In my social welfare policies and services class I begin the semester with a quick overview of ideologies (and a couple weeks of studying basic principles of economics). A key objective of teaching policy to social work students is to help them gain insight into how we ought to evaluate policies and services, and give them skills to advocate for better policies and services, and be influential when they engage in political practice (political advocacy).
One task facing me is exposing the students to brief summaries of the values and ideals held by conservatives, liberals, radicals, and “alternative” (green, libertarian, esoteric) ideologies. The students encounter George Lakoff and his ideas about frames (words that elicit emotional responses and generalizations about a constellation of concepts and feelings associated with those words) and the metaphors that Americans use when they engage in “conservative” or “liberal” thinking. Lakoff suggests when we engage in conservative thinking, we see the world through the metaphor of a family with a strict and and patriarchal hierarchy in which the loving father must be stern and instill self-discipline in his children through punishment in order to help his children become self-reliant, responsible, and autonomous. According to Lakoff, when we see the world through a liberal position, we use a metaphor of an egalitarian and nurturing family where the parents want to ensure that the children have all their needs met. I also have the students understand the “Moral Foundations Theory” as explained by Jonathan Haidt. I think that moral foundations theory gives us two good ideas that are useful in social work: 1) people all have the same fundamental moral values, and we differ in the relative significance we apply to each value; and 2) conservatives and liberals have predictable preferences for some of the shared values. (I don't think the five or six values emphasized in most Moral Foundations Theory work are actually the moral foundations, but that isn't important). The implications I want my students to understand is that you ought to understand the ideological and value preferences of your audience, and then when advocating for a superior policy or service, you ought to use narratives, anecdotes, and arguments that use the right frames and metaphors, and emphasizes the sort of values that likely to appeal to your audience. When speaking to Democrats, use nurturing parent metaphor language, and emphasize caring and justice. When speaking to Republicans, use disciplinary father metaphor language, and emphasize purity, loyalty, and obedience just as much as caring and justice. In all cases, moral narrative stories will be more convincing than facts, but when addressing political experts, you will need facts as well.
When I expose the students to examples of various ideologies, or ask them to find examples of people spouting opinions that are very obviously informed by a specific ideological preference, I also sometimes want to help my students enhance their critical thinking skills, and be aware of their own tendency toward cognitive bias. As most social work students are liberal or radical, I often try to fairly present conservative critiques of liberal or radical assumptions and prescriptions, and I may sometimes do this so well that my students get the idea that I myself hold some rather reactionary views. I’m well aware that liberals and radicals, whose policy preferences I share in most cases, sometimes do engage in delusional group-thinking or illogical thought. That seems to be a human problem, more than a problem specific to any given ideology. People need to use cognitive short-cuts and generalizations to get along without wasting too much mental effort on inconsequential nuance, so humans are especially prone to thinking with false dichotomies or tribal allegiances (confirmation bias) favoring the positions of “their ideological tribe,” and so long as people recognize this weakness in themselves and others, this sort of irrational thinking probably does little harm. But, my students should, I hope, develop the critical thinking skills to notice bad logic and poor arguments when they hear them.
This brings me to Dennis Prager and Prager U. Mr. Prager seems to be a decent and well-meaning person with some level of wisdom when he thinks about some social problems. He has on occasion been unfairly maligned by fanatic radicals. My impression is that he is not a very deep thinker, and he offers a useful example of a person whose arguments are often of poor quality; I expect any serious conservative intellectual would agree with me on that point. When conservative students are exposed to Dennis Prager and his website (Prager U) with its short propaganda videos, or even his longer speeches on You-Tube, they may think he comes off as being extremely convincing and reasonable, and sometimes students suggest that he has well-supported his ideas and given “lots of evidence” to convince people of the accuracy of his claims. Liberal and radical students probably find it painful to listen to his talks or watch the videos on his website, and often dismiss his videos without saying much more than "he is wrong and he just repeats his wrong ideas". Unfortunately, some students who have no particular ideological bias may find him persuasive.
What I’m going to do here, is take one of his talks in which he makes fairly weak and ridiculous claims, and demonstrate why his position should not be persuasive. This isn’t to generalize and say that Prager is always such an intellectual light-weight. I share his concern about the trend in anti-religious secularism because I agree with him that human societies and individuals benefit from respectful belief in (and loyalty to) transcendent ideals, usually found in religions. I also worry about people who lie about others and slander them (even when they are lying about my ideological opposites). Like Prager, I value free speech and polite discourse, and I dislike it when people want to shut down debate and close down the respectful sharing of opinions. I do not share Prager’s concern that this anti-free-speech issue is especially a phenomenon on the left. Polling research I’ve seen seem to indicate it’s very slightly a larger problem on the right, and on both the American left and right the tendency to want to censor and shut down opposing speech is a fairly fringe and extreme attitude not widely felt, and more often felt by older persons than the younger generations. At least that is the evidence I've seen, which contradicts the mountain of anecdotal evidence provided by the right-wing media echo-chamber about a younger generation of leftists who will not tolerate free speech. As Prager is a fairly extreme conservative, he naturally is most familiar with the attacks on him, and those come from fringe censorious leftists, but he’s only familiar with a very biased sample, and random sampling of the general population gives us a different picture than what he claims. At any rate, Prager is an easy target, and this makes it fun to illustrate critical thinking in considering his claims.
