly let’s deal with this other stuff.”

Unfortunately for this model, the world that we live in today requires us to know whether to respond in certain ways. It’s not just how to respond. It’s whether to take a specific course of action or not. This involves value judgments or predicament resolution.

We talk a little bit about ethics in school; it’s a minor part. It’s a discipline within philosophy and some people are exposed to it. Or if you do journalism or you’re in medicine, you may have to take a course in medical ethics or journalistic ethics. But those tend to be behavioral codes: what you should or shouldn’t do if you’re a doctor, what you should or shouldn’t do if you’re a journalist.

Those kinds of professional ethics don’t really take us to the heart of what we need to deal with, and that is, when you have a conflict of values, it’s not a choice between a good thing and a bad thing. There’s really not a choice there. We don’t make choices between good things and bad things; we do the good thing. Nobody chooses the bad thing – if you know it’s going to have bad consequences.

The real question is, how do you choose between conflicting good things? That’s where the difficulty is – whether we should do this or that, because we obviously can’t pull off both. And which is the more important way to go? Not that everything in life is sorted out as an “either/or,” but we face a lot of that. We can get economic growth or we can deal with climate issues. We can continue to grow industrially and force consumption and get the Chinese to do more consumption, get other Asians to do more consumption, get Africa on board with consumption, and we can keep the consumption-based industrial economy going for at least another few decades, with high growth overall globally, and higher pockets in some areas than others. But what are the consequences to that? Are we really going to be able to deal with the environmental consequences, and to whom are these consequences being exported?

It’s questions not just about what are the goods (including the public goods) that we’re going to produce, but also – what do you do with the public bads? What do you do with the pollution? What do you do with the requirement in any consumption-based society that you’re going to have income gaps (if it’s a capitalist system), between people who are in low-level service industries—store clerks, cleaners, all those people, big numbers—and the elites who are designing stuff. There’re going to be bigger and bigger gaps; that’s what we’ve been seeing over the last 25-30 years with the shift from the material economy to the information economy. As we go to the attention economy, it’s going to get even more exacerbated.

What do we do about that? That’s not just an economic issue; it’s an issue about social justice and developmental justice. Some people would say, “Leave the justice to itself – that’s for the philosophers to worry about, or maybe the politicians who need to get elected.” But it’s not an economic issue. That’s the bodies-of-knowledge approach, in which economists think they only need to talk to each other.

MB: I just finished a degree at a public policy school, and your distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing whether” is really useful for thinking about my experience. The school seemed to place most of its emphasis on inculcating a knowing how, capabilities-heavy approach, but didn’t encourage much inquiry into “why” or “whether”.

That said, I can imagine that a skeptic might ask about your criteria: how do you know which situations are worthy of response?

PH: I resist unilateral phrasings or prescriptions about how we ought to move forward. When I think about my admittedly limited knowledge of history—philosophers don’t tend to read that much history, because it tends to constrain your freedom of vision!—I can’t think of any instance in which there’s been a single perspective vision of the future that has done anything other than tremendous damage. It’s never worked out to be a good thing.

MB: But you are interested in encouraging things like “flourishing” and “diversity”…

PH: I think that we can pick out a term like “diversity” and say, this is a value; so are other things like “equity.” Flourishing is a relational quality that we can talk about. Whether we want to push that enough to label it as a value in the way I use the word – I’d have to think about it. But we can pick stuff like that out and say, “These are qualifiers of how well we’re moving forward.”

But the Buddhist perspective has always been one of, take the situation as it’s come to be and begin moving out from within it in a way that leads to the resolution of trouble/suffering/conflict, or to greater flourishing, or to increased diversity and equity – we can pick which values we want to endorse. What these values or ideals specify for us is not a given destination. Values don’t point to a particular place that you’re going to arrive at and then you’re done.

I’m using “values” to point to different modalities of appreciation, where appreciation means two different things. It means both a sympathetic engagement with something, as when you appreciate music. It’s also what happens when you invest and your money appreciates in value. Appreciation is an increase of value as well as a sympathetic engagement.

We can establish different values according to which we can say, “Okay, we live in a situation. Here’s how it’s come to be. These are the kinds of trouble, difficulty, suffering, and conflict that currently exist. We can see that there is a particular pattern of conditions that led to this – there’re some historical dynamics. We’ve got some moving picture of how they came to be way they are.

Given that, we can work with the energy that’s present. Things are already changing. We can take the energy or the change processes already underway and begin redirecting them, for example, in accordance with the values of greater equity and diversity (which is how I would cast out the notion of flourishing).

Not doing that is saying, “I’ve got a model of the world the way it ought to be, a good world as opposed to the bad one that we’ve got. Here’s the utopia that I think we ought to arrive at. We’re going to set it up as a goal and do our best to arrive there.” That’s not a Buddhist approach.

A generally Buddhist approach says, “Let’s distinguish what’s kusala and what’s akusala.”

Kusala sometimes gets translated as wholesome or good; akusala gets translated as the opposite of that – unwholesome or not good. But the term kusala is actually a superlative. It doesn’t mean doing something good or doing something well; it means doing something superlatively. It’s the virtuosic.

And that’s helps show what I mean by this notion of a value as a modality of appreciation – what’s kusala in a given situation? It’s not just what’s good; we’ve already got good things going on. Capitalism is a good system. Democracy is a good system. There are some bad systems out there too, and, let’s admit it, there are some bad things that happen because of capitalism. But that’s all akusala. The good and the bad are both akusala. They are not virtuosic. What we’re looking for is the virtuosic, something that opens up the kind of relational dynamics that are playing out in a way that’s not just different from what has happened thus far, but significantly different, in which there’s a meaning-consolidating dimension to what we’re doing that pulls things together in a way that they haven’t been pulled together before, that opens up prospects for continuing to work forward together.

That’s a key distinction here. We’re not talking about the good-evil approach that dichotomizes – “We want a good world, not a bad world. We have a good political system, they have a bad one.” According to the kusala-akusala approach, we are all involved in looking for virtuosic ways of working out from within our situations, as they have come to be, striving for the virtuosic.

When you start thinking in terms of the virtuosic, you begin committing yourself to stop playing everything in life as a finite game and instead playing infinite games. As James Carse put it in a wonderfully succinct way: finite games are played to win; infinite games are played to make the game more and more interesting to everyone involved.

We play politics as a finite game, because we’ve got electoral cycles. Of course, you can talk about the future. But everybody’s going from electoral cycle to electoral cycle and it’s getting this legislation through and that legislation through. It’s all about very, very definite goals that you’re trying to achieve.

What would it mean to play politics as an infinite game? Not in order to win and therefore make sure that somebody else loses, but to be able to play the game in such a way that it becomes increasingly interesting and meaningful—a process of shared creativity. That’s the kusala approach.

How do we make politics more interesting? I think you can just look at voting statistics in the US. Only half the people of voting age actually vote. If only half the people are participating, it’s because they’ve decided that the finite game that’s being played politically isn’t worth playing. You don’t have a chance to win. What would it mean to get these people on board and have them become true participants in the democratic process?

MB: Toward the end of the book, you make a case that the kind of education you envision works best in a one-on-one setting – in the context of deep and meaningful personal relationships between teacher and student. You write, “Educating for virtuosity cannot be undertaken generically or with standardized or standardizing methodologies.” Is this a Dewey-esque reminder that education has to stay responsive to local needs and conditions, or are you suggesting something more – that mass education might not permit the development of these kinds of relationships?

While we’re at it, I’ll ask the same question with regard to politics. Do you genuinely think that the kinds of deep, dense, rich relationships that would make for the kind of politics you’re describing are possible in a mass society – in which people don’t know each other, live thousands of miles apart, communicate via digital media, and so forth? Is the politics you describe actually possible in a society that’s this big and distributed?

PH: I think scalability issues are important ones, and I don’t pretend to have answers about how to scale some phenomenon up from a local level that might involve a few hundred people to a level that would involve a few hundred million. And pulling off that scaling exercise would take a very cognitively diverse group to achieve. But all of this might be a lot more conservative than you might think. Let’s take the analogy of a practicing Buddhist community. (You might be able to pull this off with other kinds of communities, but I know the Buddhist communities better in this way.)

In a Buddhist community, you can have a transformation of community interactions, practices, and relational dynamics based on a powerful intimacy between leader and community. In Buddhism, this often takes the shape of the Buddhist teacher or the master establishing a certain relationship not with the group as a whole; it’s not a “teacher-to-mass” relationship, but a “teacher-to-individual-student” relationship that has very, very different qualities.

Within Buddhist communities, the older students who’ve been around for 20 years almost invariably have more access to the master than students who are just showing up for the first time. There are public engagements where anybody’s present, and then there might be private situations where masters and students interact with one another in a much more intimate setting, and the kinds of interaction that go on are very different in those contexts. But the community as a whole ends up getting informed by something that’s consistent across those different scales of intimacy. Somehow, across those scales and everything that takes place in between those extremes, the quality of relational dynamics occurring can still be called intimate.

I think that it’s possible to aspire to something like that in the political sphere. There’s a level at which we know it when we talk about politicians having a certain “gravitas” or “charisma”; these are terms that we use to try to get at relational qualities. Some people talk about it as “inspirational”. But it’s got to be based on more than inspiration. I mean, sure, you can inspire people with rhetorical brilliance; a great actor can inspire people without being able to carry through and actually demonstrate and realize the kind of caring relationships that we’re talking about in, say, the Buddhist context.

If you scale it out to 300 million, or 1.3 billion like you have in China, it’s a real question as to whether or not any leader could have anything remotely like an intimate connection with every citizen. But I think that it is possible.

We know the importance of leaders in different contexts. In the educational sphere, you hear it over and over. If you ask, “What is the single common factor in public education that makes a difference in creating a functional and high-achieving school, one that’s moving smoothly and that doesn’t have issues socially, doesn’t have employment issues with the faculty, the students are happy, the parents are happy, everything seems to be working really well and achievements are good on whatever measures are being used?” The one thing that’s in common across the board is a really good leader, a really good principal.

You wonder what that’s about. Because the principal is not going in the classrooms and telling people how to teach and they’re not going out there and telling students how to study or parents how to deal with their kids. But they somehow set a tone. It’s something about a difficult-to-define, difficult-to-objectify quality of relationship that these principals establish, and that everybody gets on board with and begins contributing to.

I think it is possible to do that, and it means moving away from a more technocratic, bureaucratic approach to dealing with issues of administration. That will be the secret to things scaling up. It is possible to do it at a smaller scale, like a school. But if you can do it in a school, why not the school district? If you can do it in a school district, why can’t you do it in a political district? – and on upward like that. It certainly seems possible to me, though I’m not in a position to predetermine the details.

MB: It’s interesting how infrequently Buddhism has come up in this conversation. In Buddhism in the Public Sphere, most of your policy-specific arguments seemed rooted in Buddhist ontologies and epistemologies.

I had planned to ask you whether you thought this whole vision of education and moral formation was transferable outside the Buddhist context – whether it was possible to advocate for it or persuade others of its usefulness without explicitly rooting it in Buddhist origins. It certainly sounds like you’re working toward doing so, and that you’ve found a language in which to talk about all of this that doesn’t really depend on Buddhism. Is that right?

PH: I think that whenever Buddhism is spread into a new cultural sphere, it has always had to do some accommodation with the local culture. Then it can move into a phase of advocacy where it says, “You guys are doing all this great stuff, but it seems like these are problems that persist, and Buddhist practices can help you respond to those things that persist.” So Buddhism doesn’t come in and say, “You need to redesign your system.” The Buddha never recommended a regime change. He never said, “You gotta switch to a democratic polity if you’re a monarchy,” or “You need to shift from this economic system to another one.”

It’s the development of what I call different “ecologies of enlightenment,” where you get particular kinds of practices that are being brought together because they’re responsive to the needs of that particular community. And some of that’s conceptual.

Given the very limited understanding and limited practice that I’ve developed in my short time on earth, I think part of what I’m trying to do is to make a contribution to developing a vocabulary through which Buddhist perspectives—if we still want to call them that – or critically engaged perspectives on interdependence and relational quality can become a shared focus for moving forward in a way that’s generally useful. I agree entirely with that part of your statement. We can draw from Buddhist traditions, or other traditions, constellating values according to which we can start to see new ways of concretely moving forward with virtuosity. My rendering of the notion of diversity comes out of Buddhist concepts of non-duality. But I actually don’t have to tell anybody that. I can express what the value of diversity is and describe it, contrasting it with variety in a way that’s intelligible, without having to bring any other “Buddhist” stuff in.

