… to conclude my comments on Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures. The final lecture took place on UD‘s campus, the immensely well-located George Washington University.

I found the lectures disappointing, pitched at too high a level of generality — almost at the level, at times, of platitudes. Sandel comes across as a careful, well-meaning, bland person; there’s no passion in his delivery, and no real effort to engage his audience polemically by saying things sharply, or in a way that deepens their controversial nature.

And in fact Sandel’s content is controversial, having at its core an attack on the still-dominant public policy regime in American and other governments, a regime in which the moral and spiritual questions inherent in complex and contested public issues (health care, the environment) are put aside in favor of bloodless technocratic solutions.

“The attempt to empty politics of moral controversy may seem to be a way of respecting our differences, but it is actually corrosive of democratic life.” The attempt to come up with morally neutral, cost/benefit responses to civic problems, Sandel insists, fails to solve them, because these are issues that transcend consumer preferences. Governments that treat us all simply like consumers with preferences fail to appeal to our civic instincts; yet without awakening those instincts, governments will never draw from us the sense of solidarity and urgency which alone can resolve these problems.

“Monetizing moves decisions from democratic politics to technicians… [The] spurious science of cost/benefit analysis … elevates technocratic decision making at the expense of democratic deliberation.”

[D]emocracy is about more than tweaking incentives in order to make markets work better… or maximizing GDP, or satisfying consumer preferences … [It’s] also about distributive justice; [and other values at the heart of democracy] … Why then have we drifted… away from older traditions of solidarity and civic virtue? …

Sandel concludes:

Think of the self not as a consumer but as a citizen…

[D]eliberation is about changing our ways of thinking, [not merely satisfying static desires.]… To get important things like health care for all, you need solidarity — a sense of the mutual responsibilities of citizenship… [To get environmental change, you] need to change people’s attitudes toward nature… [This is a] moral and spiritual project, not only an economic one…

On the question of distributive justice, Sandel notes the extreme income and wealth inequalities in the United States at the moment, and the attendant deterioration of public services (the very wealthy withdraw from these services socially and ultimately economically), as well as the disappearance of public places where Americans of very different backgrounds can mix as equals.

(On a parochial note, allow UD to say that the university fulfills two of Sandel’s requirements in a very important way: It provides a public space for the civic and civil deliberation that can change the way people think, or that can allow people to understand why they continue to think in the way they do; it also creates one of those public places Sandel has in mind, where economically and socially diverse people can come together and deliberate in a setting not about money, but, in this case, about quality of thought. It goes without saying that the online university can in no way be this public place.)

Sandel’s is an important argument that needs to be made as strongly as possible; yet his lectures, as I say, don’t seem adequate to the urgency of the matter.

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A final thought:

Why not talk about Michael Jackson, or Bernard Madoff, or any of the money-grotesques that the very rich, hyper-privatized, morally neutral culture Sandel evokes has spawned? Jackson in particular embodies with chilling exactitude the withdrawn, opulent, heavily drugged life which might be seen as one endpoint of the civic regression Sandel’s worried about.

Jackson had in his house an anesthetic, propofol, so powerful and dangerous it’s only used in operating rooms. It doesn’t calm you and relieve pain; it puts you into a coma. It probably killed him. How did he get it?

Well, with enough money, you can get anything. And for whatever reason, in many cases, the more money people have, the more their desire is to withdraw. From civic and social life. From life itself, I guess. At five million dollars or so of wealth you’re comfortably numb; in the Jackson stratosphere, you’re – day after day – comfortably dead.

Sandel needs to grapple with the fact that Michael Jackson is an American hero.