Seven Lean Years

Last week, billionaire Robert F. Smith announced that he would pay off the student loans of the 2019 graduating class of Morehouse. And I figured I’d write something because I feel pretty conflicted about it—or I at least feel like I should be more conflicted about it.

The general atmosphere surrounding this gift was one of jubilation. I had many colleagues, friends, and acquaintances celebrating the gift, as did public figures I admire, like the civil rights activist Shaun King. But my initial response was one of anger. Anger at a system that creates student debt in the first place, and anger over the celebration of an individual who is one of few beneficiaries of that system (Smith has 4.4 billion dollars). It struck me as akin to celebrating our feudal lord for feeding us in a time of famine (which was a feudal obligation). Worse yet, it's actually more akin to celebrating our feudal lord for feeding us while his hoarding of grain helped cause the famine in the first place. The charity is only required because of the crime that necessitated it.

But I caught a little blowback for expressing my frustration, and I think I can see where people were coming from. The gift is going to transform the lives of almost 400 students. And from this point of view, this gift was a wonderful act. So, if I focus on the “generosity” of Smith, for whom this is a drop in the bucket of an otherwise obscene fortune, I might get mad. But if I focus on the effect that his act will have on the lives of 400 young men, it’s easier to see its significance. For instance, if I was ever the recipient of this kind of act, I’d probably find it easier to reconcile my anger at the systemic issues with my gratitude for the individual act. For instance, I might tell myself that while Smith is benefiting from the system in general, he’s not directly the cause of my specific problem, and his act of generosity seems to indicate that he’d prefer if my specific problem didn’t exist in the first place.

Moreover, the gift was made to the graduating students of an HBCU, so it’s not 400 random students who are having their lives changed, but 400 young black men. And I don’t think that this can or should be ignored or downplayed. For instance, African-Americans are hit particularly hard by the student loan crisis, so this gift is going to help a particularly vulnerable population, and one whose history of economic, social, and political victimization is impossible to overstate.

And yet, with all this said, my initial feelings remain. This whole situation just makes mad.

I’ve spent the better part of my professional life thinking about the relationship between ethics and politics. And part of what keeps me interested in this relationship is the dissonance between the two—how an action might appear one way from the point of view of our ethical lives but wholly different if we think about it politically. And what often explains this dissonance is that ethics and politics approach questions from different perspectives. When we think “ethically,” we are often concerned with how we, as individuals, should act. However, when we are thinking “politically,” we are often concerned with broader social, political, and economic phenomenon. In other words, the perspective of ethics is that of the individual while the perspective of politics is that of the collective. And I think this dissonance helps explain the varied responses to Smith’s gift.

For instance, from the ethical point of view, this gift is clearly an act of generosity. Granted, the 40 million dollars this gift will take is a drop in the bucket of a 4.4 billion dollar fortune—it’s just about 1% of his fortune (and maybe tax deductible, etc.)—but still. But even if this isn’t the most charitable act in light of the fortune from which it comes, the effect it will have is significant, and it seems reasonable to credit Smith with transforming the lives of 400 people for the better. That’s no small thing.

However, from a political point of view, this action appears differently. The reason student loan debt is skyrocketing is because of our extreme levels of inequality. The top handful of individuals have been capturing an ever greater share of American wealth and leaving an ever smaller share behind for the rest of us (a report released today indicates the top 1% possess over 25% of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 50% share 1% of it). And so, as our income and wealth have been shrinking, siphoned off to the super-rich, we’ve had to increasingly finance our lives through debt. Therefore, Smith might not be directly benefiting from student loans (he’s involved in the world of tech, not finance), but his vast wealth is only possible because of the same phenomenon driving all of us, including Morehouse students, into penury. That is, Smith’s 4.4 billion dollar fortune and the 40 million dollars of student loan debt held by the graduating class of Morehouse are not two separate phenomenon, but are the two different sides of one and the same phenomenon—inequality.

However, given all of this, it would be reasonable to conclude that both the ethical and the political perspectives are true. While Smith might be personally benefiting from the broad economic and political phenomenon that are allowing a small handful of people to amass unprecedented levels of wealth, he might also be a generous individual who is committed to acts of charity and social justice. And normally, I would find this kind of answer appealing. We live in a complicated and often contradictory world, and I’m generally suspicious of people who want to find simple answers among life’s many complexities, and who would reduce this act to either its ethical or its political significance.