Yet, one thing Dennis Prager ought to consider is how his bad logic and extreme cognitive bias and ideological tribalism feeds into exactly the sort of society he does not want. We need a society in which the public sphere has reasoned and courteous debate, and where people deal with facts and are open-minded. Prager’s website and his little propaganda videos are full of the sort of claims that polarize people, ignore facts, give bad argument, and encourage irrational thinking. That’s not good for our society. All ideological thinkers ought to fairly present their arguments, point to facts, give well-reasoned arguments, and engage in debate in a way that is respectful and honest. When any conservative or liberal figure fails to do this, or undermines this approach with emotional propaganda and intellectually dishonest argument, they are contributing to the sort of dystopia in which people find it more difficult to unite for the common good and compromise to find solutions everyone can live with.
Dennis Prager has a talk he gives about how socialism makes people selfish. On his Prager U website this is a five-minute screed in which he makes a few unsupported points, but on YouTube one can find a longer presentation (over an hour) in which he says pretty much the same thing he says in five minutes, but with at least some supporting empirical evidence. His five-minute talk is available in a short paper that is nearly a transcript of his argument.
To begin with, we have the issue of definitions. What does Dennis Prager mean by “socialism” and what aspects of socialism does he claim are likely to make people selfish? One thing to understand about American conservatives such as Dennis Prager is that for them, the word “socialism” is closely related to the political regimes establish by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union and forced on Eastern Europe from 1945 to about 1990. They also equate socialism with systems set up by Mao Ze-Dong in China in 1949-1976, the current Chinese Communist Party’s system in China, the dictatorships in Cuba and Vietnam, the Kim family’s totalitarian “socialist” kingdom in North Korea, the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela, the Daniel Ortega regime in Nicaragua, and various cold-war Soviet Union client states in Africa ruled by dictatorships (e.g., Ethiopia under the military junta led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, Mozambique under the one-party rule of FRELIMO, Angola under the one-party rule of the MPLA, etc.). Indeed, if you define socialism by all these places and governments, then your starting definition will lead you to the inevitable conclusion that socialism is evil. So, the disagreement isn’t so much with the logic as it is with the definition of socialism, the starting assumption with what socialism is. Persons who are sympathetic to socialism might dismiss every one of these examples as representative of fascist totalitarian dictatorships pretending to be “socialist” to justify the power of the ruling elites, and point to other situations as “true” socialism. If we accepted that approach, we might define socialism as it has been demonstrated in governments such as Austrian coalition governments led by by the Socialist Party of Austria (SPÖ) in the 1970s and 1990s, the French government under Françoise Mitterand (1981-1995), the Swedish governments under the Social Democrats (who ruled from 1932-1976 and have led the Swedish government since 2014), the United Kingdom governments led by the Labor Party under Clement Attlee (1945-1951) and Harold Wilson (1964-1970 and 1974-1976), the German governments led by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which ruled West Germany from 1969-1982 and united Germany in 1998-2005, the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, which has ruled Spain since 1982 except for the years 1996-2004 and 2011-2018. We might also look to the state governments in Kerela (southern India) headed by the “Communist Party of India (Marxist)” or the government of the Movement for Socialism Party in Bolivia (which won 55% of the vote in the 2020 elections after having governed in Bolivia since 2006). The idea that socialism must be defined by the worst governments that have ever claimed to be socialist, ignoring all the many average or good governments that have been run by socialists, is not likely to give us an accurate understanding of socialism. It would likewise be unfair to characterize capitalism by all the very worst examples of capitalist excess such as its famines (the Great Irish famine of 1845-1851, the Orissa famine of 1866 or the 1943 Bengal famine), its brutal dictatorships (Franco’s in Spain, Pinochet’s in Chile, the period of marshal law in Korea, Chiang Kai-shek’s white terror in Taiwan, Maximiliano Hernández Martínez’s “La Matanza” in El Salvador, the Dirty War in Argentina, and the list goes on), or capitalism’s terrible treatment of labor (e.g., the slave trade). Defining socialism or capitalism only by their best attributes or their worst examples does not help us understand the nature of socialism or capitalism. We must be more careful of our definitions.
Socialism has so many characters and ideas associated with it that it’s not really intellectually honest or truthful to selectively chose the very worst people who claimed to be socialist and define socialism by their actions. Any reading of American anti-socialist literature will quickly reveal that conservatives prefer to define socialism by associating it with characters such as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, or Nicolae Ceaușescu (all of them easily comparable to Aldolf Hitler in terms of their “virtues”). We might instead define it by characters such as Josip Tito in Yugoslavia, George Orwell in the United Kingdom, Mikhail Bakunin in Russia, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, José "Pepe" Mujica in Uruguay, or Antonio Gramsci in Italy. While none of these socialists are perfect, they are certainly more sympathetic than the typical so-called “socialists” people like Dennis Prager use to define “socialism” in order to argue that socialism is evil. For understanding the range of ideas and persons who could represent socialism In the United States, we could look to the Rappites and the New Harmony colony of Robert Owen, the Oberlin colony in Ohio, Eugene V. Debs, Hubert Harrison, Bernie Sanders, Meyer London, Victor Berger, Dan Hoan, Michael Harrington, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London (Sinclair and London were probably not actually socialists by the end of their lives).
