This post is inspired by a series of articles that Dan Williams wrote on the subject of “becoming less left-wing.” While I found that series interesting in several respects, it seemed to me unlikely to influence its presumptive audience, because most people on the left have no desire to become less left-wing, indeed they usually feel morally obliged to maintain their current political convictions, and are vaguely apprehensive about aging, precisely because they can see the effect that greater life experience has had on others. Thus the articles struck me as being more likely to elicit condescending approval from the right than greater maturity of conviction on the left.
Personally, I would be loathe to characterize the evolution of my own political views as “becoming less left-wing.” What stands out for me, when I look back over the trajectory of my convictions, is that I used to be full of shit – utterly and completely full of shit – and that over time I became somewhat less so. Focusing on this development, it seems to me, presents an opportunity to craft a more unifying narrative, since I would hope that everyone, regardless of their background political convictions, should aspire to be less full of shit. Of course, to the extent that the left is full of shit, becoming less full of shit resulted in me uncovering more points of disagreement with the left. But whose fault is that?
Before getting to the story, I want to take a moment to explain why I was so full of shit when I was young, because I think I understand it better now. Like most people, my basic worldview was inherited from my parents, which in my case involved a blend of 1960s countercultural ideology and Catholic social teaching. These two belief systems are in tension with one another on numerous points, but an important area of agreement lies in their basic attitude toward the world. Both believe that the human condition, and the state of society, is one of profound immorality (hippies blamed this on “the system,” Catholics blamed it on original sin). Keep in mind that when I was young the Second World War was still a recent memory – I grew up visiting my uncle who survived the beach landing at Dieppe, another who was periodically incapacitated by shrapnel still embedded in his leg. During the height of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, the idea that humanity was living in a fallen condition, destined to destroy itself, sounded entirely plausible.
The way that Christians respond to this diagnosis varies, but one prominent way to escape the negativity is to declare one’s own powerlessness and pray that it will be fixed in the afterlife. Appeal to divine grace also gives Christians a coherent, if not entirely believable, story about how they personally have managed to escape from the darkness of the world. By the time I finished high school, however, I had become an atheist (through the combined effects of concupiscence and studying the theory of evolution). And yet I still had the same negative view of the world – everywhere I looked I saw nothing but immorality and sin, or, as I soon learned to say, injustice. This is what made me so full of shit. I took left-wing utopianism and plugged it into the slot that heaven had occupied in the Christian worldview, but without having given any serious thought to how worldly salvation might be obtained. I held on to the intensely moralizing condemnation of society, even though I had no understanding of why anything was the way it was. Nor did I have the faintest idea how to fix any of it. Yet none of that stopped me from condemning it, and condemning others, based on a sense of moral superiority that was, in retrospect, entirely unearned.
This led me to strike a series of political poses that I now find deeply cringe. (Incidentally, for those who have followed my work for a while, this is why I have a somewhat unhealthy compulsion to criticize Naomi Klein. What I find extraordinary about Klein is that she has the exact same worldview that we all had, back when we were 20-year old left-wing undergraduates, and yet she has somehow managed to sustain those beliefs into adulthood. This is why reading her books always has a “blast from the past” quality for me, somewhat tinged with embarrassment. When I criticize Klein, I’m not really arguing with her, I’m just pointing out mistakes that I too made, back when I was full of shit.)
I don’t think there are any all-purpose rules for becoming less full of shit, so I thought it would be best just to describe my own trajectory. Obviously book-learning played an important role, but it was seldom the instigating factor. The episodes that I remember most clearly are ones in which some other person, in a face to face interaction, knowingly or unknowingly, called me out on my shit. This then led me to go off and read a bunch of books, in order to develop a more thoughtful position.