But in order to be able to get people to actually begin doing the work of relating to one another as needed to enhance diversity and equity in the ways that I defined those values, we need some abilities, capacities, and commitments that we might not be able to find within other existing traditions. So, for example, all the stuff within Buddhism that is most connected with issues of changing relational dynamics goes back to teachings about karma. The teachings of karma, as I would describe it from a Buddhist perspective (a Hindu perspective might be different), would be: “If you pay close and sustained enough attention, you’ll see that there’s a meticulous correlation between the abiding patterns of your own values, intentions, actions, and institutions, and the patterns of outcome and opportunity that you’re experiencing, personally and communally.”

The key to that is “if you pay close and sustained enough attention.” Usually everybody goes, “Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. I understand the words.” But to be able to have the experience of observing karma in action, you have to pay close and sustained enough attention. So how do you that?

We ask our kids to do it all the time. I’ve got two sons and I’ve asked them to pay attention innumerable times. I can tell you quite honestly, it doesn’t work. I don’t know why I’ve persisted as many times as I have! You can’t tell someone to pay attention and expect them to do it because attending, as the word put in that verbal form suggests, isn’t just observing. Most people think paying attention just means “have a look, listen, and let it enter your consciousness.” That’s not really what the Buddhist injunction is focusing on.

Paying close and sustained enough attention is really more like the English word “attending,” from which we get attendant. What does it mean to be somebody’s attendant? What does it mean if you’re attending the situation? It’s not just showing up and saying, “I attended the concert.” If you’re really attending something, then you’re caring for it. You’re doing something that requires an emotional, relational connection that goes beyond the objective and observational. You’re invested; it’s the opening up of an intimate connection between you and that situation, so that now the situation and you are internally related, not just externally related.

That requires practice. It’s not something that you just turn on like a switch and it happens. For that, Buddhist practices have been developed in different cultural settings and different time periods, to work with people who are already predisposed in certain emotional, cognitive, and physical ways. So there’s a whole set of resources there in terms of practices that could be made use of, that might not be found in other traditions. On that level, maybe there’s something distinctive that Buddhism has to offer because of this attentional—I hate to use this word—technology. Attention training is a kind of technology that’s central to the Buddhist traditions but not to many other traditions.

MB: Have you found resources in the Western philosophical tradition that reinforce some of the ideas that you’ve brought forth under a more Buddhist banner?

PH: This NEH project that I’m directing right now is on cultural diversity in Asia. I mention that because we’re working very hard to resist binaries – whether it’s “East and West” or “the West and the rest”. There’s something quite unproductive about those binaries; they have their own historical legacy. I’m tempted to say there isn’t a category of ‘the West’ from which I’ve had inspiration; neither would I say that there’s the opposing category of ‘the East’ or ‘the Buddhist’.

I’m engaged in different kinds of practices, and some of those are purely intellectual practices, like the ones in which I was studying so-called Western philosophies. I studied Buddhist philosophy in the same way in an academic setting, and I’ve engaged in Buddhist practice as somebody committed to going through a set of bodily, emotional and conceptual shifts in an effort to break through and move obliquely to my own patterns and habituations. So I’ve engaged both Buddhism and Western stuff conceptually, and I’ve been relatively comfortable plundering both sets of traditions—if I could put it that way—for ideas and vocabularies that are useful and that seem to enable me to articulate some of the insights I’ve gleaned through these practices.

I’ve found real value in things like postmodern thought, particularly in its insistence on the ethical centrality of difference that you might get out of people like Levinas or Derrida or Deleuze or Jean-Luc Nancy. When I say “shared flourishing,” I’m really playing with Nancy’s notion of the shared; it’s a great distinction between the common and the shared, just like the distinction between finite and infinite games. Same as the distinction between the kusala and the akusala – it’s a great distinction, because it frustrates our natural tendency to pair things up as opposites.

It works from a Buddhist standpoint because it goes back to early Buddhist teachings that the basic source of suffering is setting things up in pairs of opposites. So the basic Buddhist practice is to avoid doing that.  Instead of setting up oppositions, try working with oblique contrasts. So early Buddhist thinkers tended not to talk about the contrast between truth and falsehood, pitting the true against what’s not true. Instead, they drew a contrast between truth and confusion. That’s oblique. It’s not an opposite; it’s something else. When you do that oblique move, something opens up.

I like these kinds of contrasts, whether they’re found within the ‘Buddhist’ context or the ‘Western’ one. It’s natural in a highly pluralistic environment like the ones that we all live in nowadays to do that. To do it effectively is another thing; to do it responsibly is another thing. Would I say that have I appropriated postmodern French philosophy in my work on Buddhism? I would not go that far. But I’ve read enough to know that there are some great ideas there that could be made use of, that could be aligned appropriately with the way in which I would like to see relational dynamics being inflected.

I think that we could do the same thing by making use of Buddhist concepts or Confucian ones, Taoist ones or Hindu ones, Muslim ones, first people’s ones – of taking ideas, oblique contrasts, concepts, and practices that are a part of other traditions and making use of them. The danger is that you end up with a grab bag of stuff that doesn’t connect together. And that’s where the suggestion that I made earlier fits in – that maybe there are reasons for going back to something like Buddhist practice, to make sure that you develop the full set of capacities that are involved in moving forward with this. Because, on the one hand, we could say resolving the predicaments of the 21^st century requires us to appreciate a wide range of value systems and cultural systems that we now know to be important and alive and well on the planet. It’s a huge variety of stuff that can potentially be brought into the mix, and the challenge is doing that responsibly and not being exclusive about it.

But if you don’t do it in a way that’s systematic, then you run the risk of it just being like a shopping mall approach that years ago led Chögyam Trungpa to coin the term “spiritual materialism.” You take a little from here, pick a little from there, and you put it all together to get something unique and contemporary but that doesn’t really work and isn’t sustainable. We don’t want to create critical chimera – an imaginary creature that even if you could stitch one together, it wouldn’t be able to reproduce. It might be a one-generation knockoff that looks kind of cool and different in response to some unusual situation, but it’s basically a monster. It’s not going to flourish. So we don’t want to create conceptual chimera. We don’t want to  just paste things together.

That’s where I would say that we need to be concerned about the resistance – within postmodern thinking and elsewhere – to hierarchical orderings of knowledge or systems. For all its obvious historical precedents, there’s a danger in that resistance. The human body is hierarchically organized after all. You can get rid of a hand or a finger, but you can’t get rid of the brain – you’re done for. There’s a hierarchy organically. Hierarchies are not all pernicious. Hierarchies enable us to share. If there’s no difference between us, if we really do have the same, exact endowments, we have no purpose in engaging one another. Admitting that there are significant differences among us, from a Buddhist perspective, means there is something to learn from each other, something from which we can benefit by opening ourselves to our differences and not just tolerating them.

For example, Buddhism historically has not been convincing in its demonstration of an ability to institutionally realize gender equality. At a spiritual level, fine. At the level of doctrinal comments on gender and the importance of gender in religious or spiritual practice and attainment, fine. Institutionally, Buddhism has had a pretty bad record. So there’s something to be learned from modern so-called Western systems about equality. But there’s also this idea that you have to maintain differences for there to be grounds for mutual contribution.

MB: To the extent that you describe the values underlying your work in Buddhist terms, do you worry that doing so might make your work less approachable or accessible to an American audience, one that as a whole isn’t super-familiar with Buddhism?

PH: I began writing my new book – Valuing Diversity – as one in which I would not make reference to Buddhism or other Asian traditions. I started writing it, and by the time I’d written a couple of hundred pages, I felt I was just being crippled intellectually. There were so many things that I couldn’t refer to or make use of without, at least at a certain level, explicitly bringing a Buddhist or Confucian perspective into it. I felt as if I wasn’t able to move forward.

It would be a little bit like someone from Asia trying to talk about democracy without ever bringing in anything about the history of the concept of democracy or democratic institutions in the West. It would be pretty hard to do that. It’s not that you couldn’t do it, but, boy, you’d have to work really hard to get your points across.

At a certain point, I just thought, “Well, the kinds of resources that I’m going to draw on and the examples that I’ll use might not be familiar to people, so the burden is on me, as an author, to offer them in a way that makes it as easy for the intended reader to digest as I possibly can.”

I think it ends up being a stronger book in the sense that it talks about – and in some degree demonstrates – what I’m talking about. There’s a conceptual diversity within the book itself. It doesn’t just have the Western perspective; it’s got multiple perspectives from both Asia and the West. That wasn’t my original inclination, but it was personal shortcomings that got me to move in that direction.

MB: Would you mind telling me a bit about the faculty development work you do?

PH: The programs that we run here are part of a joint project of the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii; it’s called the Asian Studies Development Program. Its mission is to enhance teaching and learning in higher education about Asian culture and societies. So we get money from different funding sources, like the National Endowment for the Humanities, US Department of Education Title VI grants, and private foundations both in the US and abroad.

I put together summer institute programs for college/university professors who are committed to including Asian Studies in their teaching. They come out here and spend anywhere from two to five weeks. We put together a short, multidisciplinary academic course for them. Typically, it would involve one lecture per day, sometimes two, a film series, site visits to museums, and discussions, with the whole point being to excite them about content related to Asian cultures and societies. Typically, we do philosophy, religion, and intellectual history in the first couple of weeks, then arts, literature and contemporary issues at the end.

We also do field seminars in Asia on which we’ll take groups of 12 to 15 faculty members and travel with them in China, Japan, or Southeast Asia. We also do workshops on the US mainland.

It’s all related to putting Asian Studies into the core undergraduate curriculum. Rather than ghettoizing Asian Studies, it’s a commitment to insuring that every student who is getting a four-year degree or a two-year degree in community college should be exposed to significant content on Asia.

MB: How much of this work serves as a channel for you to expose faculty to your ideas about what education’s goals ought to be?

PH: It sort of runs the gamut. If I had taken the typical approach after getting my Ph.D. and gotten a job teaching philosophy or religious studies somewhere, it’s very likely I would not have made the turn to do the kind of work that I’ve done, at least two-thirds of which tries to make use of Buddhist concepts to look at contemporary issues.

Some of it has been serendipitous. But I also have a chance to try ideas out on these faculty groups—they’re captive audiences after all!—and develop perspectives that might be more useful outside the academy. If I can do it in a vocabulary and approach that’s useful for them and that they believe will be useful for their students, probably it’s going to work okay if I write that stuff up and publish it for a general audience. I think there’s interplay between the two.

Jonathan Watts. Photo courtesy of Watts.

Jonathan Watts is a member of the executive board of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). He is also the coordinator of Think Sangha, a Buddhist think tank affiliated with INEB.  In addition, he is a fellow at the Jodo Shu Research Institute in Tokyo, a fellow at the International Buddhist Exchange Center in Yokohama, and the author or editor of several books on engaged Buddhism and social justice.

This interview took place via telephone on July 2.

MATT BIEBER: Let’s start with Think Sangha and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. You’ve described Think Sangha as a venue in which you and others analyze social problems through a Buddhist lens – in which you try to “to think like a Buddhist.” What does it mean to think like a Buddhist?

JONATHAN WATTS: We feel like there are a lot of people who are socially engaged who, as another friend said here, “just happen to be Buddhists”. They’re engaged and they’re Buddhists, but their Buddhism is not really informing their social action. They tend to understand social issues using other frameworks, like Marxism for example, and not bringing concepts and ways of thinking unique to Buddhism to their social activism.

A really influential book and essay has been Ajahn Buddhadasa’s Dhammic Socialism, written in the 1970s. In [that book] he talks about the difference between Marxism and the socialism of the day and what he understands as Buddhist socialism.

That kind of spirit and that kind of thinking is what’s behind Think Sangha. We’re looking at the importance of engaged Buddhism on a certain level – what’s special about Buddhism that we can bring to social issues? We feel like Buddhism brings a lot of different important perspectives, so that’s why we try to think like Buddhists.

Diana Winston wrote a good essay on this called A Socially Engaged Buddhist Methodology. She has these different categories: One is to find textual resources, so can we go back and find something that the Buddha said that’s related to the social issue that we’re working on and use it as a means for legitimizing our action or developing our thought.

