Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Another Swim Meet, Another Econo-Culture Tome Reread, and a Reflection on the
Theory of Moral Sentiments:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_02-2009_08_08.shtml#1249247196
Last weekend, at the Divisionals for my kid's swim team, it was
Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. This week, at the All-Stars, where the
Kid swam fly and medley, I re-read (finally finished this morning),
Tyler Cowen's [1]In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000). It traces the
relationship between art and commerce, and here is a sample of the
reviews (yes indeed, I've cherry-picked, as I like the book, true,
very true.) (And this post goes on for a really long time after the
page break - if you plan to read it, better grab a bagel and a beer
and sunscreen):
In Praise of Commercial Culture by Tyler Cowen...is a treasure
trove of insights about artistic genres, styles and trends,
dexterously illuminated through economic analysis. Cowen's main
argument is that capitalism--by fostering alternate modes of
financial support and multiple market niches, vast wealth and
technological innovation--is the best ally the arts could have.
--Andrew Stark (Times Literary Supplement )
A masterful performance...Cowen has provided a marvelously
exuberant counterblast to the wide-spread view that in our
philistine, materialist world the arts are going to hell in a
handbasket. They are not. They are alive and well, and thriving as
never before. Cowen goes a long way towards explaining why. For
anyone with any interest in the history, funding and encouragement
of the arts, In Praise of Commercial Culture is not to be missed.
--Winston Fletcher (Times Higher Education Supplement )
[Tyler Cowen] argues that market forces stimulate the production of
culture, high and low, and that far from homogenizing taste, they
tend to produce art that is more specialized and diverse than it
would be otherwise. In three especially lively chapters, Cowen
traces the markets for the written word (where the printing press
has been around for centuries), music (where recording technology
became available only relatively recently), and painting (where
reproductive technology counts for much less)...The picture of the
art markets that emerges from In Praise of Commercial Culture is a
reassuring one...It is less possible than ever before to create the
monopoly on commercial culture that is the objective of
totalitarian states. Within wide bands of fad and fashion, people
are going to decide for themselves what they like. --David Warsh
(Boston Sunday Globe )
(Cowen, a George Mason professor, is also now an economics columnist
for the NY Times, and has a [2]very interesting column today on the
argument made at [3]TheMoneyIllusion econ-blog that, particularly
given the difficulties and downsides of fiscal policy today, the Fed
should deliberately aim for re-inflation, at the 2-3% level, and
should even move to negative interest rates (see [4]Mankiw's blog for
discussion of what and how) - essentially, penalties on bank retention
of reserves. I have no settled view of any of this, but Cowen is a
clear writer and his columns are always worth reading.)
Both when I first read In Praise of Commercial Culture and on this
re-read of it, I took away a far broader lesson than simply an
argument over public or private arts funding. The book seemed to me,
then and now, to echo the cultural forms of life that the
proto-economist-philosophes of the Scottish Enlightenment saw in the
rise of commerce and capitalism....
([5]show)
Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and others of that period and
school of thought saw in the rise of commerce many virtues for society
and culture quite apart from simply a material increase in wealth.
They saw it as the rise of 'civil society' - the social space for the
'moral sentiments' or the 'agreeable sentiments' or the 'social
virtues'. Nowadays, following the re-conceptualization of the term
'civil society' following the theorizing of Eastern Europeans under
Soviet communism (Adam Michnik, for example), we use the term to refer
to a social space that lies between the state and the market, in which
social life that is mediated neither by state authority nor market
discipline holds sway. (Hegel and Marx saw civil society as something
different still.)
Cowen's book can be understood as praise for the mixed up, materially
conscious, market engaged, and yet also aesthetically involved, world
of an active business culture that is interested in money and
interested in the culture that money can support, buy, foment,
interact with ... there is a space for the art that is completely
uninterested in commerce or the changes that commerce indubitably
makes upon the art it supports. The composer Charles Ives, who
supported himself in a business executive position, and whose music,
to say the least, made no concession to the market, is one 20th
century example.
