On the Inimitable Greatness of The Boss

Bruce Springsteen’s most famous and best-selling album, Born in the USA, is remarkably sandwiched between two works of music that are far less commercial and radio-friendly, 1982’s Nebraska and 1987’s Tunnel of Love. In sound and style, if nothing else, these two could not be more different from Born in the USA. So let’s examine this stunning trio.

In the summer of 1984 Bruce Springsteen released Born in the USA. The album would feature several of his most prominent hits (Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days, I’m on Fire, and the title track) and has sold some 30 million copies. The album helped to make Springsteen a household name and is one of the most recognizable works of the 1980s. It is perhaps fitting that the songs on this bestseller embody the anthemic, arena rock sound that would pack stadiums around the world during the following tour.

It is all the more remarkable to consider it in the context of the albums that precede and succeed it. 1982’s Nebraska is a dark, haunting folk album featuring only Springsteen’s voice, a guitar, and a harmonica. The tracks concern criminals, outlaws, the unemployed and underemployed, what Springsteen saw as the forgotten underbelly of Reagan’s America. It is not a pop album and has no ready-made hits. Springsteen did not tour for the album, perhaps fitting given its themes and sound. Nevertheless, to say it has aged well as it turns forty this fall would be a massive understatement.

Advance to the other side of Born in the USA and we have Springsteen’s highly anticipated follow-up, 1987’s Tunnel of Love. Although Springsteen largely abandons the Woody Guthrie-esque guitar and harmonica vibe of Nebraska, the album still parallels it in many ways. The songs cast aside Born in the USA’s grandeur for soft, somber compositions, led by light digital sounds and Springsteen’s voice. The topics also don’t feel ready for top-40 airplay. Yes, there are love songs here but not the bubble gum variety that dominates the charts. Instead, we get deep, probing reflections on commitment, aging, love, temptation, disillusionment, and heartbreak.

For instance, the two faces of love, “one that laughs and one that cries,” found in Two Faces, offer a stunning depiction of a man wrestling with his loving commitment for his partner and his propensity to damage the relationship. Meanwhile, the opening verse of the wedding song, Walk Like a Man, will send shivers down the spine of anyone who has pondered the mystery and commitment of marriage. And consider these lines from later in the same song, relayed from Springsteen to his father, “Well, now the years have gone and I've grown/From that seed you've sown/But I didn't think there'd be so many steps/I'd have to learn on my own.” Has any popular artist captured in so simple and powerful language what it is like to grow up?

Tunnel of Love is introspective and personal in a way that Nebraska is not. Nevertheless the albums are two sides of the same coin, the strangest sandwich one could imagine when Born in the USA is the crowd-pleasing filling. Writing for The Ringer, Elizabeth Nelson rightly recognizes that Nebraska is “notoriously on any short list of the bleakest LPs ever rendered by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers.” 

This is part of what makes Springsteen both brilliant and unique. For his Born in the USA follow-up also has to stand as an odd choice. Apparently, his thought process went along the lines of “Let me follow up these fist-pumping, relentlessly catchy sing-along anthems with twelve intensely personal, somber tracks that inspect the challenges and rewards of love and commitment in the late twentieth-century.” If nothing else, these albums deserve admiration for both their inherent brilliance and for Springsteen’s audacity to make them while at the height of his cultural influence.

Of course on further inspection Born in the USA is not as much of an outlier as it seems. Springsteen was working on Nebraska and Born in the USA at the same time and the shared themes strike a powerful chord when one focuses not on the sound but on the lyrics.

The aching desperation of Atlantic City (from Nebraska) is echoed in Downbound Train (from Born in the USA), both songs that feature not just economic hardship but relationships under strain, the first struggling to endure, the second dissolving in divorce. Listen to Atlantic City, “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City” and now Downbound Train, “I got laid off at the lumber yard. Our Love went bad. Times Got hard.”

Both albums are filled with resonant parallels, to the point that one could almost claim Born in the USA is simply Nebraska with a stadium rock sound. The song Highway Patrolman from Nebraska details two brothers, one of whom works as a police officer while his brother, a struggling vet, frequently runs into trouble. But, as the officer sings, “sometimes when it's your brother you look the other way.” Born in the USA, both the album and the song, delve more deeply into the challenges facing Vietnam Vets as they return home. Meanwhile, Nebraska tracks like Used Cars and Mansion on the Hill tackle the hopes, dreams, and resentments of growing up poor.