Another one is socializing or applying Buddhist principles and themes. This is something that A.T. Ariyaratne, the founder of the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka, did a tremendous amount of. An example of this is re-expressing the classic teaching of the Four Noble Truths as: What’s the social problem? What are the causes, especially looking at structural and cultural violence? What’s the vision? How do we realize it?

And thirdly there’s the aspect of radical creativity in Buddhist practice. If I’m a seriously practicing Buddhist, then much of what I do will embody Buddhist principles, so I will act out of my Buddhist creativity.

We’ve had – I wouldn’t call it a tension; it’s sort of more of a different flavor. In our work in Think Sangha, we have people like me and Santikaro (a leading disciple of Buddhadasa) and other people who come from Theravada backgrounds who love to follow the second style, kind of Abidhamma-like – taking principles and applying them and thinking about modern society using Buddhist conceptual models. And some of our Zen friends dislike that, feeling it is artificial. They tend towards the third style of radical creativity, trying to speak more directly, and not using overly conceptualized models. I think both styles are useful.

MB: Right – various schools of Buddhism think about social problems pretty differently. So, when you say that you strive to think like a Buddhist, are you calling on what you take to be a common set of resources across all of Buddhism? Or is that statement more aspirational– that you think this is the best of what Buddhism has to offer and you’re therefore claiming the label?

I could also see self-identifying in this way for strategic reasons – knowing that this will have a cachet for a certain sector of the population, that it will lend you credibility and influence.   

JW: Well, I think fundamentally we use the word “Buddhist” as an identity marker – we’re proclaiming our identity. We’re first and foremost Buddhist, maybe even before we’re social activists (‘socially engaged’ Buddhism is a modifier of ‘Buddhist’). So I think the common grounding is that we’re Buddhists, and then we have become socially active.

Obviously, there are people who became socially active first and then became Buddhists later. I mean, there are plenty examples of that, like our colleague Alan Senauke who was a student radical at Columbia University in the 60s and then came into Buddhism later. But eventually what happens is that Buddhism becomes the core identity, because it’s seen as the grounding for social work, and without that grounding, you can lose what we feel are essential aspects of social activism, like non-violence, open-mindedness, and holding suffering without over-reacting.

In INEB, almost everyone agrees that if they don’t have that Buddhist identity (which means that they’re a Buddhist practitioner), then they won’t be able to properly do their social work or accomplish what they want to accomplish, because the Buddhist practice offers them a variety of really important tools for grounding themselves and understanding how to deal with others.

We talk about three different levels of engagement. There are the tools that you use for personal practice that help keep you grounded, that can help keep you from burning out and that help to see how to deal with the world. Then there are relational tools that Buddhism has for dealing with others, dealing with enemies, dealing with difficult people. And then at the third level are the Buddhist tools for understanding the world and how to see and understand society.

MB: I just finished a book called The Great Awakening by the progressive evangelical thinker Jim Wallis. He argues that the most successful social movements have typically been led by people of faith. Without faith, he thinks, it’s more difficult to maintain the motivation necessary for social activism.

I don’t remember whether he says so outright, but it seems pretty clear that he’s referring to faith in some sort of metaphysical being. You, on the other hand, are saying, “Well, our identity [and one might call it a religious identity] is very important to our capacity for social activism, because it provides crucial personal and communal resources. But none of that requires a faith in anything other than the world as we see it and as we’ve come to understand it.” In other words, it doesn’t require metaphysics.

JW: Yes, that’s Buddhism! But regardless of whether you believe in the metaphysical or not, we share with people of other faith communities the feeling that you need to be grounded in a spirituality that gives you a world view, an understanding of the meaning of life, and an ethical and moral compass. And whether I believe that Christianity is wrong or right because they have a metaphysical view becomes much less important – or almost not important – when I see Christians doing social work and manifesting what I think are not Buddhist but rather Dharmic principles through their actions and behavior.

One of the great things about engaged Buddhism – and then on the broader level, engaged spirituality – is that it cuts across doctrinal lines. In INEB, we’ve had many years of fruitful relationships with people from other religions based on common commitments to social issues. And at INEB conferences, we have people who come together, who probably if you had them at just a Buddhist conference or a Buddhist scholars’ conference, they might not be able to become friends because they’re coming from different doctrines or may not even really like each other’s Buddhism. But within INEB, they find that the social issues – dealing with people’s suffering – become their common ground, and then they connect on that level. And then they become close or they become friends because they find they have solidarity on the same social issues and they have the same social views.

And that’s great, because it becomes a way of cutting through stumbling blocks. You know, “Do I have to go and talk to that Tibetan person? They believe in reincarnation.” Or you’ve seen all these silly stereotypes and viewpoints, you know. The Theravada people believe the Mahayana people subscribe to some kind of later cultic offshoot of Buddhism, while Mahayana people believe Theravadans are stuck in some kind of selfish Buddhism of personal enlightenment. At the last INEB conference, we had these two guys who became really good buddies who are on the absolute opposite ends of the Buddhist spectrum: One is a Sri Lankan monk and the other is a guy here in my office in Yokohama belonging to a new Buddhist denomination that is completely lay. So, from a Buddhist standpoint, they have nothing in common. Their respective Buddhisms are almost unintelligible to each other, but they became good friends.

MB: Let’s talk a bit about Think Sangha. Can you describe how the organization got started?

JW: It was there in kernel form since the beginning of INEB in 1989. At the INEB conference in 1992, we created a mini-forum, called the “Buddhism and Social Analysis” group, with people who wanted to think about social issues from a Buddhist standpoint. That group met every year until 1995, when we held our own separate conference called The Dhammic Society: Towards a Vision of Engaged Buddhism. Finally, it became Think Sangha proper in 1997.

MB: One of the first issues the group thought and wrote about was modern consumption patterns. Since that time, Think Sangha has dealt with issues ranging from globalization to violence in the modern world. What has Think Sangha been working on more recently?

JW: Our most recent meeting was in March of 2011 in India. We had agreements and ideas to have a project come out of it, like we usually do, but in the middle of the conference, the tsunami and nuclear disaster went down in Japan and I’ve been sort of in a crisis mode here, dealing with my own life and dealing with what was to me more emergency activism that needed to be done, and so I made the book This Precious Life: Buddhist Tsunami Relief and Anti-Nuclear Activism in Post 3/11 Japan, just published this past Spring.

Right now, Think Sangha’s in a bit of a dormant place. That doesn’t mean that the kind of things Think Sangha was doing are dormant. If you look around, you continue to see engaged Buddhists who are writing and developing their understandings of engaged Buddhism in a Think Sangha-type manner, especially many of our core Think Sangha members like Alan Senauke and David Loy here in the States. One of our recent goals has been to put together a training manual on how to do various kinds of workshops on engaged Buddhism to help people develop an understanding of engaged Buddhism and an understanding of society from a Buddhist standpoint, and then some ideas about how to use those understandings as grounds for activism.

MB: If I understand correctly, then, INEB is a forum in which engaged Buddhists from all over the world can get together, bridge differences, and talk about social problems in a somewhat more general way. Think Sangha, on the other hand, is more focused on developing precise conceptual models, analyses, and critiques. Is that fair?

JW: Sort of. Think Sangha is just one of many different interest groups within INEB. The way you just explained it, it sounds like they’re sort of two parallel organizations, which they aren’t. Think Sangha’s very much within INEB and an example of an INEB activity. It’s people from a lot of different countries coming together on a common interest and working together collaboratively. INEB’s been really growing recently, so we have a number of these sub-groups now. We have a group on the environment that’s going to stage a major international conference in Sri Lanka at the end of September. We have a Buddhist economics group. We have a group that does training for youth, developing young Buddhist social leaders. And this doesn’t even take into account what’s probably a more common INEB method, which is just simply collaborations between two or three different groups or people.

MB: You described some of the interaction between people from different parts of the Buddhist world. It strikes me that these interactions would be smoothest at the most general level, and that they’d become more challenging as the ideas in play become more conceptually specific. When Think Sangha seeks to build or apply conceptual models to social problems, then, what does the process of analysis look like within the group? How does it sort between various Buddhist perspectives?

JW: That’s a problem for certain kinds of people but not a problem for other kinds of people. Some people aren’t conceptual; some people aren’t even ideological. The fundamental ethos of INEB is what we call kalyana-mitta, which is spiritual friendship. So the foundation is creating relationships, and we do that at our meetings. That grounds us before the ideology comes in, so we have people who differ greatly on a number of issues, from their own approach to Buddhism to their ways of understanding society, yet they are still able to be collaborative because the culture that we’ve created is to put the relationship before any of those differences.

MB: I don’t mean to harp on disagreements –

JW: No, that’s fine. Sulak is somebody who believes one of the core components of kalyana-mitta is to critically challenge each other. In this way, he never shies away from, and often incites, disagreements.

MB: Are there are instances in which there are conceptual disagreements, despite the relationships that have been created? If so, how are those disagreements settled, practically speaking? What kinds of decision-making processes does INEB use? Are there voting mechanisms?

JW: No. What happens is if the conceptual problems are too big, then people decide not to work together. It becomes like a dating system; people may meet each other, become quite interested, work a bit together and find that their approaches are a bit irreconcilable and then they decide not to work together anymore, but they still remain friends. At the last Think Sangha meeting, we were in India. The Indians are already naturally argumentative and ideological and they differ on a number of positions, both in terms of Buddhism and social activism. As we as a network have recognized the importance of the revitalization of Buddhism in India, we have almost formed a sub-INEB group working on Indian issues and trying to get all the different Indian communities that we work with to overcome their differences and work in solidarity together.

At the last INEB conference, we had a bit of a row. We had a plenary session on “The Future of the Sangha.” One of the speakers was a member of the TBMSG, one of the Ambedkharite groups in India, who don’t have fully ordained bhikkus. They have ordained laypeople. It was funny because he got criticized not by orthodox Theravada people or from any other countries with traditions that put the monastic traditions at the center; he got criticized by other Indians, some of whom were also from the same, previously-untouchable backgrounds, saying, “Well, if we follow the way of your Sangha, there won’t be a Bhikkhu Sangha anymore; the Bhikkhu Sangha will be gone in a hundred years if we follow your way,” and so on and so forth. I was in charge of moderating this plenary, and it got quite charged for a bit. But that is the culture of INEB, very much set by Sulak; and so we aired our views, but it didn’t damage our conference or our general solidarity as a network of “spiritual friends”.

MB: Let’s talk about the relationship between INEB and the broader public, and whether you see tradeoffs in self-identifying as Buddhists when you work in the public square. (I’m sure this differs in various countries.)

On one hand, I can imagine how identifying openly in this way would allow you to announce your identities, create solidarity within the group, and provide a kind of support and foundation for your activism.

On the other hand, as you pointed out, it’s an identity marker, one that might unintentionally exclude folks that you wish to – and otherwise be able to – attract. Does INEB worry about this?

JW: Absolutely. There are two edges to it. There are a lot of people in INEB who don’t even have particularly Buddhist organizations – they’re just doing a kind of social work and they almost keep their Buddhist identity in the back. They don’t really hide it, but they keep it in the back and they seek to connect with people more on the basis of what they are doing as a social issue.

But there are quite a lot of people in INEB who sail into the wind. They realize that presenting themselves as socially engaged Buddhists is not going to attract a huge mainstream audience. But we believe so strongly in the viewpoint of engaged Buddhism that we fly into the wind anyway, and on two levels.

One is within Buddhism itself; we see that engaged Buddhism is an essential way of understanding Buddhism, that there are too many Buddhists who have fallen into the Buddhism stereotype, which is like, “We should not be connected to the world somehow; we should be off meditating or just doing our own religious thing.”

And then on the other level, which is flying into the face of basically secular, material society and going, “There needs to be a place for progressive spirituality/religion” – it’s not even secular society; it’s also the spread of intolerant fundamentalist religion. So there’s a certain amount of, you could almost say “evangelical engaged Buddhism,” in that a lot of us are out there going, “We really believe in this viewpoint. And yes, maybe we’re not attracting hordes of fans but we believe this perspective is really important and that it needs to be made, whether people necessarily like it or not.”

A lot of our role models were iconoclastic and persevered in the face of a lot of criticism from the mainstream. Buddhadasa, Sulak, Thich Nhat Hanh and Ambedkar – these are all people who ended up being hugely appreciated by history and hugely appreciated in the end, but in the beginning they weren’t.

