Since I seem to be grumpy these days (no doubt because of the huge pile of grading before me and the illness I recently endured) it seems like a good time to continue exploring pet peeves as a way of striving to externalize and objectify internal aggressions. With respect to American ideology, one of the claims that drives me into endless fits is the thesis that people are primarily motivated by wealth incentives. Here the thesis runs that capitalism is the most natural and effective economic system because humans, by nature, lack motivation if not given strong economic incentives to work and produce.
I am sure my good friend Jerry the Anthropologist can provide all sorts of ethnographic examples of just how this essentialist thesis is plainly false. From the documentaries I’ve watched– and here I’m sure Jerry will beat me over the head as a dolt for getting some of my anthropology from television documentaries –I’m particularly partial to a number of South American tribes that strike me as being far more motivated by finding ways to amuse themselves and form strong community than by accumulation. These tribes– the few I’ve bothered to investigate at all, at any rate –strike me as playful and imaginative, without being concerned by accumulation.
read on!
However, within the context of our own society, this thesis strikes me as being plainly false as well. On the one hand, the thesis that we are motivated primarily by economic concerns is quickly conflated, in American ideology, with the thesis that we are primarily motivated by the desire to increase our wealth and that without this possibility we would no longer work hard. Setting aside the question of why “working hard” is treated as the ultimate life value anyway, it seems to me that this thesis is deeply mistaken. While it is no doubt true that there are souls out there, like Nicholas Cage’s character in The Family Man, that are motivated by the desire to always increase their wealth, this strikes me as a motive that is absent in the vast majority of us lesser mortals. For most of us work is seen as a necessity of life that we must do in order to make ends meet. For the vast majority of Americans, incentivized pay based on performance is not even on the table. Rather, the benefits and raises we do get are annual price of living adjustments that are not directly correlated with our performance in any meaningful way.
Yet, nonetheless, many of us continue to work hard. If, however, we continue to work hard despite the fact that this performance isn’t meaningfully connected to wage increases or becoming a millionaire, perhaps this has more to do with working among a community of people that we see on a day to day basis rather than with monetary gain. That is, if I slouch on the job I very quickly earn the ire of my comrades, diminishing my own possibilities of happiness. In other words, performance here is tied to human relationships, not to incentivized pay (though we’re certainly happy when we are rewarded for that work).
The second pillar of this ideology is that incentivized pay is responsible for all innovation within our society. Never has a greater pile of horseshit been so widely articulated and believed. As an academic, my motive for writing articles, books, and innovating in the classroom has nothing to do with the financial benefits I receive from these activities. I’ll never forget the shock and surprise in my father’s voice when I told him that I don’t get paid at all for the articles I write or the conferences where I present, and that the royalties I receive for my book are a pittance. Having observed me working tirelessly doing this sort of research and writing, often driving myself to the point of exhaustion and illness, he simply couldn’t understand what motivated me. The motive here lies outside of economic incentives. On the one hand it is simply an obsession with certain problems and questions. On the other hand it is a desire to understand the lunacy of this universe we live in. Finally, to be honest, it is a desire for prestige or recognition. These motives, I think, are far more intoxicating than wealth. Indeed, it seems to me that wealth only becomes an intoxicating motive when one experiences their work as otherwise lacking satisfaction.
I do not think this sort of motivation for innovation is restricted to the domain of academia. Most research scientists are paid very little for the work they do. In this respect, they are deeply exploited by the system of capital that expropriates their intellectual labor– a labor that properly belongs to the common, not to any corporation, by virtue of only being possible based on the common –without giving them much in the way of compensation for that labor at all. Growing up I recall my horror and outrage at discovering how my father’s pharmaceutical company would get private patent rights to new drugs and procedures that were the result of publicly funded research. No, like the academic, the research scientist is by and large motivated by a burning desire to solve certain puzzles, to figure out how that DNA works, to create that new technology like a child building a fort just because he or she can, and by the desire for prestige. The case is similar with artists, musicians, novelists, etc. Observing the very young child it is difficult to escape the impression– and perhaps here I suffer from an essentialist view of human beings –that by nature we are tinkerers. Children seem to have an innate facility with buttons, levers, blocks, etc., and seem to take an endless delight in building and creating. As Bergson observed during the last century, we are no so much homo rationalis as we are homo fabricans. This delight in fabricating, discovering, making, inventing strikes me as a far greater motive for innovation than any supposed use our creations might have or any financial benefit we might gain from these inventions or discoveries.
Perhaps, in the end, this American capitalist ideology is reflective of just how pallid and dissatisfying our labor conditions are. As Freud observed in the last century, work is seen as something outside of life, exterior to life, independent of life. We think of life as something that begins where work leaves off. For many of us, our form of labor dooms us to a drudgery that, like the film Groundhog Day, will repeat endlessly with little opportunity for meaning or social recognition. This is all the more the case in our contemporary age since the industrial revolution, where our work lies either in repetitive labor in a factory or being locked in an office under glaring fluorescent lights filled with people infected with bottled up resentment at their grueling ten hour work day. Where work leaves off our leisure, our time of life, is often passive in character, sitting before a glowing television watching idiotic shows, drinking a glass of Wild Turkey and stunning ourselves into a dumb stupidity as we prepare to do it all over again on the next day or the following Monday. And for what? With what hope? We become trapped in our debt and thereby forced to live this horrific existence, our hands never touching the soil to farm or chasing prey to eat. As we’ve migrated to the suburbs we find that we have fewer and fewer meaningful social relationships, and certainly we don’t engage in those marvelous collective dances such as we witness among the South American tribes. Under such conditions, where such a way of life comes to appear natural, the ordinary way of things, it is difficult not to arrive at the conclusion that the only possible thing that might motivate someone would be wealth. Nietzsche was right. We need to create new values.
