A frightening disregard for civil rights and human nature

From a column, How can America inspire the Slacktivist Generation to action? by Dana Milbank.

It serves, I think, as an example of muddled thinking. Whether Milbank is a muddled thinker, or an ideologue or whether it is simply the product of having to produce an opinion on schedule, I don't know.

He starts off with an observation which I think to be interesting and true.

My patriotic gesture was a form of Slacktivism — a uniquely American form of engagement in which statements are made without any real sacrifice. The Slacktivist gets icy water over the head to fight Lou Gehrig’s disease, or tweets out hashtags to fight kidnapping in Nigeria (#BringBackOurGirls). The Slacktivist wears color-coded bracelets for causes, “likes” causes on Facebook — and goes to see a Seth Rogen film to defy North Korea.

[snip]

The problem is that the nation’s wars have been detached from any notion of sacrifice for the country — except for the fewer than 1 percent of Americans who serve in the military.

I agree. I first became aware of this as an issue probably thirtyfive years ago and more as a philosophical question. Can you have altruism without sacrifice? I still do not have a good answer with which I am comfortable but my inclination is that the answer is no. Unless you meangingfully share in the cost of your action on behalf of others, and particularly unless you share in the consequences of your action, then I would argue that you cannot be meaningfully be said to be acting altruistically. The field of economic development is rife with not only with failed initiatives to improve the lives of those in developing countries but failed initiatives which have left the recipients of that altruism worse off than before. I suspect that sacrifice is indeed a necessary component of real altruism.

Milbank bolsters his charge of the moral deficiency of the citizenry with:

In mid-December, the National Conference on Citizenship released its annual “civic health indicators” (volunteer work, contact with friends and family, confidence in institutions) and found a “broad decline” in 16 of 20 areas. The study was backed by the Census Bureau and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Similarly, Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that volunteering in 2012 (the most recent data available) was at the lowest percentage (25.4 percent) since the government started counting in 2001.

I think it is at this juncture that Milbank goes off the logical rails.

Why are people volunteering less? Why is there a decline in civic health indicators (which, I not having read the report, I am disinclined to grant credence to)? Milbank's root cause?

The cause of this is fairly clear: Americans are not being asked to serve their country.

It is a classic non sequitur combined with post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy producing a predictable totalitarian response. It is not grossly unfair to tug at Milbank's words just a little bit to arrive at - You are ineffective because you do not serve the State.

Milbank ties the decline in volunteering to the fact that the Great Generation which fought World War II is now passing. To bolster this claim, he brings on an expert.

John Bridgeland, who worked on national-service initiatives in the Bush White House, sees the decline of military service as the cause of Washington’s problems. “The World War II generation that served together had higher levels of charitable contributions, volunteering, voting, social trust, trust in one another,” he told me. “Even the gap between rich and poor was at its lowest levels. This greatest generation had an ethic of service that transcended politics and partisanship and belief.”

Yes. That cohort was a remarkable cohort to whom we owe much. But let's not gloss over World War II as an abstract notion. 250,000 Americans died in the process that built intragenerational trust and sense of sacrifice. Even accepting the argument that sacrifice caused a higher ethic of service, I think Bridgeland and Milbank gloss over a more critical question. Why has that ethic of service apparently declined?

I am not certain that people are less inclined towards service towards others today than in the past. It is a complicated beast and can take many forms, and consequently is very hard to measure. I am just not certain that Milbanks premise of a decline is even real. But accepting for argument's sake that it is, then is the fact that generations subsequent to the Great Generation have not had a similar existential shared experience a bad thing? I think Milbank is barking up the wrong cherry tree from which he has been picking cherries.

I suspect that Bridgeland actually points us in the right direction. As we have increased transparency in our institutions, making all the warts and transgressions much more apparent (but still not enough transparency) and as we have fostered cultural relativism and identity politics, there has been a corresponding decline in public trust in all institutions. Those trust levels are at historical lows. I became first aware of this in the 1980s with the headline revelations about the high living of the senior executives of United Way. At that time it was not uncommon for civic minded companies to pressure their employees, particularly their professional/managerial employees to contribute some percentage of their paycheck to United Way as a part of giving back to the community. This coercion was bad enough but was particularly galling when faced with headlines of how those contributions were being wasted and frittered away on executive excesses.

You can track the scandals since then in education, in church, in Federal government, in local government, in just about every institution toughing our lives. Faced with a continuing barrage of exposed malfeasance and incompetence, is it any wonder that the public might have become more cagey about how and where they contribute their time and money?

The Gramscean memes out of the academy have not helped. With a framework of cultural relativism and identity politics, why give?

I think what has happened is that Americans are as generous as ever but that they are having to find different ways of fulfilling that generosity. That is what Milbank is missing.

So what is Milbank's solution to what I regard as a non-problem and a faulty diagnosis? He wants to increase trust and generosity by expanding

national service — military and other forms — to 1 million 18- to 29-year-olds each year, up from the current 100,000. While far from mandatory national service, this would be enough to create a social expectation that each 18-year-old would either join the military or spend a “service year” after high school earning a stipend serving in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps and the like. They figure it would cost about $10 billion in taxpayer money and another $10 billion in private funds.

There is sloppy thinking at every step of his argument but this part is archetypal of the totalitarian mind which sees humans as unfree, lacking agency and subject to a mechanistic view of human behavior. We will fix your slacktivism by forcing you to share a service experience.

Milbank skirts a fairly central issue. Is this voluntary or not? He says it is far from mandatory but those are weasel words. It is either mandatory or not. Which is it? If it is mandatory national service, then you are curtailing citizen's freedom for some national purpose. What is that purpose and why is the curtailment of citizens freedoms necessary to accomplish whatever the stated end might be? Milbank doesn't answer those questions.

On the other hand, if it is not mandatory, then why would anyone join this national service? What are the benefits to them as individuals? Why would we believe that this national service is beneficial to either the participants or to the recipients? What is the good being done today by the 100,000 already involved in some national service? And how is this any different than some sort of modern day make-work Work Progress Administration?

Milbank references that it would only cost about $20 billion but leaving the cost justification up in the air. This is not a serious economic analysis. Given that the $10 billion in government funds has to be borrowed, then there has to be some measurable benefit exceeding the cost of that borrowing in order to make it worthwhile. Milbank avoids addressing that issue at all.

Like so many utopian totalitarians, Milbank does not like to engage with numbers. If he did so, he might realize that his recommended solution to the imagined problem is negligible. In World War II, our military was expanded to some 13 million men and women, nearly 10% of the entire population of 133 million and 16% of the adult population. Probably another 13 million were indirectly involved in the war effort in terms of industrial production. So roughly 32% of the adult population was directly and indirectly involved in the war effort. Such a massive common effort is likely to create a common sense of purpose and sacrifice.

What are the comparable numbers that Millbank is proposing. There are approximately 44 million 18 -29-year-olds and he wants 1 million of them to do some sort of non-existential national service. 2.3% percent with a shared experience versus 32% in World War II. Either Milbank hasn't thought this through or he's not really serious about this.

The upshot is that Milbank has provided a good example of the type of cognitive pollution which gums up our national discourse. He identifies a putative problem (people aren't sacrificing enough for their country), he thinks the reason is that people haven't shared an existential threat, and he wants to entice (or force, it is not clear) 2.3% of the generational cohort to engage in a common national service of no known purpose.

It all sounds good and positive at the conceptual level but this is pure cognitive pollution. More than that, it displays a disregard for civil rights and human nature that is fairly profound and quite frightening.