The [6]TLS once asked me to review a couple of books on amateurs and
amateurism in music. The books included a final edition of the late
Wayne Booth's invigorating memoir of being an amateur cello player,
while being professionally a professor of English at the cutting edge
of criticism, [7]For the Love of It. And the review included an odd,
self produced volume on the nature of amateurism called Bloody
Amateurs (see? not even on Amazon!). Taken together, the two works
illustrated the split nature of amateurism - split, in one sense, by
the question of what it means to be a "professional," but split in a
different sense by its relationship to commerce and commercial
culture. On the one hand, there is Booth's (and for that matter, my)
amateurism in playing the cello:
Booth came to the cello in his thirties with prior music lessons as
a youth in the wind instruments, but no experience in strings. He
is refreshingly practical in his approach; he chose the cello over
the piano and the violin because (especially in those years in the
1950s when the cello was less appreciated than it is today) there
were fewer cello players and so the instrument put him in greater
demand in amateur chamber ensembles. Music for Booth is not finally
about scholarship, or about listening, it is about playing -and his
book is really a reflection on the inadequacy of our modern
reduction of the "love of it" to simplistic notions of mere
"pleasure".
It causes the reader to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the
pleasures involved in making music; the satisfaction in playing
well, the pride one takes in learning a difficult piece or passage
or technique, the buzz in one's fingertips and the sense of
completeness with the bow when the turn is done just right, the
pleasure of playing with others, the comfort of a shared society,
the joy of not just hearing, but making, the music, the wonder at
the notes lingering on the air. These are, Booth insists, distinct
and distinctly experienced pleasures. And when he says that
amateurs do it for the love of it, that is not the end of the
matter, but rather the beginning of understanding the neglected
varieties of pleasure within the human experience and how, within
amateur music, they combine together, the abstract and the
visceral, the head and the gut, to make the activity, for those of
us who seek to do it, irresistible and - it is not too strong a
word - sublime.
What Booth does not address, however, is the larger world of music
itself, and how the collapse of the amateur as performer is part of
the complicated shift in relations between musical professionals
and their audience. For the Love of It is a work fundamentally
about the interior experience of an amateur striving to play the
most traditional canon of traditionally serious music, the ones
"everyone" learned about in those first years at the piano. It
therefore engages not at all with contemporary music, or with the
avant-garde in any form. Booth, who as a literary theorist was on
the cutting edge of criticism throughout his career as professional
and professor, would no doubt say, with blunt practicality, that
such music is not playable by amateurs, even good ones, and that
anyway it's neither attractive nor beautiful: the professor comes
to music as a respite from the professional cutting edge in his own
field, not to carry it from vocation into avocation.
By contrast, there is Ives. Is Ives an amateur? In what sense? He
makes no concessions to commerce, commercialism, demands of the market
that consumes culture, the culture industry:
Ives understood after graduating from Yale that "he would never
make a professional musician. Rather than compromise his radical,
rugged and abrasive style, he picked a conservative profession
(insurance), made a million, and composed at weekends, rarely
hearing his music performed." Ives is the role model for many of
the artists in this book [Bloody Amateurs], and yet despite the
sneers of "amateur" status implied in comments by Elliott Carter
and Aaron Copland, it would be hard to characterize him as anything
other than a dedicated, consummate professional.
Far from being an amateur, at least in the sense that Booth means
it, Ives's artistic professionalism was so complete that it denied
him the possibility of compromising it for any kind of commercial
success.
Or any interaction with the 'middling' world that mingles culture and
materialism. There's a separate discussion, for another day, about
what the culture industry represents at this moment; but Jed Perl has,
as ever, a [8]splendid essay in the current The New Republic on
exactly this issue, covering several exhibitions of painting in New
York. Suffice it say here that the vibrant commercial culture that
Cowan has in mind is very far from what the 'culture industry' is all
about.
I haven't really wandered all that far from Cowan's book, or at least
the culture it praises. There are vibrant commercial cultures with
very little interest in 'culture' in the sense of art, aesthetics,
meaning beyond materialism or beyond consumerism. One compares
Singapore to New York, for example, or Hong Kong. The priorities of a
generation not far out of utter poverty are entirely understandable;
likewise the priorities of a generation falling into genteel poverty
will have its own impact upon cultural production, and I wonder what
the effects will be upon fiction and literature.
But let me return, finally, to the virtues that the philosophes of the
Scottish Enlightenment saw in commercial culture, and to which Cowan,
in a larger sense, pays tribute in his book. (I draw here from one of
the great short books on civil society, Marvin B. Becker, [9]The
Emergence of CIvil Society in the Eighteenth Century.) They include,
to start with, a culture built upon public trust - a society of
merchants in which people would trust interactions with strangers, not
because they trusted strangers, but because they trusted the neutral
enforcement of contracts by public institutions. A society based
around the full mobilization of its human capital and not limited to
cousin-trust is a wealthier society, and artistically richer, among
many other advantages.