This is but a glimpse into the strange, unexpected, and at times discordant greatness of this trio of albums. I haven’t even considered his first 1980s album, The River, which was released in 1980 and feels more like the capstone to his 1970s catalogue. But that would require another essay at least. Let me conclude with three cheers for The Boss and his 1982-1987 trilogy of albums. As he says, without offering much explanation or hope, “still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Against AI

Reading Meghan O’Gieblyn’s deeply insightful book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, has me ruminating on some questions regarding consciousness, humanity, and AI.

Here are a few thoughts, organized around the following claim: The world would be much better off if the energy, money, intellectual effort, and prestige of Silicon Valley were redirected to more useful ends.

For instance, let’s say you find questions of consciousness, self-awareness, identity, and meaning to be fascinating. The world is already filled with billons of non-human sentient creatures—animals—who, through habitat destruction, pollution, overfishing, deforestation, sprawling horizontal development, ecosystem destruction, and the general effects of climate change, not to mention animal testing, roadside zoos, and factory farming, are being catastrophically wronged by humanity.

We don’t like to talk about this. To do so is to offer another rant that can easily be categorized and put into a box—environmentalist, animal rights, vegan, hippie, and so on.

Alternatively, in the worlds of popular culture, private industry, and academia, AI is exciting, sexy, and supposedly future-oriented. Note the headline-dominating discussions, Ted talks, research grants, Silicon Valley symposia, obsequious media profiles, proliferation of robots on college campuses, and so on that indicate our (apparently) exciting future.

The focus on AI, sentience, and consciousness in big tech, from titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, is justified because it will supposedly help us live longer and make us more intelligent through cyborg enhancements. Eventually, technological advances will perhaps even allow us to achieve immortality as we are transferred into digital form and able to live forever in cyberspace. Many people in Silicon Valley, both visible and behind the scenes, seem to genuinely subscribe to such beliefs.

These questions of immortality and identity raise their own problems, since a digital copy of myself, even if fully conscious, would not be me but a copy of me, and I would still die. Fully conscious digital copies of ourselves, if ever possible (I am skeptical), would only offer metaphorical immortality, as a being like me would exist after I die. But this is immortality in the same way that my progeny offer me immortality—they share my genes, they may share and pass down many of my experiences and ideas, and thus I live on in a way, but it is not literal immortality. Philosophers of the mind have wrestled with these fascinating questions for decades. But I digress…

Meanwhile, in the real world, humans live longer through antibiotics, cholesterol and blood pressure medication, vaccines, public sanitation, preventive medicine and universal healthcare, functioning social systems that reduce violence and address despair, and so on. Note that these actual life-saving advances, from statins to respirators, are examples of technology, broadly defined, but they are not AI. As for AI, O'Gieblyn argues that "most commercial AI systems today are designed...to perform more narrow and specific tasks: delivering food on college campuses, driving cars, auditing loan applications, cleaning up spills at grocery stores." Hardly life-saving. And yet this is where massive amounts of private capital are invested.

On the other hand, the actual life-saving medicines and practices mentioned above, under-invested in the private sphere and under constant strain in the neoliberal public sphere, are not exciting or sexy or futuristic. The same goes for reckoning with the billions of conscious beings we already share the earth with, widely known as animals.

Our treatment of animals today, both in the US and globally, is paradoxical, at once rife with care and cruelty, use of them as mere instruments and respect for them as valuable entities in their own right. Recent efforts in the US congress, like the passage of the Big Cat Public Safety Act and bipartisan efforts to discourage the use of animal testing, embody this positive aspect, as do similar or stronger bills in the EU and elsewhere. Witness as well efforts to confer rights and other legal protections on rivers, lakes, and even ecosystems. (See, for instance, this book by Joshua Gellers). Moreover, millions of people around the world treat their pet dogs and cats as equal (or near-equal) family members and companions.

