"Fairness", Solidarity and Liberty

President Obama's speech last Monday laid out his case for raising the debt ceiling and used "fair" or "balanced" twelve times in less than 15 minutes. There is an obvious political reason for his choice of diction--painting House Republicans as enemies of moderation and disconnected from the reality of the moment--but it has an important intellectual and moral aspect as well.

Conservatives and libertarians quickly dismiss principles of "fairness" and "balance" as a cloak-and-dagger show for grinding, leveling equality. But this is to miss the point--the desire for "balance" doesn't desire balance for the sake of equality but for the sake of solidarity--a desire to see a reflection of one's own experience or values in the rest of society. Envy or jealousy might be sufficient for the desire for solidarity, but they don't exhaust it. The desire for solidarity or a desire for belonging are more akin to a secularized religious instinct that seeks to fill out the spiritual inadequacy of individual experience. One way in which this desire might manifest, then, is by recognizing the values and qualities of our individual experiences in the lives of those around us. And so we have the desire for community.

In the United States, with our peculiar sense of exceptionalism and national destiny, community can be a vehicle for progressive as well as conservative values. The difference between the two is that described by Leo Strauss in his great essay "Progress or Return", the difference between the progressive or conservative community turns on the community's place in time: the progressive imagines the community of the future, while the conservative yearns for the community of the past.

But the liberal communitarian is not what she once was. The classical liberal community was one in which advanced through economic growth, ameliorating the condition of all in society and rewarding the Protestant virtues of thrift, industry, and perseverance. Yet now the liberal communitarians, in particular the greatest beneficiaries of an individualistic political order, envisage a community characterized instead by "shared sacrifice." From growth, advancement, and progress, we've turned to sacrifice, sharing of burdens, and fairness.

It's instructive to remember the uproar Wall Street bonuses met with after TARP and the Bush-Obama bailouts. As Michael Sandel keenly observed, the outrage wasn't so much directed at size of the bonuses or their apparent brazenness as their purpose--these bonuses seemed to reward recipients for their incompetence and catastrophic miscalculations. They rewarded failure. In our ordinary experience with capitalist, meritocratic, individualist values, to each according to his ability. Yet here a different set of rules seemed to apply, not necessarily as a result of cronyism or outright corruption as mystery--we heard that the size of bonuses was necessary given the scale of business, and banks had done the best they can in the face of an overwhelming financial "tsunami" that no one could quite understand. One set of rules for Main Street, another, opaque set of rules for Wall Street.

Irving Kristol warned more than 30 years ago that the bureaucratization of the American economy risked alienating capitalism's support among the American public by blurring the connection between achievement and virtue. The great promise of capitalism, like religion, has been the promise of equality--no matter your condition, high or low, if you work hard and play by the rules, you will find success in life. Belief in this equality, this fairness, is the basis for the solidarity upon which a dynamic, restless, market-based society depends. Subvert this equality and we will find instead a great hunger for "fairness" and "balance."

Wall Street is of course right in the formal, positive sense that their bonuses are justified by the rules of the economic game it must play. But formal, positive justifications have and will never support political economies--they commend no loyalties, they do not inspire reverence, and they do not summon the people to defend them against their enemies. Capitalism must be grounded on sounder stuff, and friends of free, market-driven societies should take notice.

Education and Individualism

I had the good fortune this past month to attend a weeklong seminar hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies entitled "Exploring Liberty." The seminar introduced students to libertarian perspectives in philosophy, economics, law, and history, through the real purpose was clearly to recruit new minds to the libertarian cause. More than the discussions and lectures, which had their own appeal, the most revealing comment of the week came at the final Q&A with the seminar's faculty panel.

The question, "What is your biggest problem with libertarianism," could have easily fallen on deaf ears. The answer, however, exposed the kernel of thought that most troubles libertarianism: children. Indeed, the moral status of children and an accompanying theory of paternalism would be a huge difficulty for an ideology whose favorite epithet is "paternalistic."