Another problem with this whole attack on socialism (and it’s a problem with the attacks on capitalism by many on the left) is that it really doesn’t make sense to say a particular nation is socialist or capitalist. All societies have some state control of portions of the economy, and all modern societies have some economic activity controlled by the government through taxing and spending. Socialism is everywhere, in this sense. I live in a city where my city government owns and operates my power, water, and sewer utilities. Some Americans live in towns where their internet service is provided by public utilities rather than Comcast (they tend to get faster speeds for lower prices). In the United States, the government runs an insurance scheme to protect workers from disability (it’s part of Social Security) and provides health insurance when we get older or suffer poverty (Medicare and Medicaid). We also get old age pensions run by our governments (either Social Security, military, or state-run retirement plans). The combined spending of federal, tribal, state, and local governments, and their collection of revenues through a variety of taxes probably makes up about 35% to 40% of our economy. All of these are aspects of socialism in our mixed economy. And, on the other extreme, even the most notorious totalitarian societies that claim to be socialist allow some free market capitalism and private property. There are informal markets in North Korea called Jangmadang. Cuba has a private sector.
A so-called “socialist” country like Sweden extracts about 44% of all the income earned in Sweden through taxes (the top income tax rate on earnings above the highest income threshold is 57%), government spending is right around 50% of the GDP, and the public sector makes up about 30% of the economy. In the United States, a so-called “capitalist” country, personal income is about $18-20 trillion, and federal government revenue is about $3.5 trillion and spending is about $4.5 trillion, so if we assume personal income is about $18 trillion, the federal government is taking about 19% to 20% of income in taxes. State and local taxes take up about a third of all taxes, so that would be about 9.5% to 10%. So the “capitalist” USA has about 28% to 30% economic activity controlled by the public through taxing and spending, whereas “socialist” Sweden puts nearly 50% of its economic activity into the hands of the government. My point here is that what we really mean by “socialist” is that more economic activity is controlled by the government (which, ideally, means the people control it through democratic elections of representative governments), and a “capitalist” society is one where less economic activity is controlled by the public, and is instead left in private hands. There is probably a wide range of mixtures of “socialism” and “capitalism” where people can live flourishing lives with increases in economic security and wealth and a high degree of confidence that they face no prospects of being made miserable by poverty, hunger, homelessness, and lack of health care. I image that reasonable societies might thrive with anywhere between 25% and 60% of economic activity controlled by the state (if the state must answer to the citizens through some sort of democratic processes). Insufficient capitalism could be bad, and I suppose a private sector that is “too small” might be 30% or less. Conservative Americans may think that we need 70% or more of the economy to be in private control. Our real disagreement is over where the ideal mix of capitalism and socialism lies, and I imagine there is a wide range of mixtures that could provide lovely societies.
It’s not merely the mix of capitalism and socialism that makes a society flourish. We also should be concerned with how responsive and efficient our private sector and public sectors are. A corrupt government that is very inefficient and ignores the desires of the population and instead rewards people who are loyal to the ruling elites (as opposed to rewarding merit and competence) is going to be awful, whether that government controls 30% or 50% of the economy. A government that is very attentive to the needs and desires of its people, and responds efficiently with innovation and pragmatism to the various requirements of justice and public sentiment is going to make life enjoyable for citizens, whether it’s a relatively small government controlling 30% of resources or a large one controlling 50%. As Alexander Pope wrote, “for forms of government let fools contest, that which is best administered is best,” an aphorism that has some truth in it. (But some forms of government may be temporarily well-administered with no institutions to ensure that this is likely to continue, while others may be badly administered with institutions that will help the government correct itself and improve, and Pope could not fit that fact into his simple aphoristic couplet).
Let’s examine Dennis Prager’s claims about socialism making people selfish. Let’s begin with his best claim, and the only one for which he gives any empirical evidence (in his lecture on YouTube that is over an hour long, not in this five minute Prager U video).
He claims that in nations where there is a big social welfare system that takes care of people, charitable giving decreases. He says that Israel and the United States have the highest levels of charitable giving, whereas European nations have low levels of charitable giving. He has some evidence to support this, depending upon which ways you measure charitable giving and contributing to society. Check evidence from the 2006 report from Committed to Effective Giving, or the 2015 Overview of Philanthropy in Europe, and you will see that Americans give a much higher percentage of income to charities. However, the Charities Aid Foundation used Gallup surveys to create a World Giving Index, and by their accounting (measuring things other than counts of monetary contributions to charities), it is New Zealand and Australia that lead the world in charity (which is odd, because they rank rather low on the rankings from the other reports). Canada and Ireland are tied for third place, and that leaves the United States to come in at 5th place (Israel comes in at an unremarkable 36th place). This isn’t necessarily a complete contradiction of Prager. Australia has a notoriously stingy welfare system, like the USA. But, Canada and Ireland don’t. The European Research Network on Philanthropy also offers us some insights into charitable giving in the welfare states of Europe, and they do not mention selfishness of Europeans as a reason for lower financial contributions to charities in Europe.
Prager is making a couple mistakes in his argument. For one, if there is a relationship between the size of the welfare state and the degree of generosity or selflessness in the population, we can’t expect to get at this relationship with a couple anecdotal examples. What we need is more data. Maybe the trend runs the other way, with states offering more welfare producing people who are generally more generous, but for some reason America is exceptional (and maybe Israel is exceptional as well, although Prager seems to be wrong about Israelis contributing significantly more to charities than western Europeans). Also, if we want to measure selfishness and selflessness, surely we need more indicators of selflessness than simply how much money people contribute to charities.