At the same time, the animals killed in factory farms, tested and discarded in labs, and devastated in the wild as their ecosystems are destroyed all stand testament to a glaring failure to address these genuinely important questions regarding what we owe non-human conscious beings.

It would be far more productive if we focused on improving the ledger here, by recognizing that consciousness exists on a spectrum and that mammals and birds, at the least, possess it in significant amounts. Even reptiles and fish have some consciousness. Perhaps plants do as well, though this seems less certain. Computers and robots, meanwhile, do not. (Whether they ever will is unclear). We currently inhabit a world filled with conscious humans and animals and unconscious machines. What does recognition of this entail, both in terms of how we live our individual lives and how we organize our institutions?

These questions and similar ones that O’Gieblyn’s book so forcefully addresses are as important now as ever. If we fetishized technology less, we would see that questions of animal consciousness--how humans relate to one another and how we relate to the conscious animals that populate the ecosystems of the world--should be a guiding concern of life in the twenty-first century.

To the roboticists, computer scientists, and engineers preoccupied with AI, spare a moment to recognize that the futuristic world you envision, one rich with billions of conscious non-human life forms, already exists. And we are failing it miserably.

Reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 by Friedrich Hayek, is a beloved text of libertarians and conservatives. Written during World War 2 while Hayek was living in the UK, the text offered a powerful condemnation of totalitarian forms of government and has remained popular, selling more than two million copies as of 2010. As a political theorist on the left and a lover of ideas, I figured it was well worth my time to read and engage with this influential book.

A few positive thoughts before I get to the heart of the text.

In so far as Hayek critiques the totalitarian systems of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, I couldn’t agree more. Representative democracy, with respect for liberal rights and a capitalist economy, is a much more just and less oppressive system of governance.

When Hayek uses the term “socialism” to mean central planning in the context of a massive, bureaucratic, unaccountable, Soviet-style state, I agree that this is not something to emulate. (Although the word “socialism” also has meant and continues to mean other, much more democratic and admirable arrangements).

And, finally, Hayek is rightly horrified at the monstrous power and genuine evil of Nazi Germany. It comes through viscerally in the text. Hayek also stands in admirable contrast to many other intellectual figures on the right who embraced fascism, from the three prominent elitists in Italy (Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels) to influential scholars like philosopher Martin Heidegger and legal theorist Carl Schmitt in Germany.

A similar humanitarianism pervades The Road to Serfdom with regard to the horrors of war and the dangers to truth and human decency that ongoing war poses. It is in many respects a deeply humane text.

Now for the disagreements.

Hayek’s basic thesis concerns the dangers posed by central planning of the economy and how even democratic socialism will likely lead, in time, to Stalinist tyranny. Hayek grants that the intentions of democratic socialists, in the UK and elsewhere, are good, and that they believe in representative democracy and individual rights, and indeed want to expand these. But, by concentrating economic power in the national government through the mechanism of central planning and the state ownership of the means of production, they will inevitably (or at least very likely), and basically against their will, slowly transform the state into a totalitarian one.

This leads to one of the problems with the book. What exactly counts as central planning? When does social democracy, or a welfare state, slide into the central planning that Hayek warns of? Do the wartime policies of the Roosevelt administration regarding production and rationing count as central planning? What about the high levels of public ownership that characterizes Scandinavian social democracy? We will return to these questions shortly.

At times Hayek suggests that various regulations of business, to deal with externalities affecting the environment as well as other issues, are justified and pose none of the authoritarian dangers he identifies with central planning. (The author of the introduction to the book says as much, thus attempting to head off the critique that pretty much of all of Europe adopted various socialist policies post-world war 2 and none of them became totalitarian.) But at other times Hayek seems to suggest that any left-wing economic policies, however well-intentioned, will inevitably lead to Stalinist tyranny, a claim that is obviously false.

Now the dangers of authoritarianism, and extreme concentrations of state power are well noted, as is the importance of the left remaining democratic. For those of us on the left, we shouldn’t be status-quo centrists or milquetoast liberals but we must remain committed to democracy and the protection of essential rights (including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and so on). This is important to remember. Fuck Leninism, celebrations of the power of the Chinese Community Party, and any leftist embrace of authoritarianism. But also, I think Hayek’s central thesis is basically false, though any assessment of its empirical validity requires engaging with very complex historical questions.