I think there’s an understanding that one can’t be fundamentalist when it comes time to sit down and work – that you have to connect with people. I think there’s a strong ecumenical thrust in INEB – we seek to practice ecumenical values. You have to put aside issues and be able to talk to people in a regular way.

But at the same time, there’s also what we consider important viewpoints. So it really depends on what you’re working on. A lot of INEB work may be consciousness-raising work, where you’re asked to give a talk about some social issue. And when INEB people do that, they don’t hide who they are. They come out and speak about Buddhism and the importance of Buddhism for social issues. But when you’re trying to help refugees in Burma, you have to put some of your ideological concerns in the background.

MB: I wanted to circle back to the Fukushima disaster. I know this is obviously very important to you, given the book. I hadn’t realized there was such a personal element to your experience.  

JW: Well, I live in Tokyo, on the edge of the disaster itself, and I’m affected by it directly. I have to watch out what I buy in the stores. I’m using bottled water for my daughter.

MB: Had the nuclear issue been a major concern for you prior to Fukushima?

JW: No, not at all. Not that I wasn’t concerned about it, but I’d never worked much on environmental issues or nuclear issues at all. Now, I’ve become deeply involved in it.

MB: And you’re fully opposed to all forms of nuclear power?

JW: Oh, yes, absolutely – absolutely anti-nuclear.

MB: What does that activism look like and how has it played out in the engaged Buddhist community in Japan? Is this something others in INEB are taking up as well, or is it more of a Japan-specific concern?

JW: Well, first of all, let me deal with Japan. Immediately after the whole tsunami-nuclear incident, I started doing translation and reporting to the international community on what was going on here within the Japanese Buddhist world. And as we moved along, I noticed that there was all this work being done for tsunami relief – very active and energetic and proactive, wonderful work – but there was nothing being done on the nuclear issue. Buddhists weren’t touching it. There were few radical priests who started coming out on the issue, or actually they’d already been out on the issue for some years. There’s a group called the Interfaith Forum for the Review of National Nuclear Policy that I profile in the book and that has been working since ’92. It happens that one of their leaders is a very close colleague of ours in JNEB [Japan Network of Engaged Buddhists] who I’ve become increasingly close with over the last couple of years named Rev. Hidehito Okochi.

So, my work last year was to try to put into English and spread awareness outside of Japan of what very few radical Buddhists were doing inside of Japan. But within Japan, I was doing my best to kind of stir the Buddhist world up and ask questions and see if anybody was going to do anything. In one of my articles in the book that I wrote, “Which Way to Peace?” I talk about Soka Gakkai and Rissho Kosei-kai, who since the 1950s have been opposed to nuclear arms and nuclear proliferation. They’ve devoted huge sums of money, made beautiful big conferences, talks with Gorbachev, all this kind of stuff, but they were dead silent after Fukushima. I kept asking their people, “Aren’t you guys going to come out with a statement? Don’t you have anything to say?” And they’re just sort of hemming and hawing.

Then slowly, things started coming out last fall, and fortunately, Rev. Yoshiharu Tomatsu (a leading engaged Buddhist in Japan and part of our INEB network) was the head of the Japan Buddhist Federation. Both I and Rev. Okochi (an old friend and colleague of Rev. Tomatsu) were always badgering him and teasing him and doing anything we could to say, “Isn’t the Japan Buddhist Federation going to do anything about this? This is an embarrassment.” It was an embarrassment because major parts of Japanese civil society had already come out on the nuclear issue and were very active on it. Japanese Buddhism, as has been its pattern over the years, just stuck its head in the sand. So, it’s really about trying to energize Buddhists here on the issue.

Did we have an influence? I don’t know. I guess we had an influence on Tomatsu-san and the priest above him, Rev. Taitsu Kono – the former president of the association who has become very stridently anti-nuclear. Fortunately, those two were the heads of the Japan Buddhist Federation and they pushed through a declaration, and so that has created a space for increasing awareness in the Buddhist world on the nuclear issue.

At the beginning of this year, I began noticing people in the Buddhist world – in my office, for example – were talking about the nuclear issue. They had never talked about it before. And then, by the spring, people were having serious discussions about it. I kept going to these demonstrations. I’ve got quite a network of priests on my Facebook page because I found that Facebook became a great way to network and find other Buddhist priests in Japan. (There are a lot of Buddhist priests who are socially active on Facebook, a lot of them doing tsunami relief work.) And so, I would announce all these nuclear demonstrations and tell them that Nipponzan Myohoji (the only Buddhist denomination consistently active in civil protest) will be there – and nobody would come. But did you see the big protest that happened last Friday (June 29)?

MB: No, I didn’t.

JW: There was a very large spontaneous anti-nuclear rally here last Friday, opposing the restart of the reactors – they were restarted on Sunday. It was a landmark event in that it was very large, very spontaneous, it got a bit out of control, and we got a group of ten Buddhist priests to come out. I couldn’t even get one before! We got a group of ten to come out, which will keep moving forward. The Buddhist world is getting increasingly and increasingly active.

So I guess my role here has been sort of stirring the pot as much as I can, because I know a lot of people. Stirring the pot and also trying to bring into public view – not so much in Japan but internationally – these people who’ve been working on the issue who are Buddhists.

In January, I had one of the weirder and more unsettling experiences of my life – after (possibly) being mistaken for a protester, I was removed and then arrested for “criminal trespass” at a public Mitt Romney event in Hudson, NH.

Recently, I got some great news: the case has been dismissed! No charges, no trial, and thanks to the wonderful pro-bono legal work of Andru Volinsky (with an assist from Jim Rosenberg), no legal fees. (Tony Barash, former Director of the American Bar Association Center for Pro Bono, put me in contact with Volinsky, so I’m very grateful to Tony as well!)

Thanks to everyone who expressed their support, and to everyone who participated in what became some very worthwhile conversations about our political process.

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is core faculty and director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as a founding member of Barack Obama’s National LGBT Leadership Council.

This interview took place in March, when Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were still in the Republican presidential race.

MATT BIEBER: You wrote recently that you were “disgusted” with the GOP candidates. Two questions: first, do the things that disgust you surprise you? And second, do you think that expressing that disgust is useful strategically?

TIM MCCARTHY: Great questions. This is what happens when you’re someone like me who posts aggressively on Facebook as a way to vent my spleen!

My principal source of disgust stems from the fact that I don’t believe for one second that any of these men have the nation’s best interest at heart during a very difficult trial in our nation’s history. Now, as a longstanding member of the “democratic wing” of the Democratic Party, I will fully acknowledge that I am biased when I look at them and listen to them and try to interpret what they’re saying and gauge what they’re doing. I’m just not in their camp—never have been and never will be.

That said, when I look at the current crop of Republican candidates, I don’t see a lot of positive, proactive—to say nothing of progressive—kinds of policy solutions being laid on the table that a broad sector of the American people can actually entertain as legitimate alternatives and suggestions to move us forward. I think that they are motivated in different ways by a kind of ideological purism (which I think Santorum represents), a kind of egotistical megalomania (which I think Gingrich represents), and a kind of elite entitlement (which is what I think drives Romney). I just don’t see them offering up a set of policy proposals and alternatives that can be seriously debated and considered by reasonable people.

MB: What kind of issues are you thinking about in particular?

TM: Certainly on social issues, they’re so far outside where the country has moved on women’s reproductive rights, birth control, gay rights, immigration, and these kinds of things. They even want to get rid of the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency—which, by the way, are never going to be abolished!  So let’s stop all this ridiculous pandering to the worst kind of anti-government hysteria.

We can talk about education reform and immigration reform; we can talk about different approaches to climate change, global warming. But let’s talk about the research and science that’s on the table, let’s debate it, rather than just reject academics and scientists because they teach at so-called “elite universities.” Let’s talk about their research, and if you don’t agree with it, then tell me why you don’t agree with it. What research have you done? What are your hypotheses and methodologies?  Who on your team has done serious research that arrives at different kinds of findings? Let’s have that conversation. Likewise, if you don’t like teachers’ unions, let’s talk about different models for education reform, rather than simply call for the abolition of the Department of Education, which is doing really important work in a whole range of areas.  We need to replace this silly scapegoating with serious debate.  There’s too much at stake.

And when it comes to foreign policy, I don’t think they can beat Obama.  Now, I have a longstanding critique of Obama’s foreign policy agenda—his failure to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the slow pace of withdrawal in Afghanistan, the reprehensible use of drone attacks, among other things—but I am nonetheless relieved that he seems to be less of a knee-jerk “hawk” than his Republican predecessors and even many of his fellow Democrats. But the GOP strategy is to ignore the things that President Obama has done well to advance an indiscriminate war cry for endless engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now, another hasty, preemptive military strike against Iran. Politically, financially, morally, that’s an untenable set of positions. It’s warmongering at its worst, ideologically driven, an attempt to say that everything President Obama does is wrong.

So that’s why I’m disgusted from a policy standpoint. The second piece of the disgust for me is that in the process of running for president, these folks have reinvigorated a pernicious kind of “dog-whistle” politics around race and class that I find to be absolutely insidious, and frankly ancient. Most of us, many of us, have gotten beyond the point where a candidate can invoke the claim that Barack Obama is “the best food stamp President in American history” and think that reasonable citizens are not going to see that for what it is. It’s the classic racialization of poverty, which had its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, now being projected onto America’s first black President.  It’s a deliberate strategy of trying to denigrate poor people and black people, equating poverty with blackness and blackness with poverty (which are two different, if interrelated things).

To me, this smacks of a kind of ancient race-baiting that this country needs to move beyond. If you are going to make a legitimate claim to the presidency of the United States in the 21^st century, when we have just elected the first African-American president, then you have to put an end to this. You have to do as John McCain tried to do during the 2008 campaign, to his credit, and dismiss this kind of race-baiting. I mean, McCain had surrogates, including Sarah Palin, who sometimes did it for him. But he himself did not engage in this kind of petty “dog whistle” race-baiting.

But these guys—especially Gingrich and Santorum—are going right to the heart of this, I mean, right to the heart of this.  And it’s not just them; it’s all these other people running on the GOP ticket in all sorts of state-level races and congressional races and so forth.  It’s got to stop.

MB: You used the word “pandering” a minute ago. What’s interesting to me about some of these candidates is that I don’t actually get the sense that they are aware of themselves or think of themselves as pandering. Deep down, I think Rick Santorum believes the stuff that he’s saying on class and race and economic inequality. I think Romney’s sense of entitlement and relative ignorance of what it’s like to be poor in America actually shines through pretty clearly. Same with Gingrich, and he’s the one who’s been doing the worst of this race-baiting stuff. 

I agree that they’re pandering on some issues, but on this one, it doesn’t actually feel that way to me. Which in a way is worse, but in a way is, well, hopeful.

TM: Well, you know, with all due respect, I think that’s a generational thing. You’re young and God bless you for that; I wish I were young again!  But you know, for me, listening to Newt Gingrich takes me back to a place. I came of age politically when he was becoming famous politically—or infamous, depending on one’s perspective. When he was rising through the ranks of the Republican Party and then, in 1994, with the Republican takeover of Congress during the Clinton administration, all of this race baiting—on crime, welfare, rap music, multiculturalism, affirmative action—was almost routine. It was such a core part of the Republican strategy to dismantle the Great Society programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when we actually did tackle poverty – not in a way that was completely successful, but there were policies committed to economic redistribution and the broad general social welfare that helped the least among us, that actually had enormous success in doing some of the things that they set out to do.

And Gingrich was a part of a concerted effort driven by these so-called “Christian” conservatives (who are hard to call Christian when it comes to how they treat the poor!) and these so-called “small government” conservatives (who do love their wars!), all of whom are hell-bent on dismantling the welfare state that was originally created during the New Deal and then expanded during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations. Don’t forget that Nixon put in place the first federal affirmative action programs for minority-owned businesses. But that’s not a conversation these people want to have. Richard Nixon would never have a shot at the nomination in today’s Republican Party. He’s too liberal, which just shows you how far to the right we’ve moved in this country. Reagan couldn’t even get the GOP nomination today.

So, for me, much of the current discourse around race and class issues within Republican circles smacks of a kind of 1980s and 1990s conservatism. I see this as a return to a kind of insidious politics rather than a watered-down version of what has happened in the past. Perhaps that’s because my ears are very well trained to hear the dog whistle, having lived through that time and having fought on the Left in those culture war battles when I was a young graduate student living in New York City, during Giuliani’s reign and Clinton’s retreat. You know the kinds of things that we were fighting against: the dismantling of the welfare state, the racialization of poverty, police brutality, these kinds of things, which are really arenas in which I earned my chops and sharpened my social and political analysis. This, to me, seems like a return to all that—only this time, we have a real black President who has become a target for these irrational fears.