The first political ideology that I explicitly endorsed was anarchism. This was less a product of any coherent thought process and more an extension of the music I was listening to (DOA, Black Flag, Bérurier Noir, etc.). (The whole countercultural model that I had absorbed from my parents kind of primed me to believe that only “underground” or “alternative” music could have any merit.) The Dead Kennedys played a gig in Saskatoon, back when I was in high school, that made a profound impression. The Dead Kennedys were a really big deal. So when I started university, in 1985, encountering for the first time people with explicitly declared political ideologies, I naturally decided that mine was anarchism.
This was a pretty commonly held view at the time, at least in leftist circles, because it allowed one to strike a radical political stance (“burn it all down!”), while avoiding all the difficult questions about what one intended to replace it with. This was useful at a time when the defects of both capitalism and communism were being felt most acutely. Back when the Soviet Union was a going concern, it seemed obvious to everyone that state socialism was just as bad as capitalism. Because of this, I can’t remember there being many Marxists around. To the extent that there were any, most people considered them brainwashed, because they always belonged to some faction, embroiled in complex internecine fights with other factions. The Trotskyists were particularly intense and weird.
So when I started reading political philosophy, I naturally looking to the anarchists (or as we used to say, when trying to sound sophisticated, “anarcho-syndicalists”): Chomsky, Bookchin, Bakunin. There was at the time a whole scene around Black Rose Books in Montreal that lent intellectual credibility to this tendency. None of this helped pay the rent, however, so I also worked part-time as a computer programmer during my undergraduate years. This was, unfortunately, before William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which meant that cyberpunk was not a thing yet. So these two parts of my identity were completely disjoint – I was just a lone punk rock guy working with a bunch of dorky engineers.
As it turned out, one of those dorky engineers was from Lebanon, who like many people from war-torn countries had a somewhat greater appreciation for the virtues of a functional state. One day when we were chatting about politics I mentioned that I was an anarchist. This caused him to sit up a bit and say, “What, you mean like no government, no state?” to which I responded, “Correct.” He replied then with a question that, at the time, seemed to me completely out of left field: “But then who would manage the currency?” This brought me up short, because obviously central banking wasn’t something that I, or any of my anarchist buddies, had spent even one second thinking about. I can’t remember what I said in response – it was probably something stupid like “there wouldn’t be any money” – but the question stayed with me, gnawing away, over the course of the next few months. Most importantly, it made me realize that, despite having a lot of strong convictions about politics, I hadn’t really been taking political questions seriously. A person who was being serious would have thought about these issues and would have had an answer to questions like this. (My co-worker, by the way, eventually decided that engineering was not for him and is now a Professor of Finance at University of Zurich. So shout-out to my old friend Michel Habib, for helping me to become less full of shit!)
As soon as I starting thinking seriously about what the state does, and how difficult it would be to achieve those outcomes in the absence of the state, that was the end of my youthful dalliance with anarchism. This led naturally to greater interest in Marxism, which was self-evidently more serious as a political ideology. But it was also at a time when Western Marxism was thoroughly neo-Marxist, so I quickly got interested in the Frankfurt School. One of the central themes of the Frankfurt School had been the so-called “critique of instrumental rationality,” which was basically a successor notion to Marx’s critique of ideology (more on this below). The English translation of Jürgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action came out when I was an undergraduate, which immediately became super-important. After reading the two volumes, I decided that, from that point forward, my education would consist of reading every book in Habermas’s bibliography.
This project led to my next turning point, which occurred in the early ‘90s when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University. This one is a bit more complicated to explain. At the time, the University of Chicago Political Science Department, just down the road from us, was one of the major places in the world for rational choice theory and analytical Marxism. One of their recent graduates, Jim Johnson, got a job at Northwestern, and decided to teach a seminar on the subject of the Frankfurt School. Nobody in political science was interested, but a bunch of us from the philosophy department decided to take the course. As the semester wore on, Jim became increasingly frustrated with all of the babble coming from the philosophy students, until one day he lost it: “You people and your critique of instrumental rationality… You know absolutely nothing about instrumental rationality. If you were actually interested in instrumental rationality, you would go over to the Department of Decision Sciences and take a course on rational choice theory.”