If Hayek’s critique does apply to Europe, as many casual readers on the right seem to assume, it is clearly false, since Europe went down a social democratic route and is arguably the most democratic and rights-respecting region on Earth. The only European countries tending in an authoritarian direction are led by right wing governments. 

If Hayek’s thesis does not apply to Europe, because social democracy and welfare states are not real socialism (i.e. central planning and an authoritarian, bureaucratic state), then it’s not clear if his critique applies to any country on earth.

It is not a good depiction of the rise of the Nazi Party. The Nazis were not a democratic or liberal party but a violent, racist, dictatorial party committed from their inception to overthrowing democracy, eliminating all individual rights, jailing or killing all political opponents, and conquering all of Europe, if not the entire world. They didn’t slowly and accidentally create a totalitarian state. It was their monstrous goal from the outset. They were genuinely evil, and deeply undemocratic and illiberal, from the start. 

(Although they arguably became even worse and more brutal as the war dragged on. This touches on a good point of Hayek’s, that war is brutalizing and damaging to the cause of human decency and freedom. Howard Zinn, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, makes a similar point regarding the evils of war accelerating the evils of Naziism).

Hayek’s thesis does not appear to be a good depiction of the USSR either, whose authoritarianism likely owes more to a brutal, prolonged civil war, desperate famine, and the authoritarian ideology of the Bolshevik party (apparent from the beginning), than it does to a slow, unintentional slide into total state power by unwitting democrats. Maybe this is part of the story but not much. The leftist believers in democracy were largely silenced and crushed by the Bolshevik state.

Nor does it seem to apply to the rest of the Communist countries, which largely and unthinkingly embraced the Soviet political and economic model of centralized political and economic power. These state actors weren’t naive believers in democracy, as Hayek suggests democratic socialists in the UK were. There may be traces of Hayek’s story with regard to Cuba  in the 1960s but I’m not convinced. Cuba embraced the Soviet bloc at least in part because the US began sanctioning them, diplomatically and economically, pre-missile crisis, thus pushing them into the arms of the Soviets, at which point they shut down the free press and knowingly embraced, fairly quickly, the rigid authoritarian system of the USSR. They didn’t slowly and accidentally concentrate economic power.

I think, maybe, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and especially Nicolás Maduro could be an example of Hayek’s thesis, in which implementation of democratic socialism led to a concentration of state power that ended with the defeat of democracy. Indeed, Venezuela has not had a free election since 2015 and has crumbled into a dysfunctional, economically broken, authoritarian state. But again, the actual story strikes me as much more complex than Hayek’s thesis allows. Was Maduro’s authoritarianism (and note, Venezuela is not totalitarian) an inevitable result of the policies enacted under the democratically elected Chavez? If not inevitable, was it highly likely? More specifically, did a concentration of economic power lead to a concentration of unaccountable political power? If so, then this may be a good case for Hayek. But explaining this slow slide into authoritarian government requires far more detail and careful analysis than today’s would-be Hayek’s are given to undertake.

This again leaves us with these questions that need much more specification—what exactly is central planning? Which “socialist” policies lead down the road to serfdom and which are safe? How and why countries become authoritarian (and when they democratize) are incredibly complex questions studied by political scientists, sociologists, and historians. They don’t readily lend themselves to glib answers, nor is it clear that the paths taken in the 21st century will mirror those taken in centuries past.

So by all means read The Road to Serfdom, for its condemnation of the evils of Nazi Germany, Stalinist tyranny, and war, and for a reminder that this book, and its author, are far more thoughtful than many of their proponents today. It also serves as a healthy reminder to those of us on the left to reject any remnants of authoritarianism from our past.

But, for all its many insights, Hayek’s thesis strikes me as too simplistic and, in practice, mostly false. Historically, most countries and parties that proclaimed leftist ideals were either authoritarian (or totalitarian) from the beginning, and remained so, or democratic from the beginning, and remained so. The latter, democratic leftism, remains something for those of us on the left to aspire to, with continued commitment to the defense and expansion of democracy and individual freedoms as well as egalitarian economic policies.