MB: But pandering suggests insincerity, doesn’t it? That’s what I’m trying to get at. One of the troubling things about Gingrich’s rhetoric is that it actually feels sincere, even if it’s misguided.

TM: I think it’s absolutely not the case with Gingrich, because Gingrich panders to those kinds of elements, and then the next day accuses both Romney and President Obama of being divisive. You can’t say in the same week—to virtually all-white audiences—that “Spanish is the language of the ghetto,” that Barack Obama is “the best food stamp president in American history,” and that he needs to “stop singing and start governing” (after an appearance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem), and then—the very next day after a primary where he got hammered—step up to the podium and say that Barack Obama and others are responsible for dividing America.  You can’t do that and expect to be considered sincere, can you?  Perhaps we have different definitions of “sincerity.”

MB: It’s a tricky word to use in this case. I get the sense that he thinks of himself as a gadfly figure, a prophet whose statements represent hard truths. Not so much about Obama singing, but I definitely have that sense about his description of Spanish as the “language of the ghetto.” Sure, much of his analysis is rooted in false premises, but I get the sense that he’s so love with his own intellect that he doesn’t work too hard at being consistent.

TM: See, I think there’s a difference here, because I think that Newt Gingrich is a man whose entire political career (and personal life) is built on a series of lies and betrayals. In my mind, he’s not someone who can be taken seriously as someone who’s bringing a hard truth that we’re not ready to hear, particularly when the people he’s talking about—black people and brown people, immigrants and other minorities—are precisely the people who have historically been used in this way to score political advantage. We can go back even further than the 1980s and 1990s to find examples of these groups being scapegoated to advance conservative policies that actually made their lives, already tough, more miserable.

But let’s think about Mitt Romney. Romney is a man who is running away from his only political record. He’s running for the presidency and away from his governorship. This seems incredible to me, but then again, Romney has a long history of shifting the terrain once he sets his sights on the Next Big Thing. I have a very personal connection to this. In the last year he was governor, he ended up slashing a whole bunch of programs that disproportionately benefited poor people in Massachusetts, including a program that I run in Dorchester, which had been supported, in part, with some state funding.

This is a program that runs on a $117,000 annual budget. Much of that we get from Mass Humanities and private donors, but we also have a line item in the education section of the governor’s budget. Romney cut this line item as a part of a larger effort to slash so-called “welfare” programs. The problem is that the program I directed—the Clemente Course in the Humanities—is not a welfare program; it’s a community-based, college-level adult education program run out of a remarkable community health center located in one of Boston’s most resilient neighborhoods. The program is excellent, one of the flagship programs of its kind in the nation, and the community health center is a remarkable, award-winning organization that provides a host of services to thousands of community residents. And yet in his last year as governor, Romney cut the funding for this and other programs to shore up his conservative credentials just as he was preparing to run for the presidency the first time.  Perhaps this is what he meant when he said he was “severely conservative.”  Indeed.

But to me, there’s nothing at all sincere about shoring up your conservative “street cred” by screwing people on the street. That’s what too many Republicans do, and that’s what he did.  Perhaps it’s the curse of the Irish, but I’ll never forget that.  And I’ll work like hell to make sure he never gets to punish America the way he punished those of us in Massachusetts.

Let’s get real:  Romney is the king of insincerity, and I do think you’re right insofar as he is oblivious to the kind of experiences that ordinary people have, those of us who are poor, working or middle class. He can’t even begin to understand what this kind of life would be like, what our lives are like, so he can’t have any empathy, and he comes across as being completely tone-deaf to these kinds of experiences. That will continue to be the case because he’s just not someone who is ever going to connect or empathize with—to say nothing of support or care for—ordinary folks. He’s no Franklin Roosevelt, that’s for sure!

MB: You can see Romney trying to squeeze himself into these new clothes, including when talks about having had “a severely conservative record as governor.” 

TM: No, he didn’t, until the very end.

MB: Right. He can’t possibly believe that. With Gingrich, it’s easier for me to imagine that he thinks what he’s saying is true at the moment he’s saying it. 

TM: Look, let’s be honest: If you’re going to be in politics at the national level, you’re going to have to pander. You’re going to do things that are inconsistent with the record that you may have had in the past.  And you are going to have to account for that. There are very few politicians at the national level who have had fully consistent careers. Barack Obama doesn’t have a fully consistent career politically. He’s gone back on things that he promised. He’s done things that his past wouldn’t have predicted. He’s been more conservative than his record might suggest in some arenas and he’s been more progressive than his record would suggest in others—that’s part of politics.

Getting back to your original question about what disgusts me about these guys, it’s the abject pandering and intentional dishonesty that disgusts me.  I’m not saying that Barack Obama’s perfect, far from it, but these guys are chronically and constitutionally imperfect in a way that I think will prevent the nation from moving forward from this crucible we’re experiencing right now.

The other question you asked me, which I want to get back to, is this question of whether expressing disgust is strategically advantageous. Are you asking whether it’s strategically advantageous for someone like me, specifically, to be doing this, or whether it’s strategically advantageous for the Left, generally, to be doing this?

MB: Let’s talk about you in the context of your Facebook posts. Are these venting moments, or are your posts meant to animate your readers in a certain way?

TM: I think both. Personally and politically, we all need places to vent, and I know that when I go on Facebook and vent my frustrations with Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney or any one of the other candidates, I know that I’m going to get some kind of instant gratification from my friends who are equally or even more frustrated.

I also use Facebook in other ways that are more strategic. I often post provocative articles—not necessarily articles I agree with but articles that have provoked me in some way—because I want to provoke others and try to generate the kind of discussion across identity, experience, and ideology I think we need (I have a pretty diverse range of “friends” on Facebook).

I’m also from the political school – maybe I’m a “Saul Alinsky radical,” as Newt Gingrich claims the President is, or maybe I’ve just studied too much Frederick Douglass, Karl Marx, and the like – that sees conflict as the principal engine for social change. There’s never been a moment in history where broad consensus without conflict has resulted in a great leap forward. The moments of profound change in this country—whether you’re talking about the American Revolution or the Civil War or the New Deal or the 1960s or even now—were not moments of universal consensus, where we all hold hands as a nation and talk to one another, quietly and respectfully, about how cool it would be to pass the Civil Rights Act, or how great it would be to abolish slavery, or how amazing it would be if women got the right to vote, or how wonderful it would be if gay people could get married, or how awesome it would be if we declared our independence from Britain. Progress is forged in the crucible of conflict, not the cult of consensus. Creating a kind of division in or break with this cult of consensus is the way that we foment the kind of contentious politics that has always produced the possibility for great change, in this country as elsewhere.

But I think there’s a difference between being provocative and contentious for the sake of a broader vision for social change or justice, and being intentionally divisive for the sake of one’s political livelihood. I think Newt Gingrich does the latter. Divisive is what the CPAC Conference was in February. Divisive is separating people into two sorts of realities and two existences for the purpose of raising one up and diminishing the other. And when I think about what it means to be divisive, I’m talking about divisiveness in terms of groups of people who are defined by things that are beyond their choice or control in some ways – like the idea of dividing white people and black people, straight people and gay people, rich people and poor people, men and women – for the purpose of making sure that one of these groups is somehow diminished, denigrated or discriminated against.

We can think about the Occupy Movement in this context, too. Though I support much of what Occupy is trying to do in terms of transforming our public debate about war, wealth, and our collective well-being, I’m not one of those people who wants the 99% to rule so that we can put the 1% in Guantanamo Bay. I don’t believe in just flipping the proverbial script. We can acknowledge that there are good rich people and bad poor people—and vice versa—and still also acknowledge that our economic system is in many ways rotten to the core, and that a system that produces such gross disparities between rich and poor is acting against the interests of the common good. In other words, we can have a contentious political conversation about the realities of economic inequality in America, how we might resolve these problems, without reproducing the hierarchies and stereotypes that have no place in a truly just world.

MB: I’m thinking about Alinsky’s quote about how you have to polarize to mobilize but depolarize to settle. In that moment, there is a division going on, isn’t there? It’s just a more legitimate division, one that isn’t based on things like skin color or whatever. It’s perhaps a momentary political division in the name of progress.

TM: Yeah. When I’m talking about divisiveness, I’m talking about divisiveness that functions as a way to produce discrimination and perpetuate disparities between one social group and another. I don’t see restoring tax rates to Clinton-era levels as discriminating against my friends who make over a million dollars a year, and I don’t know many of them who think that, either. But when Mitt Romney gets up at CPAC and says, “I will support a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman,” he is voicing a division that serves explicitly to disenfranchise and discriminate against my husband and me, and countless other queer couples.  That’s personal, and unjust.

When folks get up and say, “We’re going to abolish the Department of Education” or “We’re going to turn these kids into janitors,” that creates a certain kind of division between people who have easy access to education and people who struggle to gain that access, people who can choose their employment and people who can’t.

We can have a conversation about what our educational landscape would look like if the Department of Education were abolished, but one thing’s for sure: public school kids—meaning the vast majority of kids from poor, working, and middle class families—would be totally screwed.  Frankly, it would be a much bigger crisis than any of these GOP candidates knows or acknowledges, assuming that they’ve actually thought about the consequences of their policy positions. I’m not convinced they have.

You know, there are people on the Right, or people who oppose the Occupy Movement, who think that making the rich pay more in taxes is a form of discrimination against the rich. I don’t happen to agree with that argument. I think that argument is selfish, and I think that argument has nothing to do with the pursuit of a fair or just society. But we can have that debate, and the Occupy folks saying “Tax the rich!” is one way to create that kind of debate.

If I were the White House press secretary, or working intimately with the Obama campaign, which I’m not, this obviously wouldn’t be the tone or tenor that I would lead with in public life. But that’s not my role. My goal is to help do whatever I can to get people to critically examine the reality in which we live and to help move us towards a reality that is more fair and just, more equitable and free, for more people than is presently the case. My goal is very simple in that regard, but I also understand the profound limitations of my own place in this society. I mean, who am I?

MB: It’s interesting you brought up Alinsky, and it’s perhaps ironic that Gingrich is calling Obama an “Alinsky radical.” After all, Alinsky thought in terms of power analysis, of how contention is sometimes necessary for victory. And a lot of the left’s critique of Obama is precisely that he hasn’t been contentious enough! 

Of course, one might respond by saying that Obama’s done a very subtle kind of power analysis by counting votes in Congress and squeezing through a health care bill, for example. 

But it’s clear that he’s not a president who’s been all that fiery at the rostrum, banging the table or giving Four Freedoms-style speeches. So it feels especially ironic that he’s getting tagged with this label. 

What are your thoughts on that? And why do you think Gingrich has been bringing Alinsky up in the first place? After all, he’s not someone most people know about. 

TM: I think Gingrich is doing a couple of things here. First, he’s trying to position himself as a credible historian; he always talks about being a historian, which I find very funny for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m a historian, too. My ears always perk up whenever he says, “As a historian, blah, blah, blah,” because I’m interested in what’s going to happen next once he says that. He often says things after he invokes the ethos of the historian that probably wouldn’t pass muster in most graduate programs that I know of in American history or any other kind of history.

I also think he’s trying to demonstrate that he has some kind of knowledge that’s privileged, that other people don’t have. He often does that, and there’s a good article to be written, if it hasn’t been written already, about Newt Gingrich as “historian-at-large.” He is in desperate need of a peer review!

You know, Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer. He’s trying to link Obama to that, to the glorious radicalism that is part of Chicago’s modern history. But as you say, Obama demonstrates none of the political temperament of a Saul Alinsky-type community organizer, despite the fact that he was a community organizer in Chicago where Saul Alinsky made his fame.

But the irony is even deeper in that Obama is a former community organizer. Alinsky was always a community organizer, and he didn’t write Rules for Radicals for the President of the United States. He wrote Rules for Radicals for people engaged in contentious political work and community organizing at the grassroots level. Not that there aren’t lessons that we can all learn from it, but Alinsky’s work was not written with Congressional and Presidential candidates as the intended audience, so we need to keep that in perspective.