For example, when I visited Tanzania in 1988, I was much relieved to be a in a place where people seemed more laid back and less greedy than what I experienced in Kenya, where I was studying for my semester abroad. In Kenya, people seemed desperate for—and obsessed with—money, and most of my interactions with those Kenyans whom I didn’t know from my home-stay or gatherings with my coreligionists involved people trying to get money from me in some way. Kenyans, at least in Nairobi, seemed very greedy and selfish (or, maybe more desperate and deprived). Tanzanians, in contrast, didn’t seem greedy at all. At the time, Tanzania was a socialist country, and Kenya was not. However, Tanzania was much poorer than Kenya. The Tanzanians I met, who seemed disinterested in whether they could get money from me, and also seemed very poor, would not have been able to show their lack of greediness and selflessness by making large financial contributions to charities. They donated their time to charities, as did many of my Kenyan friends, but Prager’s measure of selflessness only concerns financial contributions, and ignores hours given to helping friends or neighbors, or time given as a volunteer to charities. If we did measure time contributions in addition to financial ones, Americans would again be among the world leaders in selflessness. But, my point here is that Prager would need a better measure of selflessness than simply going with financial contributions to charities.
Prager is also ignoring the other possible predictive conditions that would shape charitable giving. I would guess the largest predictor of selflessness or charitable giving at any particular time would be the degree of selflessness or charitable giving at an earlier time. That is, there would be habits of selflessness and generosity (or habits of selfishness) that would tend to persist. Prager would then want to show that over time, as nations establish general welfare systems (as they become more socialist), those habits of giving would diminish, whereas in societies that do not increase their social safety nets, charitable giving (and selflessness) would increase, remain stable, or at least diminish at a slower rate. I would guess that the wealth of a nation would also determine how much money people give. As in my example of Tanzania, the selfless people I met there were trying to get by and survive, and they lacked surplus to hand out. And yet, it seemed to me that Tanzania’s leader Julius Nyerere, with his emphasis on local concepts of harambee (let’s all pull together and cooperate through self-help) and ujama (equality and collectivity) informing his indigenous form of Christian African socialism, had done much to make Tanzania's society less selfish than Kenya’s capitalist development was doing. The point is, Americans are among the wealthiest people in the world, so Americans have more wealth and income beyond what they need to survive, so that fact must certainly have something to do with charitable giving in the USA. Americans are also more religious than Europeans. Religiosity in the USA does predict charitable giving (and several more desirable civic attributes), and in fact Americans give a lot of their charitable contributions (about 29% to 31%) to religious charities and their religious congregations. Americans also give a lot to educational institutions and scholarships (about 15%), which might be less necessary in a society where public expenditure covers the costs of education. Americans also give about 10% of charitable giving to health, which again would be less necessary in societies where health care costs are covered by state spending.
So, it’s not just selfishness, as Prager claims, that might make people give less to charities. Other things that could decrease charitable giving are welfare states supplying people with their needs so that fewer people were desperate for charitable help. Perhaps a welfare state that is generous also reduces poverty and thus removes many of the social pathologies that require charitable organizations to help people. The relative wealth of a society might also influence charitable giving. State support for the costs of education also should influence charitable giving. The religious habits of people would also influence charitable giving if contributions to religions are included in the category of charitable giving. Prager ignores all this, and assumes that charitable giving is a good and sufficient way to measure selflessness or selfishness.
There are other ways to look at selfishness and selflessness. I have referred above to the World Giving Index, which tries to measure something that seems close to “selflessness” in what they call “giving” in their report. In that study the more capitalist societies of Australia, Switzerland, and the USA are rated near the top, but so are the more socialist societies of Canada, Germany, Denmark, Iceland, and the Netherlands, which all have generous welfare states; they all rank in the top 20 of over 140 nations. Hong Kong (ranked 18th), has a miserly welfare system, but seems giving-oriented. I don’t see any clear pattern of a relationship between “giving” and the level of welfare, especially if we control for religiosity and median personal wealth and income. There is also another way to measure “selfishness” that might be more accurate than low levels of charitable giving. I’m thinking of the World Values survey, and the axis of “self-expression values” versus “survival values”. The “survival values” are “linked with a relatively ethnocentric outlook and low levels of trust and tolerance.” In my interpretation of high-survival-orientation societies, those are places where people feel insecure, so they behave in ways that appear more selfish because they are mentally oriented toward avoiding poverty or starvation or insecurity. Survival values, however, correlate pretty well with income and wealth, so that poorer nations are more likely to have high levels of survival-orientation. Middle-income nations with high survival orientation are few, but Morocco, Lebanon, Armenia, and Georgia, are among the more prosperous places with high levels of survival orientation, or selfishness (if “survival orientation" is closely related to "selfishness”). None of those places is known for its generous welfare system. The lowest levels of survival orientation are Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and New Zealand. Some of those countries also rate pretty high in the world giving index, which makes sense if we think lack of selfishness (low survival-orientation) ought to relate to high selflessness (high levels of giving). This isn’t supporting Prager’s claim about welfare states making people selfish and less selfless; it’s contradicting it. To be fair to Prager, he could point out that China is one of the places on the planet with the lowest levels of giving (ranking 147th), and it pretends it is a socialist country. Vietnam is also a place ruled by a dictatorship that pretends it is socialist, and they are ranked 138th, also very low. Kenya and Tanzania, which seemed like societies with a big contrast in greed and selfishness when I was there in 1988, are ranked at the about the same level of giving (Kenya at 29th and Tanzania at 33rd) and survival orientation.
