For a couple of months I’ve been trying to get a handle on a wispy problem that seems to be clouding debates about the current economic crisis. Something feels deeply wrong about how these discussions function as discussions, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint the shadowy rhetorical origin of this disquiet, if it exists.
I think that I’ve got my finger on a piece of it now, after listening to this morning’s coverage of the GM bailout. My hypothesis is that in discussing these big, unprecedented economic policy decisions we tend to make extraordinarily unstructured use of two very different languages – one having to do with fairness, another with pragmatic expediency.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with either of these terminologies or the types of meaning that they field. Both languages possess clear and predictable metrics of value, and neither will easily devolve into mystification. People know fairness in a deep way; they also understand expediency in their very bones. The trouble is that the way that we entwine these two registers of understanding lacks discipline, consistency and integrity. This dearth of true structure impedes consensus about what is at stake in our situation and confuses our decisions about how to proceed. As a consequence, unrest is increased by the very protocols of illuminated discussion that attempt to dismiss it.
Let’s consider an example.
Here is an excerpt of CNN’s story on today’s bailout plan of GM, which extends a lifeline to the company:
Some of Michigan’s congressional delegation weighed in after the announcement, laying out the stark reality the automakers that call their state home are now facing.
“The road ahead is going to be very difficult and painful, although, as the president said, there is potential for both companies to emerge from restructuring as stronger, more competitive companies,” said Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan. “I stand ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work.”
Rep. Sander Levin, D-Michigan, said he is confident the companies will meet Obama’s demands.
“We can do no less because the domestic automotive sector is the heart of the U.S. industrial base, and as the President said, ‘it is a pillar of our economy,’” he said in a press release Monday.
But not all politicians see the plan as fair.
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, said Monday that it’s not time to “hollow out our manufacturing sector” while providing taxpayer dollars to AIG, which faced public backlash over multimillion-dollar bonuses.
“All of the creditors of General Motors are losing substantial amounts — even people who worked their whole lives expecting retirement benefits and health benefits when they retire,” Sherman said. “What about the rich and powerful that AIG was owed money to? They are getting paid every penny. They demand it, and it comes from the American taxpayer.”
Notice how Dingell and Levin use the language of hard-headed pragmatism: our situation is “painful” but there is potential for “stronger, more competitive” results, let’s “roll up our sleeves;” we have no choice but to intervene when there are threats to a “pillar” of the “heart” of our “base.” The mixed metaphor is pretty ugly, but all of its components have to do with infrastructure – the holy guts of human work, an obdurate world of hard facts and appropriate responses to those facts, of cost-and-benefit-analysis and circumstances-beyond-our-control.
If the “tone” of these two speakers seem saturated in pragmatism, that pragmatism results directly from language choices.
Contrast this with the story that Sherman lays out: a conflict between workers who are losing benefits and rich CEO’s who get paid come Hell or high water. This story is about good guys and bad guys, about who deserves what and why. By foregrounding a contrast instead of foregrounding a situation, Sherman summons a very different type of thought, one in which the reader is not called upon to understand a wrong but to right it instead. Perhaps Dingell pays too much attention to our woeful economic circumstances, but Sherman pays practically no attention to it at all.
That’s why, from a rhetorical point of view, Sherman not only fails to rebut Dingell and Levin, he does not even really abut Dingel and Levin. The two sides are having different discussions, because there isn’t one question on the docket, but two: 1) is this necessary? and 2) is this fair? And the prose has no way of separating one question from another, instead pretending that they are identical and simultaneous despite the fact that one side of the argument is going for a touchdown and the other is going for a home run.
The same schizoid tendency can be found in the context of a single point of view. Consider this post by Alan Wolfe at TNR. In this reproduction, I mark passages that seem to belong best to an expediency debate in bold and those that seem to belong to the fairness debate in italics:
History may remember Obama’s caution and unwillingness to punish those who got us into this mess as his finest hour. As we work our way through this crisis, one question is paramount: What is the best way to get money as quickly as possible into the hands of those who need it most? The interests of many need to be consider, but the interests of those who are losing their jobs, their live savings, and, in some cases, their lives themselves must be considered first. Justice demands nothing less. And so does economic recovery, which depends on the ability of struggling ordinary people to afford housing and medical care, let alone consumer goods and cars.
If punishing those guilty for sending the economy into its tailspin would help those victimized by their recklessness, the Obama plan would be the right way to go. But it is a fact of capitalist life that the rich and privileged can effectively blackmail everyone else to get what they want. This is one of those times when we have little choice but to give into their blackmail. Not doing so is a luxury the worst off among us cannot afford.
Yes, it is galling to see people not held accountable for greedy, if not criminal, actions. Their actions were inexcusable, and if there is a world beyond this one, one hopes they are punished for their deeds. But in this case, statesmanship requires gritting one’s teeth and doing what has to be done.
See how scattered this feels? At one moment we’re supposed to make judgments based on one set of outcomes (expeditious recovery) and the next moment we’re supposed to make judgments using an entirely different kind of analysis (just deserts for all parties).
I have no quarrel with Wolfe’s decision to foreground expediency over fairness. Actually, this is in many ways the most intelligent of approaches: openly and honestly sequestering the decisions over which we actually have a choice from those from which we do not. But I don’t have enough technical understanding to really make such a separation. And at any rate, my worry is that the reasoning is just too unstructured, organized so that the language of expediency and the language of fairness can only approach one another long enough to be vexing.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having one of these debates or having the other. Also, there’s no problem with having one debate then having the other. In fact, there’s no problem with arguing about whether one debate is more apt than the another. The problem arises when we try to have both debates at once without recognizing that’s what we’re doing, so that writers end up answering a pragmatism-based suggestion with a justice-based objection, and one statement barely darkens the door of the other. It is a practice that produces incoherent chatter that makes everybody involved seem like an unserious boob.
It also makes good answers pretty hard to come by. Because we erroneously assume that the question what we must do is identical with the question what is fair, the possibility that these two questions might actually have different answers will not compute.