I was joking with somebody the other day. I said, “You know, the invocation of Saul Alinsky is probably going to hurt Elizabeth Warren more than it’s going to hurt Barack Obama.” I’m sure you’ve seen the ad linking Elizabeth Warren to Occupy Wall Street and the intellectual “theories” of radicalism that they purport to represent. So, you know, it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

That said, I am actually thrilled by the Alinsky invocation, precisely because most people think about their lives in local and immediate and short-term ways. They think about how they’re going to pay the bills, whether or not their kids are going to go to a good school, how this is going to affect their small business. Even when you think about the healthcare reform bill, small business owners are thinking, “How is this going to affect me in running my business? How will this drive costs up or down? What’s that going to mean in terms of me wanting to hire or retain X number of employees?” You know, people think of things in local or personal terms, particularly people who are parents, people who are responsible for other people in their lives, whether it’s in a business or a family or a broader community.

But if people take the next step to actually read Alinsky, they will understand that his political framework was about trying to wrestle power from elites for the benefit of the majority of people living their lives at the local level. If people actually read Alinsky, they might realize that we’re all more radical than we think we are.

Whether or not that’s going to happen is another question, because we do live in a world of sound bites and Swift Boat mythologies where we’re able to invoke Alinsky as a kind of radical, tar and feather Obama with that kind of claim, link it to Chicago, and then move on. I’m not sure if Rules for Radicals has experienced a spike on Amazon.com in the aftermath of Gingrich mentioning him. Perhaps it has. Who knows? If that’s the case, it’s a welcome thing.

As for Obama, one of the most striking things about his presidency is that he has very humble, unorthodox roots in the sense of being raised in Hawaii, being a biracial kid in Indonesia, all these different pieces, and he also has these roots as both a community organizer and constitutional lawyer. I mean, he has all these very interesting elements to his background, all of which have shaped him in different ways. This is one of the reasons why he’s so hard to figure out – most of us don’t have that combination of local and global, personal and professional influences. And so, he seems foreign to us in some ways, but then really familiar to us other ways, and so we project onto him what we will, which has always been the case since he’s been in the national spotlight. In a way, I feel badly for him; he’s a screen onto which we project our most intimate affinities and intense anxieties.

But the deeper irony here, I think, is that the very set of forces that conspired to produce this historical moment, when the United States was ready to elect its first black President, were actually put in motion by people like Saul Alinsky and the political activists who fomented the various rebellions throughout our history that produced the great social changes that made it possible for Barack Obama to go to Harvard Law School, do the kind of successful community organizing work that he did, and run and win the presidency. Without the Saul Alinskys of the world, there would be no President Obama.

Obama pledged to change the way that we do politics, right? If I were him, I’d say this, over and over: “We need to keep doing the kind of contentious politics that got people like Hillary Clinton and me where we are today. Let’s keep practicing that kind of politics! Let’s keep fomenting rebellions to create opportunities for more people to be part of our political democracy.” Now, that’s some change I could believe in!

MB: It feels like there’s some tension between what you said earlier – about how Alinsky’s methodologies are the sorts of things that work in a certain community context but they’re not the sorts of things that work if you’re president. 

TM: Right, exactly. But the other piece of that is this: how does the President govern with a divided Congress, or even with a united Congress (which he had for the first two years)? Obviously, the sort of contentious politics that exists at the level of grassroots organizing, in social movements, that causes change – that doesn’t always work in Congress. That same contention perhaps forestalls or prevents the compromise or consensus that would lead to the passage of certain types of legislation.

Maybe Barack Obama’s right. Maybe most of us are thinking in the here and now, in the short term, and we don’t really recognize the long-term picture. I think it was Joe Klein or one of the pundits who said at one point after the healthcare debate that “Obama’s playing chess and the rest of us are playing checkers.” I think there may be a case to be made for that – and we could all be wrong.

On the other hand, one could make the case that he shouldn’t want to change politics as it currently exists, because contention at the grassroots actually made it possible for him to get to a place where he could govern in the first place. But perhaps there’s a whole different set of governing strategies to think about once he gets there. Maybe this is the difference between “politics” and governing or legislating. Maybe the political processes that take place outside of formal political institutions must be contentious in order to create the conditions that would elect news kinds of people, who then have to engage in a politics of compromise and consensus within these political institutions.

And maybe that’s what is at the root of our political problem in this country, which is that there are two fundamentally different kinds of politics located in two fundamentally different kinds of contexts, and that “the people” exist at the crossroads. The people on the outside who are in these communities, where they’re suffering and they’re experiencing inequality in real time and they’re struggling to make ends meet, are the very people who elect the folks in Congress to pass legislation—ostensibly to make their lives a bit easier. The legislation is going to be watered down because Congress has to compromise to get anything done, which means that things never trickle down (or perhaps that’s all we get, a trickle) to the people living in those communities. That only then reinforces the divisions and inequalities that constitute “reality” for most Americans.

Maybe we’re always going to be stuck like this. Maybe that’s what Marx was talking about with the “dialectics of history,” what DuBois and Alinsky talked about in their own ways. And maybe these two political realms – where ordinary people live in their everyday lives, and where a select group of elites gathers to govern on a daily basis – maybe those two locations require two completely different kinds of politics, strategies that are actually—and inherently—at odds with one another.

MB: Obama is certainly temperamentally more compromising and conciliatory and civil discourse-oriented than Saul Alinsky, there’s no doubt about that. But he has also talked about other things that jam up the political process – like the campaign finance system.

So it does feel like there’s a tension between those two locations and these two types of politics. But on another level, it seems like there’s an additional set of problems that has nothing do with the contention-versus-conciliation dynamic.

TM: Perhaps, perhaps. But with respect to campaign finance reform, what happens at the national level has a huge impact on the way that we experience local party politics. The choices we have around certain kinds of candidates are now significantly influenced by Super PACs, Citizens United, and so forth. Obviously, there’s a deep connection between the two. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that there’s a productive tension between those two types of politics.

You know, when I’m being generous, there’s a part of me that feels badly for Barack Obama on some level, because he is someone who really seems to understand the community organizing, Saul Alinsky, civil rights model. He came from it, he’s a beneficiary of it, he was in it. But now, he’s in this other realm, which is completely different, and he has to navigate it as the most powerful person in the world. He’s become “The Man”! And if I have a hard time wrestling with these “insider-outsider,” “people vs. power” tensions here at the Kennedy School, I can hardly imagine what his life is like. He must be experiencing cognitive dissonance all the time!

MB: I spoke with Marshall Ganz about this in early 2010. Ganz had been the architect of the organizing effort during Obama’s 2008 campaign, but by August of 2009, he’d become critical of the way that the White House hadn’t put their supporters to much use. Ganz seemed to be suggesting that the White House had forgotten where its power came from and had started playing a kind of inside baseball. 

Sometimes I still feel that way. You know, the president might occasionally ask us to call our congressmen about such-and-such a bill, but that’s not the same thing as helping to animate a broad-based citizen movement.

TM: A couple of things here. One, our electoral system is on a two/four-year cycle. Social movements don’t move on a two/four-year cycle – they gather steam and they’re ongoing and, at best, sustained for many years.

Second, political campaigns are not social movements. I think that one of the mistakes many of us who were involved in the Obama campaign made is that we saw the campaign as a kind of social movement. Because it sort of felt like a duck, and quacked like a duck, it had to be a duck. There was a fair amount of Kool-Aid being served, and so many of us were really quite desperate for something new and fresh and hopeful. So we drank it.

To be honest, this was the very first time in my life where I was really, genuinely optimistic about a presidential candidate. Many of us were intoxicated by that spirit and wanted deeply to believe that it was a movement, as opposed to a moment. Now, the campaign did have lots of movement elements, not least of which was Marshall’s work, which was based on a social movement-organizing model. This was one source of the confusion, I think. In many respects, it looked like a duck.

That said, there were a lot of us – especially those of us who would consider ourselves on the Left – who were genuinely thrilled to see that this was a campaign willing to adopt social movement strategies for the purposes of political campaigning. You had many young people involved, it was a multiracial cast of characters, and it was multi-generational – I was always working with people who were different from me, people who were 30 years older or 20 years younger than me, and it was thrilling to be part of that. I mean, you couldn’t walk into an Obama campaign office anywhere in America, even in the richest or whitest parts of America, where everyone in the office looked the same. And that was really exciting for those of us who were part of it.

I think we wanted to believe that it was a movement and we mistook it for one; in the end, we realized it was really just a moment – a fascinating moment, an important moment, a fabulous moment, a historic moment – but a moment nonetheless. And I think many of us are now left wondering, worrying whether it’s going to be a fleeting moment. I have been buoyed by some of the things that he’s done recently in the gear-up to the re-election campaign, but I share Marshall’s and others’ deep frustration over the fact that we have been put on the shelf for three years and now we’re being mobilized again for the purposes of getting him re-elected. If the Obama campaign thinks for a second that we are going to be as eager to do this this time around as we were the last time, they’re really fooling themselves.

One of the key elements to Obama’s victory – over a course of fourteen to sixteen months, from 2007 to the November election – was that he was able to successfully generate enough positive energy among enough of the electorate to vote for him, rather than just relying on a vote against the Bush era. Obama was able to get us to want to vote for him. It was the first time in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Bill Clinton in 1992, where a lot of Democrats and liberal-Left types I knew were excited to go into the voting booth and vote for this man.

That was really important in terms of energizing people, keeping folks together, building the coalition that ultimately got him elected. I don’t know if it’s possible for him to do that now. Right now, he’s banking (no pun intended) on the fact that people are so disgusted with the Republicans in Congress that they are going to map their disgust onto these presidential candidates—Romney et al.—and that people will be so disgusted that they’ll either tune out and stay at home or come out and vote for him, simple because he’s not nearly as bad as they are. If that happens, we’ll be back to a “lesser-of-two-evils” political system, which would be a great, great tragedy.

Ultimately, Barack Obama is too good to rely on that kind of strategy. He has to develop the ability again to move us enough to want to vote for him, because I truly believe that he represents something positive for the nation. I think that’s going to be a hard sell, frankly. He’s starting to work on it and we can see parts of that developing. Certainly, he has a very strong record of success to build on in some areas.

I think he has the opportunity to actually get us to want to vote for him for very specific policy reasons. This is different from last time where we wanted to vote for him because he gave us “hope” and there was going to be “change” and here’s the first black president. He was young; he was our JFK. He was all these things rolled up into one. But a lot of that stuff was kind of ethereal. It was real, but it was still symbolic and abstract at times, undefined.

He has to do something else now, something more substantive. If his people had sustained the energy from the first campaign, found a way to not just turn that tremendous grassroots support into the biggest email list in American history, he wouldn’t be fighting such an uphill battle. In that sense, as Marshall knows better than anyone, they really dropped the ball.

MB: You said that he’s hoping folks will map their distaste for the Republicans in Congress onto the Republican candidates. It seems like he’s got an advantage in that there’s no really popular candidate among the four remaining Republicans. He’s got to be happy with what he’s facing.

TM: No question. I don’t know if he’s quite popping champagne bottles yet, but he certainly is smiling widely. As someone said recently: the more Mitt Romney talks, the longer the feedback reel is for David Axelrod. You know, “Corporations are people too, my friend” or “I don’t care about poor people.” I mean, it’s an endless string of gaffes that only plays into and reinforces the perception that he’s not only the poster child for the 1%, but the Sports Illustrated swimsuit centerfold for the 1%. I mean, let’s be honest, Romney is the 1% on steroids! I can’t remember a candidate for President of the United States in recent history that has been more emblematic of all of the problems with capitalism that have created the current misery that so many people in this country are living with and suffering under.

MB: I felt myself tense up when you used the word “capitalism” – not because I don’t think there are problems with it, but because I’m not sure you even need to bring a theoretical critique of capitalism to bear in criticizing Romney. In other words, all sorts of indifference and entitlement and privilege and obliviousness are on display in his candidacy – things that should make everyone, even defenders of capitalism, very uncomfortable. And I suppose I worry about the political effects of calling capitalism, full stop, into question. 

TM: This gets back to where we’re all positioned in the political culture. I think we always need to be having a critical conversation about capitalism if we’re ever going to have any hope of attacking and uprooting precisely those forms of entitlement and indifference and inequality that you’re saying exist. Capitalism produces all of these things, reinforces them, literally banks on them.