However, I think this situation is actually a good example of how the conflict between our ethical and political lives isn’t always a conflict between two different perspectives, but about how we often employ a narrow conception of ethics that prevents us from understanding the full ethical significance of our actions.

Iris Marion Young once likened systemic racism to a birdcage. From the point of view of any one wire in the cage, the cage doesn’t seem to exist, but when we assemble all the wires together, we can see that they create a prison. And our individual actions are like that—they might appear ethical from our own individual point of view, but when we assemble them within the context of our society, our well-meaning action might be one more wire in that cage.

For instance, Michelle Alexander is particularly good at teasing out this problem. For Alexander, much of the racial bias in our current mass incarceration epidemic can be traced to the role that unconscious bias plays within the criminal justice system. That is, rather than a system that is overtly predicated on racism, the vastly disparate outcomes in how people who are black are treated versus those who are white, is largely attributable to the way that our unconscious racial biases affect individual decisions throughout this system.

For example, police officers do not usually make an explicit decision to pull over a greater number of black motorists than white ones, but their unconscious prejudices influence their decisions so that they do. However, because these biases are unconscious, their influence on decision making is subtle, so that we often fail to notice their effect. Consequently, from our own point of view, we might merely be stopping this particular motorist for a broken tail light, but if we were to study our behavior over time, we might notice that we tend to pull over more black motorists than we do white ones. And this is what Iris Marion Young helps demonstrate—that what appears an ethical action from our own point of view might in fact appear quite different if we examine it from the perspective of the social whole. So, a police officer might think that they are merely helping keep dangerous drivers off the street, but they might also be one tiny wire in the birdcage of systemic racial injustice.

However, while this might make it seem like there are often conflicts between our individual ethical lives and our role in the political world, I don’t think this is fair way to frame it. Instead, I think that what is often taking place is that we’ve constructed a particular account of ethics that takes the individual as its frame of reference so that we can avoid acknowledging what our ethical responsibility might entail from a broader social point of view. More simply, I think we often adopt a narrow individualist understanding of ethics so that we don’t have to accept what a larger political conception of ethics might demand of us. And we do this because these latter demands are often quite intense.

In other words, it is not that there is a conflict between ethics and politics, but that we can’t begin to think about our ethical responsibility until we first understand our political reality. Our actions are not solitary actions independent of the context in which we act, but they derive their meaning from that context. And until I understand how my actions might be contributing to broader social injustices, I can’t possibly take responsibility for what my actions actually are, because I don’t know what they are. And so, for the lone police officer pulling over motorists, the road to true ethical responsibility requires that they first understand the racialized nature of the criminal justice system. Furthermore, it also requires that they examine their own behavior from a quantitative point of view, determining if they are in fact pulling over more black than white motorists, so that they can try to identify and contend with their own racial bias. And then, faced with the truth of their actions, they would have to determine what their ethical responsibility truly entails—and it very well might entail becoming an opponent of the criminal justice system of which they were once apart.

But herein lies the problem—understanding our complicity in systemic injustices is difficult. Not only is it difficult to understand the nature of systemic injustices, but determining our responsibility for them is equally so, because that responsibility is often quite diffuse—we are but one wire in a birdcage. Conversely, examining our actions from a narrowly individualistic point of view is quite easy.

With all this said, I suppose that my real point is that every billionaire is responsible for the penury of the rest of us, because their wealth is the consequence of pushing the rest of us into poverty. So, it might be unfair to focus on Robert F. Smith, who is making at least some movement in the direction of helping people out of their indebtedness, but this act of charity falls far short of his role in creating their indebtedness in the first place. Worse yet, his act of charity can only occur because of that indebtedness, because our poverty is what allows billionaires like him to amass their fortunes in the first place—he’s returning a tiny fraction of what he’s already taken from us.

In the Christian Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” I’m no biblical scholar, nor was Jesus a Marxist, but this sentiment seems pretty close to the mark. Given that billionaires are the cause of poverty (and I don’t mean that they literally create poverty but that the existence of their fortunes—their hoarding of wealth—necessarily means that others have to go without), the path to true ethical responsibility would seem to entail a commitment to eradicating the type of wealth that they possess. That is, if I were a billionaire and I truly wanted to be an ethical individual, it would seem to me that I would have to be committed to ensuring that no one was ever allowed to hoard as much wealth as I, because my hoarding of wealth necessarily comes at the expense of others. Otherwise, I might be merely feeding the poor during a famine whose existence I was complicit in creating.

Which is to say that these have been seven leans years for most of us, but for billionaires like Smith, they have been fat ones indeed.