Upon investigation, it turned out that the business school at Northwestern did in fact have one of the best departments in the world to study game theory. So in response to Jim’s challenge, I went over to see if I could take a course on game theory. I got lucky in two respects: not only did they have seminar I could take, but it was taught by a professor (Jeroen Swinkels) who was extremely good at explaining things. I wound up learning a lot of game theory, which was useful in several ways. First, it’s the only reason that I got a job in philosophy, because it allowed me to publish a bunch of narrow, technical papers. Second, it provided a non-ideological route to understanding economics (a discipline that had initially repulsed me by all of its cheerleading for capitalism during the cold war). And finally, it caused me finally to understand why all of the chit-chat I had been hearing about the “prisoner’s dilemma” and collective action problems was actually important.
The biggest “a-ha” moment for me, in the wake of this, occurred while reading a paper by Allen Buchanan, “Revolutionary Motivation and Rationality.” I had not been super-impressed by Jon Elster’s critique of functionalist thinking in Marx, but reading the Buchanan paper somehow crystalized it – by showing the specific mistake that one is likely to make, and that Marx made, by failing to provide an action-theoretic mechanism to underpin one’s socio-theoretic claims. It also made me realize that the entire concept of ideology, as Marx had conceived of it, was a downstream consequence of this mistake. (My awakening on this point led to this paper.) The other big moment around this time came from reading Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism, which led me finally to understand the calculation problem.
The last big turning point that I can recall occurred after I had started teaching at University of Toronto. We have a course called “philosophy of business,” which I used to teach, but I wound up moving to a different college where the course was called “business ethics.” I kept teaching it, even though I hadn’t really been doing conventional business ethics. At the time, however, our business school did not have an ethics course at the undergraduate level, so commerce students wound up taking the philosophy department’s version. As a result, I found myself teaching a course that had at least a hundred commerce students in it. And what I found, in the first couple years, is that they asked me a lot of questions that I didn’t know the answer to.
What made the situation so arresting was the fact that the questions they asked were not complicated. Indeed, most of the questions were perfectly innocent requests for clarification. One day a student stuck up his hand and said “When you say ‘the corporation’, what sort of corporation are you talking about?” or another day a student asked, “When you talk about ‘shares’, what class of shares are you thinking of?” In both cases I presumably babbled something in response, even though the honest answer would have been “fuck if I know.” In both cases I also hurried home afterward to look up the answer, only to discover that studying 19th century political economy had provided me with a woefully deficient understanding of modern capitalism. I had no idea how a stock exchange worked. I didn’t know what a corporate bond was. I didn’t know what “horizontal integration” meant. I didn’t know how an IPO worked. I didn’t know what the role of the board of directors was in a corporate control transaction.
In other words, I was a man with a lot of big opinions about capitalism unmatched by any clear understanding of how capitalism worked. My general sense of embarrassment was exacerbated by the fact that these were commerce students (i.e. not the sharpest pencils) asking me questions that I didn’t know the answer to. So I resolved, once again, to become less full of shit, by learning more about how the institutions of the society that I lived in actually functioned, before passing moral judgment on them.
I’m not sure if there’s a general lesson to be learned from this story, other than that people have their reasons for believing what they believe, but also their motives, and their motives are at least as important as their reasons. I could provide a list of books that I’ve read that informed my views on various subjects. But in many cases, I came to appreciate their significance only years after having read them. When I first read John Stuart Mill, for instance, I thought he was wrong about quite literally everything. A great deal of my subsequent intellectual development has consisted of coming to acknowledge that he was right about most things. That’s not because I read the books again more carefully, but rather that I became more receptive to their message. Unfortunately, I have no particular insight into how to create that sort of receptivity in others, other than just calling them out on their bullshit, as the occasion merits.