One of the things that I’m really excited about with the Occupy Movement is that they’re bringing a wholesale critique of capitalism to bear on our political economy, at a time when there’s widespread suffering and anxiety and insecurity, to say nothing of inequality. It’s the first time we’ve had this kind of aggressive critique of the inner workings and outer effects of capitalism in a long time. America’s radical tradition is animated by many things, and certainly there have been times in the past where we’ve seen a vigorous critique of the privilege, power, profit, and greed that are produced by capitalism.

But in recent times, we’ve been much more motivated by a kind of rights-based radicalism—one that seeks inclusion and equality for disfranchised groups—than a justice-based radicalism. The latter would require, as a pre-condition, the radical redistribution of wealth and the radical restructuring of consumers and producers, those who profit and those who labor. It may sound ancient to talk like this, but I think it’s really important that we do.

Frankly, one thing I worry about with your generation—if I may be patronizing for a second—is that you have been raised in a rights-obsessed political world. I’m not saying that’s bad, necessarily, but I do think sometimes your generation thinks that as long as gay people have all the rights that straight people have, black people have all the rights that white people have, immigrants have all the rights that native-born folks have, and women have all the rights that men have, that’s enough. But it’s not enough.

Running through all these groups of people whose rights we want to uplift, uphold, or ensure is an economic system that reinforces and compounds the inequalities that already exist, legally and politically. If we do not transform the economic system that perpetuates the brutal class inequalities of our society, our so-called “civil” rights will mean very little.

So, yeah, I guess I’m calling for an old-school conversation about the relationship between race and class, gender and class, sexuality and class, nationality and class that our rights-based conversations sometimes avoid too conveniently.

MB: To me, it’s just a strategy question. I absolutely think that the discussion that you just described is necessary. I’m just concerned that that word is so explosive – I wonder whether there’s a way to talk about all those things without the conversation getting sidetracked into accusations and counter-accusations about whether you’re “anti-capitalist.” 

TM: Well, I am who I am, and I’m owning that. I mean, certainly, I’m in favor of capitalism if slavery is the alternative, or if feudalism is the alternative. And frankly, I’m not sure how optimistic I am about our capacity or willingness to eradicate capitalism or imagine and put in place an economic system that is more just and equitable than what we have now. On some level, I suppose we’re all capitalists now in the United States. I don’t say this with any degree of glee or gratification. Our failure to imagine an alternative to capitalism is perhaps the greatest tragedy of our tragic age. But for Christ’s sake, at the very least, let’s have an open, critical conversation about the system of capitalism that so many people take for granted and assume will always condition or structure our economic lives and relationships. Let’s at least be honest about what this system is doing to all of us on a daily basis. It’s really destroying us—materially, socially, politically, morally, and spiritually.

For instance, let’s be honest about the folks who are doing the work that produces so many of the goods and services that other people profit from, and let’s be honest about why the same people who profit from their labor are working to deport them because they’re “illegal.” Let’s have that conversation.

And let’s talk about the fact that I will pay more in taxes this year because my marriage in Massachusetts – where it’s legal for my husband and me to be married – is not recognized at the federal level because of the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act.” And let me connect that to the fact that my husband and I are going to have to shoulder a greater tax burden this year than Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who opposed marriage equality and who now supports a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.” So not only is he paying less than me because he’s a multi-millionaire who makes his money off capital gains, but I’m going to pay an extra tax burden on top of that because I happen to be married in a state that supports my right to marry that he once opposed in a nation that denies my right to marry that he now wants to run. It’s enough to make your head explode.

So I want to have these conversations, which are conversations about capitalism, conversations about government, conversations about greed, conversations about rights, conversations about second-class citizenship, privilege and inequality. I would love to sit down with Mitt Romney and have these conversations with him. Of course, he’s never going to have these conversation because in one place he’ll want to talk about gay marriage and in another place he’ll want to talk about taxes, but never the two at once. We live in an age of compartmentalized politics, which only facilitates discrimination and fosters inequality.

MB: In a certain way, it seems like Occupy has been trying to bring many of those disparate elements together – to decompartmentalize our discourse and politics. 

But with the demise of the encampments, I think we’re seeing a diminishment of Occupy’s role in public life. Will Occupy continue to play a meaningful role, or has its main contribution already taken place?

TM: That’s a really complicated question. I think it’s tough to figure out for a number of reasons, not least of which because it’s hard to figure out exactly who’s a member of the Occupy Movement. There are a lot of people who took part in the camps, people who are participating in the discourse, people who are sympathetic to the cause but opposed to the encampments, people who are sympathetic to the movement but who don’t understand or are confused about its aims. There are lots of different ways to relate to the Occupy Movement, so it’s hard to pin down who, what, and where it is.

I think that is an intentional thing on Occupy’s part – to make the movement project a kind of omnipresence, physical and otherwise, such that the movement seems bigger than it is, or could be bigger than it is, in terms of sheer number of people participating at any given time. In this sense, the 99% framing is brilliant—perhaps the first time in American history when a social movement consciously presented itself as a majoritarian rather than a minoritarian threat.

That said, I do think that we’re going to begin to see kind of Occupy 2.0, as the Occupy Harvard people have branded it. I love that – the need to brand these things, never being able to fully able to escape the discourses that we’re critiquing!

But I think it remains to be seen what’s next. Clearly, there has been a deliberate attempt to dismantle the encampments and to tear down the physical manifestations of Occupy. And then in some places—Oakland, most dramatically—there have been attempts to continue the kind of ongoing public spirit of Occupy by having regular protests and marches and physical occupations and so forth that have been met with increasingly violent resistance from the state.

As the movement becomes perhaps more oriented around violence, both in terms of the state’s willingness to engage in violent forms of repression against the protestors as well as the movement’s own willingness to engage in acts of violent resistance, it’s hard to know what this will bring. I’m not going to lie – I’m nervous about that. There are a lot of people debating whether an “eye for an eye” strategy is a good turn, myself included.

So far, I’ve always maintained that the movement should continue to rely on strategies of civil disobedience as a way to create a stark division between the violent repression of the state – tear gas and batons, cracking people’s heads, and so forth – and the non-violent orientation of the Occupy folks. The sympathy for the movement has increased in the public arena, in the court of public opinion, when the Occupiers themselves are seen as non-violent protesters, subjected to the physical violence of the state, vis-à-vis the police and other forces. I think it would be a mistake for the movement to turn to a more violent kind of strategy, however justified, in some places, at this early phase.

That said, it’s important to acknowledge that the Occupy Movement has clearly had a huge impact on the political discourse of the country – we’re finally talking about economic inequality, the excesses of capitalism, corporate greed, the unfairness of the tax code, federal regulation, all these kinds of things. That’s very necessary and I think that’s because the Occupy Movement has opened up this discourse and brought a critique of capitalism to bear on a larger public debate.

Whether or not he’ll admit it, I think many elements of President Obama’s last “State of the Union” address were shaped by the Occupy Movement and its critiques. I think Romney’s difficulty in getting out from under the perception that he’s the poster child for the 1% can be directly attributed to the Occupy Movement’s success. I mean, he ran for president four years ago and he did not have these troubles. Mitt Romney’s difficulties have been amplified, supersized by Occupy.

I also think we’ve seen President Obama’s turn to a more populist politics, starting with that speech in Kansas and moving into the launch of his re-election campaign. I wouldn’t say it’s a Leftist politics, per se, but it’s certainly a more populist politics, and increasingly so. That, too, is because of Occupy. So the movement has done its job – Obama is changing his tune, Romney is stuck in the mud, and many more people are having these conversations. I think that’s a really good thing for the country.

I also think it’s probably a good thing that the movement is in a process of reorienting itself. I’m trying to figure out whether or not Occupy can be brought into the fold of the Obama campaign. I mean, I have always maintained that I’d like the Obama campaign to move in the direction of the Occupy Movement rather than the Occupy Movement incorporating itself into the Obama campaign, because I think we’re at a moment in our history where we need a strong and unapologetic Left critique of the ways our politics and economics conspire to create conditions of great suffering and inequality. And the Occupy Movement represents that critique.

For the last forty years, we’ve had a consistent Right critique of government and a Right critique of our political economy. Grover Norquist, Ron Paul – whether it’s libertarian or some other brand of conservatism, we’ve had that critique pretty consistently for more than a generation.

During that time, the Left has not been as strong in sustaining its critique. There are many reasons for this. Part of this gets back to the argument I was making before – the rights-based legal and political discourse has overtaken the Left in some ways, and the older, more structural critiques of capitalism and our political economy have lost their luster, have in some ways been drowned out by this emphasis on rights, stemming, in part, from identity-based social movements. So I really like the fact that we are once again engaging in a serious class analysis that connects to discourses around racial, gender, and sexual inequality. It’s long overdue, and I welcome that. We need a more sophisticated analysis of our collective misery.

I think it’s pretty clear that the Occupy Movement has had a profound impact in a relatively short period of time. Whether or not it becomes the kind of movement that defines a generation remains to be seen. I would like to believe in its power to be that, but I think the transition from Occupy 1.0 to Occupy 2.0 will be an uncertain journey. It will be interesting to see where all of this shakes out.

That said, we need to think more deeply about this historical moment and why it produced both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement simultaneously. To me, it’s no surprise that we have this kind of Right-wing, conservative political formation at the same time that we have this Left-wing, progressive political formation vying for the soul of the nation, both seriously influencing our politics.

Clearly, the Tea Party has had more of an impact on the way the Republican Party operates than the Occupy Movement has had on the Democratic Party. But I think it’s no surprise that these two very aggressive political formations, which occupy opposing places on the political spectrum, have emerged at this particular moment. And we need to take them both seriously and think about how they’re both renewing and reinvigorating a politics of contention, in the spirit of Saul Alinsky (in an ironic twist, both the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party activists have read Rules for Radicals!)

What does the future of all this look like? Will these two movements merely be co-opted by the two-party political system? That would not be a good thing for the nation, because anyone who knows anything about U.S. history knows that political parties are where radicalism goes to die. If that’s all that happens—if the Tea Party becomes the Right wing of the GOP and Occupy becomes the Left wing of the Democratic Party—then we’re back at square one. And that’s what I’m worried about.

I would much rather live in a nation where we’re all part of a vigorous debate about the future of the country that encompasses the Occupy Movement and the Democrats, the Tea Party and the Republicans, the Libertarians and the Marxists and the capitalists. We could all play different roles in this long overdue debate, but at least we’d all be included in the debate. I am much more interested in this kind of politics—wherever it takes us—than I am in a politics where nine Supreme Court justices decide that “corporations are people” and that “money is speech,” so that a few dozen billionaires can buy one-minute ads that decimate political opponents, using all sorts of smoke and mirrors and lies, while the rest of us are forced to the sidelines, making our political decisions after passively watching a set of circus acts. That’s not democracy, it’s the Roman Forum. And we all know what happened to Rome.

Louis Menand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer for the New Yorker. His most recent book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, traces the rise of the modern university system and asks hard questions about whether higher education’s historical goals and structures are well-suited for today’s world.

In a June, 2011 New Yorker article, Menand expanded on Marketplace, laying out three theories that seek to answer the question: What is college for?

Theory 1 sees the university as a quality filter – a means of sorting young people according to their intelligence and capabilities and providing signals to society about the roles for which they might be well-suited.

Theory 2 is the classic liberal arts vision of the university – in Menand’s words, an opportunity to teach “the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being.”

Theory 3 is a more brass-tacks view: it sees the university as designed for professional or vocational preparation.

In this interview, Menand and I dig into Theory 2. What does an education designed to create “informed citizens” or “reflective and culturally literate human beings” actually look like? What books and pedagogical techniques might it include? How much will it seek to answer the ‘big questions’, and to what extent will it be content with simply asking them?

MATT BIEBER: What does a Theory 2 education actually look like in practice?             

LOUIS MENAND: It can be lots of different things. I don’t think of it as learning about great ideas particularly, but as students learning things about the world that they wouldn’t learn elsewhere. Some of this learning is historical, and some of it is philosophical or theoretical, and constitutes equipment for thinking in a more enlightened way about your own life and about your place in the world. But there’s also real knowledge that gives students some power over their circumstances – about science and technology, or the way the economy works. That’s not something that people can get a very sophisticated dose of in high school, and it’s not something that professional schools care about.

I also think that college is a form of socialization, because higher education trains people to observe general norms about how to reason and make judgments of taste and value. You pretty much have to learn to conform within certain parameters or you’re penalized. So college does make students more likeminded, and that’s probably a social good. You could regard it as a cost maybe, as well, a certain diminution of individuality, but I think it’s probably on balance a social good.

