Gottfried - Multiculturalism and the politics of guilt: toward a secular theocracy

From the Managerial to the Therapeutic State

Among contemporary welfare states, the United States stands out as perhaps the least socialist. Major American industries are not nationalized, and, unlike in Europe, a relatively private sector provides most of the salary to well over half of Americas workers. The tax burden facing American wage earners is still less than 50 percent of their gross earnings, while the percentage of the gross domestic product going to the federal government has even declined slightly over the last twenty years. Indeed, American public administration at all levels, including the armed forces, takes from those taxed less than half of what their governments impose as a percentage upon the Canadians, Germans, French, Swedes, and Italians. If these standards of comparison were all we had for measuring political freedom, Americans would be justified in rejoicing at their liberty. Like Goethe they might proclaim, with good reason, Amerika Du hast es besser. After all, public administration in the United States seems leaner and less intrusive than it is in European countries.

But this is not the entire picture. Although the United States as a redistributionist state has lagged behind other governments, in one respect it has created the authoritative model for the rest of the world. Our welfare state since midcentury has become increasingly preoccupied with modifying social behavior. And while American administrative democracy has not gone as far economically as nationalizing production, it has moved into socializing citizens through publicly controlled education and wars against discrimination. Such reconstructionist initiatives have been taken in response to what the state, the media, and victim groups designate as a crisis, a surging outburst of prejudice that supposedly must be contained and whose representatives need to be reeducated.

In the first volume of this work, an attempt was made to trace the intellectual foundations of the American therapeutic state through a series ofworks mostly produced around midcentury. In Gunnar Myrdals An American Dilemma (1944) and in the voluminous anthology of social and psychological investigation The Authoritarian Personality (1950), prejudice in the United States looms as a pathological hate that envelops particular victims. It is also a sickness that only public administration, we are assured, is equipped adequately to deal with. In this special pleading, dressed up as clinical analysis, administrators are charged with social healing. They can allegedly attain this goal by reeducating others and by confronting social and moral dissent as an unacknowledged illness. By now the understandings of liberalism and democracy proposed by sensitizing social psychologists have come to prevail. Today in most Western countries, public speech and written publications that unsettle ethnic and racial minorities have undergone the process of criminalization. Among Americans the outlawing of environments and behaviors believed to offend women, gays, and other minorities has achieved the same repressive result as the numerous laws enacted against crimes of opinion in Europe.

Feminist author and Stanford University Professor Susan Okin, in Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), maintains that social justice requires nothing less than a concerted political war against gender discrimination. Government, she explains, should not allow gendered practices that make women and children vulnerable, and Okin advocates administrative intervention in family situations to monitor the relative earnings of husbands and wives and to make sure that sexist toys are kept away from children.

Rorty also contends that there is no use asking about the way the world is apart from human decisions that affect that world (whatever it may ultimately be). Those who like Plato have posed metaphysical questions were often pushing authoritarian, theocentric agendas. It is therefore better to work toward improving human affairs than to speculate about the nature of reality. Like self-described pluralists and multiculturalists, Rorty does not shrink back from talking about social justice or from identifying that preferred value with those he fancies, although he does insist, like his idol John Dewey, that objective reality is a relic of Platonic other-worldliness.