The Professionals and the Collective

THE PROFESSIONALS AND THE COLLECTIVE

It is a fact that one can rapidly, after a phase of indoctrination, become enslaved to a profession, to the point of having one’s opinions on any subject become self-serving, hence unreliable for the collective. This is the bone the Greeks had to pick with professionals.

One of my first jobs was for a Wall Street firm. After I’d been employed for a few months, the managing director called us up and told us that we needed to contribute to a few politicians’ campaigns, with a “recommended” payment of a certain proportion of our income. These politicians were said to be “good.” By “good” was meant good for their business of investment banking, as these politicians would help with legislation that would protect their business. Had I done that, I would no longer have been eligible ethically to voice a political opinion “for the sake of the public.”

In a story well argued throughout the centuries, Demades the Athenian condemned a man who traded in funeral goods on the grounds that he could only derive profits by the death of the great many people. Montaigne, rephrasing the argument made by Seneca in his De beneficiis, argued that we would then be obligated to condemn every single professional. According to him, the merchant only thrives by the debauchery of youth, the farmer by the dearness of grain, the architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and officers of justice by the suits and contentions of men. A physician takes no pleasure in the health of even his friends, a soldier does not wish for the peace of his country, etc. And, even worse, should we go into people’s inner and private thoughts and motivations, we would see that their wishes and hopes are almost invariably at someone else’s expense.

But Montaigne and Seneca were a bit too indulgent toward self-interest and missed something quite central. They clearly got the point that economic life does not necessarily depend on altruistic motives, and that the aggregate works differently from the individual. Remarkably, Seneca was born about eighteen centuries before Adam Smith, and Montaigne about three, so we should be quite impressed with their thinking while retaining a certain abhorrence of the fundamental dishonesty of men. We have known since Adam Smith that the collective does not require the benevolence of individuals, as self-interest can be the driver of growth. But all this does not make people less unreliable in their personal opinions about the collective. For they are involving the skin of others, so to speak.

What Montaigne and Seneca missed, in addition to the notion of skin in the game, was that one can draw the line with public affairs. They missed the agency problem—although the problem was known heuristically (Hammurabi, golden rules), it was not part of their consciousness.

The point isn’t that making a living in a profession is inherently bad; rather, it’s that such a person becomes automatically suspect when dealing with public affairs, matters that involve others. The definition of the free man, according to Aristotle, is one who is free with his opinions—as a side effect of being free with his time.

Freedom in this sense is only a matter of sincerity in political opinions.

The Greeks saw the world in three professions. The banausikai technai, the artisans; the craft of war, polemike techne; and that of farming, georgia. The last two professions, war and farming, were worthy of a gentleman—mainly because they were not self-serving and were free of conflicts of interest with the collective. But the Athenians despised the banausoi, the artisans who worked for a living in dark rooms making objects—generally sitting down. For Xenophon, such crafts degraded the craftsmen’s bodily strength, softened his spirit, and left him no time for his friends and city. The illiberal arts confine one to the workshop and narrow one’s interests to his own welfare; the crafts of war and farming give one a wider scope so that he can attend to his friends and city. To Xenophon, farming is the mother and nurse of the other technai. (The ancients did not have corporations; if Xenophon were alive today he would transfer his distrust from artisans to corporate employees.)

There are Arabic and Hebrew sayings, Yad el hurr mizan / Yad ben horin moznayim—“the hand of the free is a scale.” It is just that the definition of the free is not well understood: he is free who owns his own opinion.

For Metternich, humanity started at the rank of baron; for Aristotle, as well as, though in a separate form, the English up until the twentieth century, it started at the rank of idle freeman, unpreoccupied with work. It never meant not working; it just meant not deriving your personal and emotional identity from your work, and viewing work as something optional, more like a hobby. In a way your profession does not identify you so much as other attributes, here your birth (but it could be something else). This is the f*** you money that allowed Thales of Miletus to gauge his own sincerity. For the Spartans, it was all about courage. For Fat Tony, humanity started at the level of “self-ownership.”

Now self-ownership for our horizontal friend was vastly more democratic than for his thinking predecessors. It simply meant being the owner of your opinion. And it has nothing to do with wealth, birth, intelligence, looks, shoe size, rather with personal courage.

In other words, for Fat Tony, it was a very, very specific definition of a free person: someone who cannot be squeezed into doing something he would otherwise never do.

Consider this leap in sophistication from Athens to Brooklyn: if for the Greeks, only he who is free with his time is free with his opinion, for our horizontal friend and advisor, only he who has courage is free with his opinion. Sissies are born, not made. They stay sissies no matter how much independence you give them, no matter how rich they get.

Another facet of the difference between abstract modernistic nation-states and local government. In an antique city-state, or a modern municipality, shame is the penalty for the violation of ethics—making things more symmetric. Banishment and exile, or, worse, ostracism were severe penalties—people did not move around voluntarily and considered up-rooting a horrible calamity. In larger organisms like the mega holy nation-state, with a smaller role for face-to-face encounters, and social roots, shame ceases to fulfill its duty of disciplinarian. We need to reestablish it.

And aside from shame, there is friendship, socialization in a certain milieu, being part of a group of people that have diverging interests from the collective. Cleon, the hero of the Peloponnesian War, advocated the public renouncement of friends upon taking up public affairs—he paid for it with some revilement by historians.

A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars). This would get priestly people into office.

Just as Cleon was reviled, in the modern world, there seems to be an inverse agency problem for those who do the right thing: you pay for your service to the public with smear campaigns and harassment. The activist and advocate Ralph Nader suffered numerous smear campaigns as the auto industry went after him.