All this is to say, it’s difficult to define and measure selfishness and selflessness in a society, but when we do, it’s difficult to find a strong relationship, or really any relationship, between how much socialism exists in a society and how selfish or selfless the people of that society are. Simply pointing out that America is, by many measures, among the the most generous and selfless societies in the world, and then using that to claim that socialism makes people selfish because places with more socialism than the USA don’t have their populations donating as much to charities, doesn’t really win the argument, if you are trying to persuade people capable of critical thinking.
That’s really Prager’s only argument based on facts or empirical evidence. Every other point he makes in the five-minute Prager U video, and in the longer YouTube video of his lecture at the University of Wyoming, are based on claims he makes without offering evidence. He does say some things about the value of religion or the ways to achieve happiness that make some sense and have empirical support (although he doesn’t offer references to the empirical support I happen to know exist for this claims on those topics).
But it is interesting question whether the introduction of a generous social welfare system (which Prager calls “socialism”) would tend to make people less interested in helping others and more interested what advantages they could get from any situation (“selfishness”). I’ve visited and briefly lived in countries that claimed that they were socialist (the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, China a few times between 1992 and 2012, Tanzania in 1988, and others ruled by democratic socialist parties (various western European countries when they were ruled by social democrats or socialist parties). I never noticed any particular correlation to selfishness or selflessness. I met horribly selfish and greedy people in the Soviet Union, but I also met people who seemed totally unconcerned with selfish advantages, who seemed to only want to share and give and have fun together. The less selfish people seemed to come from remote places: Irkutsk, Arkhangelsk, Tblisi, or come from the class of the intelligentsia; the most selfish people seemed to come from Moscow or what is now St. Petersburg, so maybe the selfish/selfless thing is influenced by urbanization or city size or education level? My impression of Scandinavian societies and my friends from those countries is that they are not at all materialistic or selfish in the sense that Prager uses the term “selfish”. They seem very disinterested in money and very interested in culture, having good moments with family or friends, and enjoying life with others.
How would we test his claim that increasing welfare benefits will increase selfishness? We would want a good measure of general selflessness and selfishness. Contributions to charitable causes as a percentage of disposable income would be one indicator (of several). Using a ratio of "charitable contributions" to "disposable income" (money not necessary for covering basic needs like housing and food) would help us control for the the way wealth and incomes could influence giving. We would also want to measure giving of time to official charities (volunteering). I think we would also want to look at time use studies and see how much time spent socializing with friends and neighbors, or helping out family members, and compare that to the amount of time people used to earn money or devoted to spending their money. We would have to adjust for incomes there, as poorer people in poorer countries would be expected to spend more time earning money just to make ends meet. But, all else being equal, one sign of selfishness would be a preference for earning and spending money on one’s self compared to activities that are more social and less oriented toward accumulating more wealth. Among religious people in two societies, after controlling for degree of religious belief and practice, we could compare how much of their religious time (prayer, social activities with religious congregations) are devoted to praying for others or helping others versus how much was devoted to self-care or merely fun activities or personal spiritual growth that isn’t involved in helping others. These would all help us measure selflessness and selfishness.
We would then want to measure trends in these indicators over time, and try to match those to changes in the generosity of the welfare system. We would also want to do some cross-national comparisons, but we would need to control for other things that influence selfishness and selflessness, and we would certainly want to to do at least two measures separated by some significant time, so that we could control for cultural traditions. That is, it would be more important to compare trends in indicators of selfishness and selflessness as those trends correlate to welfare effort or percentage of the economy in government control; it would not be sufficient to just observe a point-in-time comparison. We would also want to control for relative need. There is greater need for charitable giving in societies with more people in poverty or destitution, and that matching of “selflessness” to a society's need for “selflessness” is certainly important.
Another possibility to test Prager’s claim is to create psychological experiments. We could put people into situations in a psychology lab where they would do role-plays or simulations, and let some of them have a more “capitalist” situation and others have a more “socialist” system and then see whether those experiences make people more “selfish” or “selfless” in some sort of game or simulation. This sounds a little like Paul Piff’s experiments, and his results would disappoint Prager.
We could also compare people in the American states with more socialism, such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, California, Oregon, and Connecticut with those states having the least socialism, such as Wyoming, Texas, Mississippi, or Alabama. After controlling for religiosity and disposable income, are people in the least socialist states more generous and selfless than those in the more socialist states?
I could anticipate that someone who supports Prager’s view might claim that it is a more valuable situation for humans to live in societies where some people suffer deprivation and misery, so that people can exercise private virtue and volunteer their time and sacrifice their income and wealth to help the unfortunate persons. In societies where people collectively ensure that no people are suffering from extreme deprivation or poverty though taxes and public spending, people would lose their chances to practice virtue by taking care of the poor. Another way to express that perspective is that it is necessary to make other people suffer deprivation so that wealthy persons can get spiritual benefits by being moral and helping others. So, it’s not enough to have a system where we can accumulate more wealth and have higher incomes and compare ourselves to others who are very poor and materially insecure, we also need this sort of system so that we can get spiritual benefits by the opportunities it gives wealthier people to help poorer people. Expressed that way, I’m not sure the position is defensible. There are other ways to cultivate our virtue and moral improvement that don’t require our society to produce many people damaged by poverty and deprivation.
