“The pessimist and the prophet” is the current title of the online version but only if you read the article itself — everywhere else on the website it is the more verbose and I presume SEO-friendly “The Harvard professor who foresaw our age of anger – and what happens next”. Neither is what is used in the print edition, the more poetic “Meditations in an emergency”. Common to all three is that they are nowhere to be found on the FT’s home page, though to be fair it is referenced in the top right corner of the front page in print, above a Mad Men-esque illustration and with an altogether different teaser title: “The limits of liberalism; Philosopher Michael Sandel”.
I have never heard of Sandel before, of his 12-part lecture series about Justice (available on Youtube free of charge) or of his 1996 book Democracy’s Discontent which seems to have predicted the perils of globalization and neoliberalism without having to reference lizard people or secret cabals. In this it reminded me of False Dawn which came two years later, though of course I will have to read Sandel’s book first to confirm. In the article, FT commentator Martin Sandbu, who is also a former student of Sandel’s, retells their recent conversations about, well, the current goings on and what happens when you take morals out of politics and rely on “free” markets for guidance:
Sandel’s j’accuse is that this kind of liberalism took what should have been the most political questions out of politics, leaving them to be settled by market mechanisms. I proposed that this was similar to the appeal of “effective altruism”, the neo-utilitarian moral theory popular among students and tech bros, which reduces moral questions to basic calculations of effectiveness. “Exactly,” he said.
In an updated edition of Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel gives the example of Barack Obama’s approach to the 2008 financial crisis. “By standing between the bankers and ‘the pitchforks’,” as the public demanded legal limits on bonuses and no bailouts for banks, “Obama sought to mollify the public outrage, rather than give it voice. [He] treated the financial crisis as a technical problem for experts to solve, not a civic question about the role of finance in democratic life.”
On America’s fake meritocracy:
One derivation of market-friendly liberalism Sandel has long questioned is meritocracy, the idea that society should be organised to give the most able the advancement they deserve. I remember how he would warn us teaching fellows that in the classes debating distributive justice, undergraduates would all preach meritocracy. They were adamant they had earned their Harvard places through hard work alone. In the lecture hall, Sandel would then ask the 800 or so assembled undergraduates to raise their hand if they were their parents’ first (or only) child. He still does this today, and when he does, “75 to 80 per cent of the students raise their hands and there’s an audible gasp when they look around and notice that”. The over-representation (more than half of US children are second born or later), combined with plausible reasons why birth order matters for parental attention and other advantages, is a powerful prompt for Sandel’s students to rethink whether they can really claim meritocratic achievement.
On the class divide: But of course as more and more people attain the right to the skybox, those who do not want to mix with the rif-raf build skybox on top of skybox on top of skybox to form an ever-growing hedonistic mountain.
Then there was what Sandel calls “the skyboxification of public life”, a reference to corporate boxes in sports stadiums. Sports events were once a class-mixing experience. Ticket price differences were modest. “Everyone had to stand in the same long queues to use the bathroom, everybody had to drink the same stale beer and eat the same hot dogs. When it rained, everyone got wet. But with the advent of luxury skyboxes, that no longer was the case.” It’s a specific example of what he calls one of the most corrosive effects of growing inequality: that winners and losers increasingly “live separate lives”. This is not just a matter of distributive justice, of unequal incomes, but that we lose the “chance encounters” [that] remind us of our common citizenship, “of what it is we share”. How many of us at the winning end of these developments have given much thought to what we have collectively lost in the process?
Unlike the cadre of neoliberali journalists across the pond — e.g., the editorial board of The Atlantic — Sandbu owes up to his generation’s failure to make the world better and can at least contemplate the possibility that our current predicament is the direct consequence of their hubris. And surprisingly considering FT’s target audience, the comments to the article are uniformly positive. There may be hope yet.