Second, Ferguson and Smith saw commerce as a benevolent activity, not
simply in the sense that it makes society wealthier, but because it
provides a productive and benevolent outlet for energies that might
otherwise be diverted into war among those wanting to gain wealth and
power on that basis.
Third, it provides a public space with reasonably neutral commitments
that get away from religion and other elements of constitutive
identity around which one can easily - and the generation before these
philosophes did - wage bloody civil and religious wars.
Finally, commerce lays the foundation for the separation of public and
private, in a rough and ad hoc yet still identifiable way. It thus
provides the bourgeois cultural and material floor under the
claimed-universal but, in fact, culturally-supported and -embedded
artifice of liberalism as a political ideal.
There is a method behind all this reading and re-reading. I suspect we
are going to see a revival of institutionalism in economics
literature. Behavioral economics is not the only corrective to
hyper-rationalism and the assumption of hyper-efficiency everywhere
one supposedly looks. [10]Kenneth Arrow is quoted in a recent
interview on health care markets with the Atlantic's Conor Clarke as
pointing to 'extra-market', institutional forces of professionalism
and culturally embedded ideals of performance and service that are not
accounted for by market drivers. There will be a sociological revival,
I suspect. Cowan's book fits into that in a certain way.
But there will also be a revival of an even older literature than,
say, Weber. It is the claim that if markets and economic forces must
be explained not only on narrow rationality grounds, but also drawing
in behavioral economics and sociological-institutional explanations,
they must also be accounted for far greater attention to the 'moral
sentiments'. Far greater attention, that is, to affect, social affect,
affections, the virtues of sympathy and the 'agreeable sentiments',
the psychological and moral qualities of 'sociability'.
It is not an accident that these same Scottish Enlightenment
philosophes I have cited above praising the agreeable virtues of
peaceable exchange and commerce should also be committed to offering
theories of the interior moral qualities of honor, trust,
'bindingness', sympathy, and all the other affective qualities that
undergird what might otherwise, on the surface, appear to be merely
the enforcement of contracts.
I mentioned in an earlier post the loss of any significant attachment
in law and economics to theories of agency as affective relationships,
and not merely enforceable contracted duties, undertaken or not
according to rational expectations of fulfilment. That is not, at
bottom, the nature of agency, which is fiduciary duty. Fiduciary duty
is finally premised upon sympathy and affect - rules and principles
for dealing with others based upon a near-Adam Smithian notion of
sympathetic response, how you would deal with yourself.
Or, to put all this in other terms, The Wealth of Nations does not
stand alone. It stands in tandem with a theory of moral psychology,
one that Smith himself surely saw as being as crucial to the overall
enterprise as the division of labor and gains from trade. That moral
psychology is found in the much-ignored work, a work read perhaps by
philosophers and intellectual historians, but not economists, but
which for Smith stood alongside and as an equal pillar, the theory of
affect and social virtue - Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.
This is not a crazy call to abandon rationality or its quantified
expression in economics, heaven knows. Please don't misunderstand me
on this point. I have too many conversations with, for example,
anthropologists who believe they understand monetary economics that I
make no claim to understand, better than the Fed does, because they
understand something about exchange in hunter-gatherer societies. This
is not the current argument (often unexpressed from academic
politeness but, let's facing, one that has occurred to bunches of
people) that - professional economics apparently having fallen down on
the job in the financial crisis - let's jettison it in favor of
re-making economics a branch of the English department. But it is a
claim that it's time to draw back into economics a necessarily
qualitative account of the moral sentiments in economic life as we
know it. This is a different inquiry from behavioral economics or the
sociology of markets. It is moral psychology in the traditional
philosophical sense, the 'relational' teachings of how we use and
intend words of not merely logical force, but affect.
There might indeed be room, in other words, after a really, really
long time, for the humanities once again in economic explanation.
([11]hide)
References
1.
http://www.amazon.com/Praise-Commercial-Culture-Tyler-Cowen/dp/0674001885/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249241602&sr=8-1
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/business/economy/02view.html
3. http://blogsandwikis.bentley.edu/themoneyillusion/
4. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
5. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1249247196.html
6. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=935771
7.
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Amateuring-Its-Rivals/dp/0226065863/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249243053&sr=8-1
8.
http://www.tnr.com/currentissue/story.html?id=8a071f0a-078a-439a-adec-4c2dc5be1bfc
9.
http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Civil-Society-Eighteenth-Century/dp/0253311292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249246649&sr=8-1
10.
http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/conor_clarke/2009/07/an_interview_with_kenneth_arrow_part_two.php
11. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1249247196.html
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