Prager presents his thesis as “Whatever its intentions, socialism produces far more selfish individuals and a far more selfish society than a free-market economy does.”, but he never really gives any evidence that this is so. He does this with other claims as well. In his longer lecture at the University of Wyoming, he says that leftists are bothered by inequality, and care more about equality than freedom. While it's true that leftists are concerned about great inequality for a variety of reasons, I don't think many on the left are bother by inequality in itself; they tend to be concerned about gross inequality where some people have so much wealth and power that they can shape cultural narratives, unduly influence the government, and make it more difficult for anyone else to become wealthy. Inequality also is of greater concern when some people are desperately poor. I think most leftists would worry less about inequality in a society where there was no poverty, homelessness, or hunger. However, where those things exist and some people amass fortunes of millions or billions, that does raise concern. In actual surveys of moral values, there really isn't any difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to valuing liberty and freedom. Research in the field of Moral Foundations suggests that liberals do tend to put more value on fairness, relative to valuing purity, obedience, and loyalty. So, Prager happens to be right if he would merely claim that the left cares more about fairness and equality, relative to other moral values. But, no, he claims that the left hates inequality, and leaves it at that, which isn't a claim that could be supported with any evidence I've ever seen.
In what he says is a point that illustrates his claim that socialism makes people selfish, he gives an example of an audience of young people reacting with enthusiastic joy when Barack Obama told them that they would have health insurance coverage on their parents’ health insurance plans up to their 26th birthday. Prager suggests that the students were happy that they could “remain dependent on [their] parents” and he is saying that being happy about being dependent on others is an indicator of selfishness. There are alternative explanations to why young adults felt glad to know that they would be eligible to have health insurance coverage under their parents’ policies. For example, the threat of not having health insurance, and facing potential financial ruin early in their adult lives if they became sick or seriously injured, might have caused them lots of anxiety, and knowing that this insecurity would be removed might have given them a sense of relief and joy. In fact, that seems like a more plausible explanation than Prager’s for a crowd’s enthusiastic response to learning about the Affordable Care Act’s provision that young adults would be covered under their parents’ insurance.
He claims that “socialism destroys” the aspiration of becoming a “mature adult” and “being independent of Mom and Dad”. Well, that is a claim, but he offers no evidence based on surveys of young people and their aspirations. Also, I do not know that he is correct that “independence from Mom and Dad” was an aspiration throughout “all of Western history” as he claims. I believe studies by economic historians reveal that in peasant societies of medieval Europe, multi-generational households (adult children sharing homes with their parents) were common. Even just looking in America, “throughout the 19th century, most Americans lived in a multigenerational household.” Also, “multi-generational families were usually formed when one child remained in the parental home after reaching adulthood to work on the family farm or business with the anticipation of eventually inheriting.” So, he’s wrong on the facts there, about more young adults living with their parents being something that correlates to the size of the welfare system or the degree of socialism in the society.
Also, some cultures just value multi-generational households and have no assumptions that children demonstrate their independence or self-reliance by moving out of their parents’ homes. In Asian and Mexican cultures there is more likely to be an assumption that families stay together in multi-generational households, and this is even the ideal in traditional Chinese culture. One trend in America is the growing percentage of our population with Mexican or Latin American heritage, and other is the significant increase in our Asian-American population. These demographic changes could partly explain the increase in adult children living at home, so a cultural explanation, rather than a relationship to welfare system efforts or “socialism” could be part of the trend Prager observes. Finally, the levels of wages for young adults compared to the cost of housing probably plays a role in whether young people move out to live on their own. When young adults can earn high wages and housing costs are relatively low, that ought to decrease the percentage of young adults living with their parents. So, there could be economic factors not directly related to the welfare system that would influence whether young adults live with their parents. Prager is just wrong about history, and probably ignorant about trends in American demographics, and possibly not intelligent enough to think about other alternative explanations to his conjecture that an increase in our welfare state effort is encouraging more young adults to remain in the household of their parents. In his Wyoming lecture he describes such young people as living in the basement, playing video games. Again, he offers no evidence of how widespread that situation is. What percentage of persons between the ages of 18 and 29 who live with their parents are employed? What is the unemployment rate of persons aged 18-29? What are the median and average wages of persons in that demographic? What are the costs of purchasing a home or renting an apartment? All these things need to be known before we can say much about Prager’s claim that “socialism destroys” the aspiration of becoming a “mature adult,” and yet Prager never mentions any of these things.
He claims that “taking care of yourself” is not a virtue in the welfare state. Again, this is something that could be measured. There were major changes to our American welfare system in the late 1960s with the introduction of Medicaid and Medicare and the War on Poverty and Great Society policies of the Johnston administration and the so-called “liberal consensus” in government from the 1960s through to the Reagan administration in 1981. During that time there was a study of subjective labor force commitment between 1973 and 1985, (conducted by Jon Lorence at the University of Houston), and no decrease in work ethic appeared for men, while women’s commitment to working increased. That contradicts Prager. In 1996 another change to the welfare system reduced benefits and encouraged more people who had been receiving welfare benefits to enter the workforce. The push to get people rapidly into the workforce may have been partly influenced by the randomized controlled trials of various approaches to getting persons with low incomes into the workforce (the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies). I am unaware of any studies of trends in work ethic or strength of endorsements of the importance of “taking care of yourself” that might have been done around the welfare reforms of the mid-1990s or in the years that followed, but if we had such studies, that would help us see if there is any confirmation for Prager’s conjecture about changes in desires for self-reliance when there is a more generous welfare state. One problem threatening any such study is that necessity may make a a stronger work ethic, but this stronger work ethic would be shaped by a justification for one’s circumstances and choices, rather than a virtuous choice of a free person.