Because of its allergy to paternalism and coercive restraint upon the individual, libertarianism doesn't give us a good story about how we should form or educate children (in the literal sense of "bringing out" or "bringing through" children into adulthood) because libertarianism is so individualistic. So someone like Walter Block, for example, is at his most comical defending the employer of child labor because his theory of education is so hopelessly barren. A child becomes an adult in Block's view by acting in a way that befits an adult, e.g. selling his labor to an employer for a wage and living apart from his parents. The transformation of child into adult is a kind of "immaculate conception" whereby the child wills himself into adulthood, where the very performance of leaving home to seek employment serves as proof of childhood's end. There is no theory of education here beyond the single, formative, self-begotten action that Block calls "adult homesteading" and allows children to "fire their parents" when they become too "onerous."

The comedy of Block's effort results from shoehorning an intransigent feature of human life into a constrictive ideology of individualism. But childhood isn't reducible to the vocabulary of individualism because children must be educated, and education involves, well, coercion and indoctrination. What is more, education involves more than just parents. It involves a community and a culture--or a theory of what a community praises and blames. And the need to educate the next generation, or to answer the question "What will we tell the kids?" justifies the intuition that there are collective goods of moral importance in addition to individual goods.

Leo Strauss is said to have quipped (and he was a man of few quips) that all political philosophy is about education. I understand this to mean that the central motivation in political philosophy's search for the best regime is the thought of how we want to raise or rule our children. Libertarians might better understand traditionalism, conservatism, and liberalism if they recognized that paternalism, rather than some misplaced political gesture, is in fact the central subject of politics.

The Harry Lime Hypothesis

Midway through The Third Man, Holly Martins announces to a meeting of Vienna's literary scene that his next book will be a clean break with the trivialities that marked his previous works with a more serious story called, aptly enough, "The Third Man". The piece, some reviewers have noted, marks the central maturation in Holly Martins as he comes to understand the complexity of collective responsibility and the myth of the romantic hero. This is simple enough. More interesting, however, is the way in which Holly's interactions with Anna and Harry change over the course of the film especially near its conclusion. Anna asks Harry, for example, "What's your price this time?.... You must be proud to be a police informer." While her agenda obviously leads her to this statement as Harry's mistress, her point remains--all the characters in The Third Man are marionettes of larger forces at play, including the zeitgeist of the post-war era. This devaluation of the individual surfaces again at the end of the film's famous chase through Vienna's sewers, where a wounded and exhausted Harry Lime signals Holly to shoot him as though to give a proper ending to Harry's saga. Collectivized responsibility seems to mean collectivization in general--here, Harry Lime completes his role in the story in deference to some kind of collective will.

Anna comes out of this as the emblem of the drifting individual. The closing scene aptly captures this--she slowly approaches the stationary camera head on, growing from one of Harry Lime's dots to her full figure. Her attachment to Harry, borne out of her rescue from repatriation to the Russian sector, makes her the modern Antigone in the words of one critic and does perhaps redeem her. Her character's oblique reference to the Prague Coup of 1948, for example, allows us to sympathize with her plight. There is also something compelling in her indictment of Holly. His betrayal of his best friend is no small task, and it comes in the service of enforcers of justice who have lost much of their legitimacy. The black market is not some fringe phenomenon in Vienna after all, and those who attempt to control it fail to understand the desperation of the times. 

Like the other two films studied in my group, this adds the central dimension of tragedy to The Third Man. The tragedy itself becomes the lamentation of the film, not the compromises made by individual characters. If there is one glimmer of hope it comes, ironically, from Harry Lime himself. His suggestion from his famous cuckoo-clock speech, that good and evil can be magnified by each other, seems to ring true in the sentiments of Holly Martin's new book. Is evil necessary for their to be good, and can laying evil bare create virtue? Perhaps. But this old idea better fits Renaissance Florence than post-war Italy in film's perspective.