Finally, I do think that Theory 3 is relevant to everybody because as a social investment, higher education basically justifies itself by producing workers who can do high-tech kinds of work. I think that’s what the president is talking about when he talks about college for everybody.

MB: In the book, you argue for the benefits of a common cultural heritage that people can draw on and use – a common set of references, a common moral language, that kind of thing. As we get more and more internationalized, globalized, multi-cultural, do you think it’s important to retain a particular canon? In other words, how important is it that our common heritage look anything like the heritage that we’ve been accustomed to in this country? Or is the point just to have something in common?

LM: I’m agnostic about that. The argument that we have great books curricula or general education curricula to provide people with a common heritage was used to justify those kinds of curricula in the first half of the twentieth century. But I think the world is too plural for that rationale now to be very cogent.

There are protocols for inquiry that are important for people to understand and be able to adopt, and those protocols constitute a lingua franca, even if the language is principally methodological. The idea that there is a set canon is an anachronism now, and generally acknowledged as such.

MB: It’s interesting that you zero in on the protocols for inquiry or methodological skills that students learn in college. There are also, of course, particular questions, including the ‘big’ questions, the ‘eternal’ questions, about what it is to be a human being, what a good life might look like, and so forth.

LM: Yes.

MB: Should students be taught to engage those questions in a serious and systematic way in college? Or is content less important, to your way of thinking?

LM: I think that some courses in college, humanities courses in particular, help people decide what the important questions are. I don’t think that those courses provide answers to those questions. You can’t do science without making a decision about what things are important to find out about and why. Those are the questions that discourses like philosophy, literature, and religion try to answer. For students to have a feel for that, they have to have exposure to more than just scientific methods.

MB: My impulse is to say that if we can agree that the pursuit of certain sets of questions – methodological or moral or anthropological questions, say – ought to form at least a part of a serious college education, then the next question follows pretty fast. That is the question of whether some answers to those questions are better than others. Not final answers, necessarily, but answers that take fuller account of what we know from the sciences and anthropology and so forth. 

It sounds like your agnosticism begins around that point – that there might be certain questions that are perennially useful to confront, but that a good college education won’t necessarily even try to offer specific answers or push students in the direction of particular answers to those questions.

LM: Part of the ethos of the college experience is to introduce students to normative issues without being prescriptive. It’s just not what liberal education is about, to tell people what the answers are. It’s to introduce them to the questions, and to the way that people have thought about them. That introduction naturally presupposes a degree of selection. We don’t teach Scientology, but we do teach Plato. We’ve made a decision that reading Plato is going to generate more thought about the things that are important than Scientology is. To that extent, we’re prescriptive, but I think it’s not our job to tell people what to think. It’s just to help them think.

MB: I suppose I worry about the effect of exposing students to lots of different theories – including ethical theories – without asking them to try to formulate commitments in the process.

In doing so, it seems like there might be implicit suggestion that there really aren’t good answers to these questions. That all you can really do is expose yourself to the variety of what’s been thought, and that you’re not really obligated to go further and test these ideas against one another.

Do you worry about that at all? Is there a risk of inadvertently teaching students that nothing is at stake when we focus on exposing them to ideas without actually encouraging a more robust form of moral formation?

LM: I guess I don’t think there’s a danger, though I’m not quite sure why I think that. I wouldn’t trust ourselves to know what to tell people, is one thing.  We’re not really trained to answer the questions that we ask. The manner in which we pose the questions and pursue the arguments – even though it may be open-ended – does in itself communicate a certain kind of ethical practice or rational practice that has normative value. It teaches students not to make choices arbitrarily or self-interestedly or prejudicially. These are attitudes we try to enact in our work, our teaching and our research. I think not having answers is probably what’s valuable about what we’re doing, since out in the rest of the world, everybody seems to have an answer for everything.

MB: So one of the primary values of a liberal education becomes encouraging a kind of humility.

LM: We’re supposed to be disinterested, meaning that we’re not supposed to spin things to get desired outcomes. Everything else out there pretty much is spin. I think for students to experience what it’s like to think this way – to the extent that we’re decent models of it – is a good thing, because it gives them a little bit of detachment from the world in which they’ll be asked to take sides all the time.

MB: You co-chaired Harvard’s curriculum reform committee in 2006 as well. Part of that process involved thinking about the educational aims of the university, particularly given the range of backgrounds from which students come and the different cultural and moral presuppositions they bring with them.

It seems to me that the way you’re talking about liberal education functions on two levels. One way of seeing liberal education is that it’s about putting questions on the table without being prescriptive. But I imagine that perspective also functions pretty strategically in a university this diverse – it doesn’t scare people off ahead of time.

LM: You couldn’t get the faculties to agree on anything very specific or prescriptive about what students need to know or ought to know beyond saying there should be certain subject areas that they will be exposed to. General education is just one piece of what the college curriculum is – the required courses that everyone has to take. There has to be a rationale for you’re requiring people to take these courses, since otherwise they can take whatever they choose. You’re saying, “I don’t care if you’re interested or not; you have to take courses in these areas.” You need a rationale that’s not just, “because it adds breadth to your learning,” but that actually has some substance to it.

One of the difficulties with coming up with a general education curriculum is that professors aren’t trained to think that way. They’re trained to think about what you need to know to be an English professor, an economist, or a physicist, and when you ask them to think about what else people ought to know, they have fairly random answers, which often reflect simply on their own experience of college. Or they have impractical ideas about what we can actually teach. 

We’re not trained to think about it. We’re trained to plow our furrow.

The frustrating thing, which may be behind some of your questions, is that in a university that is organized on the principle of division of labor, if you reward people for specializing in one rather narrow part of the whole, you get a lot more expert knowledge. This works very well for, say, manufacturing cars where the person who does the brakes is really good with brakes, and the person who does the carburetors is good at that. At the end of the assembly line in a factory, you have a car. But there’s no place in the university where you see the car.  All you’re seeing are the pieces. The components are never put together anywhere.

MB: Yes.

LM: So general education is a stab at what it might look like if we actually put all the pieces together. But you’re fighting against the strong pull of specialization, which is how the system is organized and how people are rewarded.

MB: I think you’re helping me clarify what I worry about. In part because of the structures you’re describing, it seems like the university has a tough time articulating a vision about the type of person it hopes to help form, or the type of ethical and intellectual virtues that it hope to see its students gain. In other words, it’s both a model and the absence of a model.

LM: That’s true.

MB: That doesn’t seem like enough. This is going to sound trite, but to my mind, students who have the privilege of going to a place like this and gaining exposure to all these brilliant minds – I would hope that they would emerge with a desire to do something more meaningful than just going and making as much money as they can.

LM: Right.

MB: This is a larger cultural issue, of course, and I don’t just want to just lay it at the feet of the university or the faculty. But if that is one outcome of the educational process, I would hope the university might say to itself, “Well, gee, that’s not quite what we’re hoping for.”

LM: That’s the Theory 1 part, though. Theory 1 is that a place like Harvard exists to select out the most intelligent members of the cohort as it passes through college and then to hook those people up with the appropriate careers. And those tend to be careers that people do well in because they’re very smart. It can involve making a lot of money. It can also involve being the president of the United States. It’s not just about the money, but it is about success in pretty worldly terms, and that’s why people compete to get in and that’s partly why the university survives: because it performs this selection function. So, in this respect, society is not really interested in what’s good for everybody; it’s only interested in what’s good for the best.

MB: It feels like you’re describing ‘the best’ quite differently under Theories 1 and 2.

LM: Yes, they tend to be somewhat different, because Theory 2 is a theory that it’s a social good for people to have this experience together. Fundamentally, it’s not about a race to the top. That’s what Theory 2 people tend to think.

MB: My sense is that Theory 1 and Theory 2 actually relate pretty closely. That by going through a Theory 2-type experience, one might gain a larger or deeper vision, including a more sophisticated moral vision, and that the fruits of that learning could be used in very practical, Theory 1-oriented ways by society – so long as society is interested in bettering itself.

LM: Yes, but the Theory 1 people can do whatever they want with the advantage that they’ve gotten by going to school. I’m sure a lot of students come to a place like Harvard with either no idea or very vague ideas about what they intend to do with their lives, and they are converted to something while they’re here and they often do amazing things. Did you go to Harvard [as an undergraduate]?

MB: Princeton.

LM: Princeton, too. Some of these students do astonishing things, and you would not predict it when they came in. It’s just something happens while they are in college. So even if you have just 20% of your students decide to go off and save the world, even if the rest of them try to make money, you’ve done a good thing.

I don’t think the process is just a technocratic process.

We face enormous challenges: global warming, poverty, health care, terrorism. Dealing with these challenges requires deep thinking about a range of moral questions. What is it to be a human being? How do we work? What’s good for us? What do we owe to one another?

Unfortunately, HKS doesn’t do much to encourage this kind of moral reflection. We already know what’s wrong, the school tells us. Now apply the technical skills we’ve taught you and make it right.

This ethos encourages us to think about public problems as technocratic challenges, to be overcome with a toolkit full of domain-specific skill and expertise. The trouble with this approach is that it leaves some of the most interesting and important questions unaddressed.

Take the study of economics, for example. Master of public policy students (MPPs) are required to take an introductory class in neoclassical economics, with its attendant reliance on rational actor models. As we know by now, these models have been deeply troubled by 40 years of behavioral economics research.

Honest economists will acknowledge the contributions of this research. Often, though, they’ll then barrel straight ahead, claiming that economic models aren’t political or normative. They merely describe the world, providing useful predictions and helping us understand how economic exchange takes place.

But of course, this isn’t true. Economics does make implicit normative claims, particularly about the sorts of things that it’s important to measure. By focusing on metrics like utility or preference satisfaction, economists act as if the underlying philosophical questions have already been resolved. Frequently, however, they haven’t even been discussed. (Is it an unequivocal good for people to get the things they want?)

Public problems aren’t always technical challenges. Instead, they involve deep assumptions about human beings. The question, then, is whether those assumptions are good ones. Addressing these assumptions – or at least beginning to swim around in these waters – involves a deep dive into ethics and political philosophy.

But HKS doesn’t emphasize these pursuits. True, we have a small number of faculty who think hard about the premises underlying policy work. But outside the ethics core requirement, we barely talk about these questions. Again, the school whispers: Freedom is good. Threats are bad. Government’s job is to protect its people, provide them the basics so that they can exercise their freedom, and get out of the way. Democracy and the market will take care of much of the rest.

That might well be right. But if that’s all we can say, I’m not sure we can say as much as we need to. For example, there is a lot of energy at HKS around education reform, particularly around providing students with better science and math skills and ensuring the U.S. can compete more effectively.

These might be important goals, but to me, education is about more than creating a talented work force. It is in large part how we teach – or fail to teach – a set of intellectual and moral virtues. It’s about the formation of selves and citizens. If we aspire to make education policy, shouldn’t we be thinking and talking about these things too?

But many folks at HKS don’t feel like it’s their responsibility – much less their prerogative – to think in these ways. We’re policymakers, not philosophers. It’s not our job to think about the long-term, the theoretical, or the ideal.

The irony, however, is that when we don’t meaningfully engage with deep questions, we undermine our capacity to do the very work that we value so much. We build policy mirages that reflect nothing more than our untested assumptions about people and the world. And those policies frequently fail.

Initially, I thought the solution was more ethics training – say, a year-long core course. I workshopped this idea with some classmates, and their response was loud and clear: Please, no.

Many of them are deeply frustrated with the way that ethics is taught here. Some think the required ethics class for MPPs is uselessly abstract, while others find it condescending. A third perspective – which appears to be quite common – is that there’s something strange and counter-productive about ghettoizing ethics into a single class as opposed to integrating ethical thinking into everything we do.

That last perspective strikes me as exactly right. On his Foreign Policy blog, our own Stephen Walt recently observed that philosophy, political theory, and history “are not what schools of public policy typically emphasize, even though they are supposedly in the business of preparing students for careers in public service.” It’s as if policy schools think they have to choose between technocratic skill-building on the one hand and deep engagement with moral and political philosophy on the other.

They’re wrong. Ethics isn’t just another tool in our toolkit. It should be the tool that underlies everything else, and the one to which we should continually return. Our curriculum should reflect that. After all, HKS wants its students to do good in the world. If we really mean that, then we should take the question of what counts as good more seriously.