One goal of the welfare state is to allow workers the freedom and liberty to refuse to take demeaning, dangerous, ill-paying, or unsuitable jobs. If able-bodied working-aged persons have a generous welfare safety net, they can wait and be more selective about the jobs they take, which is a desired result of the welfare state (enhancing the liberty of poor workers). Without a generous welfare system, in what Prager would consider a “more capitalist” situation, poverty and desperation might force people into the workforce where they would take any job they could find, and employers would have less pressure to raise wages, improve working conditions, or otherwise attract workers. In such a situation, the actual fact that workers would be forced into jobs by economic necessity might make workers explain their situation with a narrative about the importance of work, telling themselves that they were being virtuous by doing what they had to do. If workers had a choice between perishing or taking a horrible job, they would form an explanation of their behavior that made their decision to survive (take the horrible job) a thing to be proud of, rather than a depressing aspect of their life, and a measure of their “work ethic” or commitment to self-reliance would probably show higher “self-reliance” values. In such situations, the enhanced work ethic Prager would undoubtedly praise might be better explained as a coping mechanism used by poor persons to create a positive narrative about their experience of being forced into unpleasant jobs. Does the virtue of valuing self-reliance and holding a strong work ethic change if society gives a non-disabled working-aged person opportunities to just get along in life dependent on the welfare state or family wealth? Surely virtue involves persons with freedom choosing to hold good values and act virtuously. If persons are forced to act virtuously because the alternative is starvation, how have they exhibited virtue rather than self-preservation? This sort of philosophical consideration of morality is seemingly outside Prager’s thinking. A world where God remains concealed, evidently preferring to allow disbelief and atheism as rational beliefs, seems to some moral philosophers to be a universe in which freedom and autonomy in choosing virtue or evil must be of very high importance. This view could be used to argue the case that socialism allows poor persons the dignity and virtue of consciously exercising their liberty to work and be self-reliant rather than adopting those values to justify the actions they are forced by necessity to take.
Prager says that in societies that are more socialist, because the state takes care of people, people become more preoccupied with what they can get from the state and others, and thus, more self-centered. There is a logical problem here. In a society where the state does not take care of people, how could people be preoccupied with how much they would get from the state? They might be concerned with the lack of help they received from the state, and become preoccupied with demanding the state step up to help them, but they would not be asking questions about how much the state will be giving them because in this situation the state gives them nothing. In a situation where you have a house, you will give some thought to the condition of your house; in a situation where you are homeless, you will not have the opportunity to consider the condition of your house, because you have no house. Prager’s scenario makes no sense; of course people are more preoccupied with what they get when they get something. And, also, has there ever been a government that didn’t give anything to its people? What sort of government would that be? Governments are given power by people who respect the government, and governments get the respect from the people either by giving them stuff or threatening them. Texts from 4400 years ago extol the virtues of governments that protected poor people and provided security for widows and orphans, so governments have been in the business of taking care of poor people for quite a long time. Even the most primitive governments provide services such as basic infrastructure, or systems of justice to prevent blood feuds, or protection from enslavement by marauders, or theft by bandits. Are these types of services, which are universal in all civilized governments, in some qualitative way different from providing food assistance or income support in times of crop failure or natural disaster, or in times of unemployment? Governments always give people some things, and people interested in politics are always preoccupied in what they are getting from the government, and whether the government is efficiently providing services and benefits to citizens, as opposed to extorting wealth to give to the ruling class or wasting public resources in the enrichment of inefficient and unresponsive government employees and their families.
Prager says people become selfish when they are able to ask questions such as, “how many days can I call in sick and still get paid?” Or “will the government pay for my education?” Are people are not made selfish when they ask questions about “will the government protect me from dishonest merchants and unfair money-lenders” or “will the government keep me safe from violent enemies?” All of these are examples of people asking about what help or benefits they receive from others, and I do not see how it is logically possible that one type of question or preoccupation is more likely to make people selfish than another. Governments always demand conformity to laws and contributions of wealth to support government work, and people always are interested in what they get in return for these limits placed on their liberty and the contributions they must make.
Prager than says it’s destructive and a cause of selfishness when people see certain aspects of public support as rights to which they are entitled. Again, there is no evidence Prager cares to show us (and probably no evidence in existence) showing that selflessness or selfishness correspond to perceptions that everyone has a right to public provision of health care or education or the guarantees of living in dignity with adequate housing and food as described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He is just making a conjecture, claiming it is true, and then saying it supports his idea that socialism makes people selfish. This is not evidence.