In a word, the slow slide from democratic socialism to totalitarian socialism, i.e. the slippery road to serfdom that Hayek warns of does not seem to be something that happened much, if ever, in the past 100 years. As I said above, most parties and governments of the left either started and remained authoritarian, or started and remained democratic. The Scandinavian model of robust social democracy, or democratic socialism, whatever ones wishes to call it, remains a great path to emulate.

The "Return of the Strong Gods"

This post is adapted from a chapter in my new book, How to Think About Democracy in the 21st Century.

R.R. Reno, a conservative theologian, offers an interesting thesis. According to Reno, the first half of the 20th century was defined by the very powerful “strong gods” of nationalism, racism, communism, and fascism. The postwar world, in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, is defined in reaction to and against these things, as a series of “anti-“ ideas. Anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-communism. In their place we have promoted “weak gods” like tolerance, difference, openness, and so on, to preserve our society against those earlier, bloody threats that mobilized people’s passions with religious fervor. In some manner, these earlier strong gods seem to be coming back.

Like conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen, Reno argues that this postwar liberalism was too weak and too individualistic to hold a society together. It therefore undermined itself, which led in turn to people seeking stronger forms of meaning, connection, and politics. Hence, the “return of the strong gods.” There is much to this thesis. We could think of it as the return of history thesis, an antidote to the triumphalist (and misguided) end of history thesis.

This thesis overlaps with and resonates with much of the critique offered by the left, which is deeply opposed not just to extreme neoliberal economic policies but to the very individualist political theory that informs such policies, which deprives us of community, the common good, and other shared elements necessary for participation in democratic citizenship (Wendy Brown, for instance, makes some of these points).

Francis Fukuyama was right when he stressed that 20th century state-centered communism, as a challenger to the west, was not just an economic or political ideology but really a comprehensive worldview and powerful collective narrative. When it died it left many countries and people without any shared narrative to make sense of their world. The problem, as conservatives like Reno and Deneen note, is that the liberal democratic countries also lack a unifying narrative. Hyper-individualism is not adequate to bind a society together.

These concerns are not limited to the right. If anything, they have become as or more prominent on the left. Whereas many on the right have embraced the attempt to marketize and privatize all aspects of life, participatory democrats like Benjamin Barber have demonstrated how local participation could create strong, democratic forms of citizenship. Historians like Christopher Lasch combined elements of left and right thinking in their critique of American individualism. Communitarian-oriented thinkers from the center to the left, such as Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer have been exploring these considerations for decades. Radical democrats like Wendy Brown and Sheldon Wolin have critiqued the totalizing and hollowing power of markets. It is some of these very concerns that led to my dissertation chapter “Is Democratic Community Possible?”

Thus these concerns regarding the eroding power of modern individualism are not limited to the right. Further, it seems clear that elements of Reno’s thesis are true. Why are eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland turning to authoritarianism and xenophobia? For one, they lack any other cohesive narrative. The oligarchic, privatizing neoliberal conception of citizenship, economy, and state is not enough to bound a society together. If anything, it only rends it further apart. Thus, citizens in these societies which have very few immigrants find themselves turning to exclusionary and authoritarian visions of nation and meaning. In Reno’s terms, the “weak gods” of markets and privatization were inadequate—leading many to unsurprisingly, if lamentably, turn back to the “strong gods” of nationalism and exclusion.

Reno characterizes the postwar US consensus as the belief that “a sense of solidarity based on widely shared prosperity rather than on the strong gods will allow us to achieve a stable common life.” There is much truth to this. It also leads directly to the power of the leftist diagnosis of the contemporary crisis—a major part of the breakdown of this postwar consensus is the loss of “widely shared prosperity.” For if that is the basis of institutional legitimacy, then stagnant wages, precarious labor, declining benefits, growing inequality, longer work hours, more expensive housing, education, and healthcare, rising deaths of despair, urban deindustrialization, and a society in which children are no longer guaranteed to be more prosperous than their parents all contribute to the collapse of legitimacy, the demise of the postwar American dream, and the consensus it informed.

With the center disappearing, the middle class falling apart, and community hollowed out, the strong gods rush in to fill the void.