Cynicism and Hope in Post-War Film

I find it interesting that Alex and I have each noted that our films carry a deeply cynical and gritty tone toward the war while Justine's has a more hopeful view. This suggests with respect to Italy that the country escaped the crippling feelings of national guilt that other Axis powers had to confront in the wake of WWII. Italy never carried out anything like Hitler's Final Solution, so perhaps it escaped the moral condemnation and humiliation that Germany received and was thus able to recover psychologically more quickly. Das Boot, on the other hand, seems to cast the submarine crew as appendages of the German war machine and focuses on the ordeal they endured as pawns of the Third Reich. My film takes a cynical view not because of defeat, but because of the readily apparent hollowness of the Allied victory--WWII had not ended but seamlessly shifted east to the borders of the USSR. 

More on the Context of the Third Man

The writer of The Third Man's screenplay, Graham Greene, never intended the film to be a political piece. Greene was quoted as saying, "My only intention was to amuse.... I didn't want to provoke political sentiments." Reed's modifications to Greene's script transformed The Third Man into an intellectual work and expose its relationship to its historical context. The most significant change Reed made was to change film's tenor toward Holly Martins. Its unflattering view of the naïve, inexperienced, unworldly Martins contrasts its positive view of Calloway, the British MP attempting to police the wreckage of Vienna, and to a lesser extent Anna. It should be noted, however, that Anna herself is a participant in the same underground trade as all of our civilian protagonists--it is a fact of life that lends an overall palor to the film rather than a morally ambiguous realism. As the same essay quoted above argues (persuasively, in my opinion), the film's tone toward its American characters exemplifies Britain's frustration at the wartime cooperation and accommodation of the Soviet Union by the U.S.. However, the film retains some of Greene's imprints. Some commentators have characterized The Third Man as a lament of totalized war and its dehumanizing effects on all parties. Harry Lime, who interestingly is never given a nationality or any other real identity other than his criminal enterprise and connection to Martins, is this universal representative of what remains in the aftermath of the war. He is the prototypical anti-hero, a man Nietzscheof whom would be proud, with the force of his persona counterbalanced against the sadness of his situation. He is not the villain in this tale because we identify with his inner contradiction--he at once seems to transcend his surroundings with his aloof spirit and slick talk but is firmly a product of the toxic milieu in which he prowls. 

European vs. American narrative styles

In both its American and English versions, The Third Man opens with a voice-over. They are not identical, however. As compared here, the two monologues diverge in tone and purpose. The British version was voiced by the director, while the American used Holly Martins, the American author--an omniscient narrator vs. the protagonist. The unseen voice in the British version, as the same source notes, employs irony and understatement to set a dark and uncertain mood at the film's outset. For example, while speaking of the multi-national police force that controlled the city's center, it reads, "Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know." Compare this to the American version's "But they were good fellows on the whole and did their best." In the former, the ambiguity remains--it comes across as the narrator's opinion and not as fact. The American version firmly establishes them as the good guys in this story and removes any wiggle room.

These two styles come into conflict within The Third Man, but ultimately British sensibilities prevail. There is no clear resolution to Holly Martin's journey and the piece leaves the viewer with an abidingly cynical view toward the power politics and murky characters trying to sort themselves out in the shadows of "the old Vienna."

Real-Life Inspirations for The Third Man

The writer of The Third Man, Graham Greene, had a firm basis in espionage that the brought to bear in his piece. While the film is not explicitly a spy story, its portrait of the black market in Vienna gives it the same overall quality. The black market, like espionage, involves men in constantly perilous, extra-legal environments, dealing in goods and services beneath the table. Greene himself had worked as an intelligence officer for the British during World War II at the behest of his younger sister, an MI6 operative, and his elder brother had spied for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Greene also employed contacts in the London Times and MI6 for background research on the occupation of Vienna and the criminal underworld it had spawned. Events in the film, like Harry Lime's penicillin racket, were not pulled out of a hat--they reflected the reality of an economy dominated by rationing and chronic shortages where criminals like Lime provided a useful and necessary public service.