Prager suggests that gratitude is an important character trait that makes us happy, and also makes us good citizens. He’s probably right about that, and I know of good evidence to support this claim he makes. But, he then says that when people see things like public provision of health care or education as a right or entitlement, they will tend to lose their feelings of gratitude. In other words, if I believe that during times of sickness or poverty, when the public has a duty to help me with health care or food and rental assistance to prevent me from starving or becoming homeless or dying from an untreated illness, I will not be grateful to the public for giving this support to me. Instead, I will see this as my natural right. I might see it as my right because when I am not poor or sick I will earn money and contribute my fair share of my wealth in taxes to the public welfare, or I might see it as everyone's right. And this perception of having an entitlement to receive help when in need would make us selfish? Again, this is an interesting conjecture. Do people in countries with big welfare expenditure that are more socialistic feel a lack of gratitude for the benefits they receive from the state? We could survey people in England to measure whether they feel gratitude for the health care they receive from the National Health Service, or we could see if Danish people who live in public housing are thankful that they have subsidized affordable housing, or whether French people are grateful for the free educations they receive. Do any of them feel thankful that they don’t have to live in America where they would pay out of pocket for more of these things, but enjoy relatively lower taxes? Or, are they envious of Americans for our ability to either afford or not afford to attend college, and get medical care when we need it? I wonder what we would find, but I would be surprised if we did find that people in such generous welfare states were in general lacking in the feelings of gratitude. Gratitude is a fairly basic human emotion, and I think our ability to feel it or express it would have more to do with psychological situations and personality traits, and very little to do with our attitude toward the welfare benefits we might expect from the socialist aspects of our society.
Prager closes his short Prager U video and his lecture at the University of Wyoming with a restatement of his thesis, declaring, as if he has proved his claim, that “teaching people to work hard and take care of themselves and others - and that they should earn what they receive, produces less selfish, not more selfish, people”. He really has no evidence to show that this is so, and he certainly has no evidence to show that societies that have more capitalism do teach people to work hard and take care of themselves any more than societies that have more socialism.
Prager could be right. We don’t really have evidence to make a call on whether he is right or wrong. There is some empirical evidence bearing on his claim, and it doesn’t really support what he is claiming, but it isn’t definitive proof that he is wrong. The problem we have is that many people think that Prager offers a convincing argument for his case. They think he provides “lots of evidence” that he is right, when in fact he provides almost no evidence, and the evidence he does provide is very weak. Most of his argument is based on restating his claim as facts, and confusing assumptions he has about how the world works with his claims about how the world works.
Prager has counterparts on the left, but they often appear more serious than he, and they usually are deeper thinkers, but that’s easy. It would be difficult to be a more shallow thinker than Prager. For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy (“BHL”), the French philosopher has some unfair things to say about conservatives. In his Left in Dark Times (2007) I think BHL offers a very helpful and useful illustration of how people who identify themselves as “leftists” see themselves, but he then contrasts such leftist persons with the “scum” (he quotes Sartre in this characterization of conservatives) who are complacent and feel that they owe nothing to anyone. This unfair mischaracterization of persons who aren’t in BHL’s ideological tribe is pretty much what I think Prager does in his attacks on the left.
Here is the passage from Left in Dark Times to illustrate my point:
A BRIEF WORD about this indefensible idea of guilt for crimes one has not committed.
On this point too. humanity splits down the middle. On one side are those who remain seated, satisfied, sure of themselves and of their place in the world; who don’t question anything, and especially not the legitimacy of being what they are; who, as a consequence, are only very rarely bothered by the notion that they might be guilty of anything—and certainly not for someone else's crimes. These are exactly the people Sartre described as “scum.”
On the other side are those who remember Primo Levi’s “shame at being a man,” who think there is something shameful, or at least humbling, in the human condition. I cannot—these people think—help but be a little uncomfortable being who I am, since I can only be that way at the expense of some other person. I’ve probably done nothing wrong; I may not be guilty of anything; I am well-deserving, virtuous, generous, attentive to other people, a good activist, a good citizen; but I live with the unpleasant, inevitable thought that my position, my possessions, my prosperity, the air I breathe, my confidence, my dreams, my peaceful sleep have been—just a little bit—taken from someone else.
Sartre wrote about the difference between the “scum” (locked into what he is, frozen in his place and being, justified) and the non-scum (Dostoyevsky’s shy, sweet man; the man who worries about his existence, concerned, nauseated; who cannot escape the feeling that he takes up too much room in this world, and whose excess room inspires him not to pride but to remorse).
Similarly, Emmanuel Levinas’s entire philosophy revolves around the distinction between the moral man (indebted to the world, a hostage to it, obliged to answer for its disorders and injustices, even when he has not caused them) and the immoral man (who, claiming to have “done nothing,” simply feels innocent, wanting nothing of this “heteronomy,” this “substitution,” which seems to him a contradiction in terms, absurd, outrageous).
We do see injustice. We do see signs of what the ancients called the unequal division of Goods and Evils. Some people, looking at this fact, say: “Let it be, let it play itself out, it will work out fine in the end.” And other people answer, reflexively, before even thinking too much about it: “Conflict… will never resolve itself peacefully ... and of course that conflict can come in many forms.... You can emphasize the political, the social, or other.... You can—and this is the great superiority of Anglo-Saxon law—wish for conflicts to end not in rupture but in truce.... You can, you must, consider that it’s the honorable position of politics to create, wherever radicalism, and therefore a rupture, looms, provisory, modest, revisable solutions. . . . What’s not possible is changing a society without conflict.... You can’t accept that this conflict-ridden structure be finessed, since that would be antisocial.... and being aware of this antisociality, recognizing the dissimilarities among humans, betting on this discord which is our destiny and which can be transformed into our opportunity: that, finally, is a good definition of the Left….”