March 31, 2009 at 7:20 pm
I will not beat you over the head for watching documentaries; I watch documentaries too, and sometimes I even both enjoy them and learn stuff from them. I’m just leary of the History Channel.
March 31, 2009 at 8:34 pm
There’s a huge difference between someone talking about a “selfish-gene” (if this is the word–not a big fan of Dawkins here), a very real and pressing biological predisposition toward self-preservation, and someone saying that people are motivated by profit incentives only, right? At least potentially.
These two concepts have been endlessly obscured and blurred into one by capitalist ideology, but as a realist I think it’s important to get at the biological reality here, if there is one–to what extent can you expect taking away profit incentives and modes of production from private ownership (which I endorse) to solve problems resulting from the drive toward self-preservation, sometimes even at the expensive of “others” or the “collective”?
Is it even possible to talk about this from either side of the divide without falling into essentialism? Not sure.
March 31, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Speaking to profits and the university: my last job was working in development for a major biomedical research university, and while you’re right that the base salaries weren’t high, the benefits of publishing or beating out the competition when it came to cutting edge research were *huge* in terms of careerism and profit.
I watched people with families who were happily earning $80,000 a year plugging away at basic science research suddenly get pulled in by big biotech for seven figures, or offered book deals by commercial (rather than academic) publishing houses, and then I’d watch their “research” devolve into nonsense or a secondary pursuit while the TV appearances became more and more frequent.
I have less experience with humanities, but I’ve seen quite a few people making all kinds of money outside of the university press for their work, in every university I’ve attended or worked for. I do know there are tons of professors whose jobs are entirely thankless and woefully underfunded, so yes, those are people for whom the profit motive is not a huge factor in their work. But there is a lot of pressure put on professors to perform and get published, and I think it’s worth considering that there is a variety of experiences within academia.
March 31, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Right, in many respects I think this is my point. First, with respect to Dawkins’ selfish gene, the argument doesn’t work here because, for Dawkins, selection works at the level of genes, not at the level of organisms or phenotypes. For Dawkins the aim is not for organisms to reproduce themselves and proliferate, but for genes to reproduce themselves and proliferate. Paradoxically, genes use organisms for their own ends, and then, of course, there’s the whole idea of the extended genotype where these relations and processes of selection aren’t restricted to the boundaries of organisms (i.e., gene networks can jump across the confines of organisms or bodies).
All of that aside (and I have problems with Dawkins as well that I won’t get into here), the sleight of hand with the particular ideology I outline in this post lies in conflating self-preservation with the thesis that people are primarily motivated by profit incentives. Profit incentives are one way in which beings such as ourselves can be motivated. In other words, there are a variety of forms this drive to survive can be met. My thesis would be that the money incentive is not the only way nor even historically the most predominant way in which this drive has been met and that the myth of the hard working capitalist “savage” is just that, a myth not reflective of other forms of “economy”, how they are organized, and what has motivated human bodies within these forms of economy. Here I think my observations about upsetting coworkers is particularly salient with respect to incentivization. There we find a motive that is entirely non-economic in nature but which is nonetheless extremely compelling to those within its grip.
I certainly have no desire to ignore or sidestep biology, though I do think that there are significant problems with biological essentialism where genes are seen as one-to-one codings for particular traits and characteristics. This is the reason that disciplines such as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are so suspect. Here it’s worth noting that my criticisms of biological essentialism and sociobiology arise not from a culturalist critique of biology, but rather arise from within biology itself. The developmental systems theorists, I think, have convincingly shown that the idea of genes as a blueprint or algorithm coding for innate phenotypal traits significantly misconstrues the processes by which development occurs in organisms (incidentally, this is why great caution should be taken with respect to Dennett’s characterization of genetic biology).
I don’t see how anything I suggested in this post implies that there are not a great variety of experiences within academia. If anything, this post was arguing against such generalizing tendencies. The point in referencing academia was that here we have numerous examples (and I’m inclined to think what you point to is statistically the exception rather than the rule) where people work hard and innovate, but on the basis of very different motives. Such an observation undermines the necessitarian claim that the money incentive is predominant in motivating people to work hard or innovate.
March 31, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Great points. I’ve often cited phenotypic plasticity when explaining to biological essentialists why their position is insufficient to explain *everything* without regard to social or environmental factors.
I have difficultly sometimes because I don’t think of capitalism as an overdetermining “system”, but probably more of an assemblage– but then I respect certain thinkers who disagree with this and note that it’s important not to forget about how capitalism shapes certain activities.
For me there’s a certain challenge in keeping open the possibility of academic innovation by acknowledging that there are professors who aren’t primarily motivated by profit incentives without being naive about the ways many individuals (with good intentions) can be seduced by or sucked into the vortex of commercial forces operating all around them.
March 31, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Anodyne,
If you haven’t come across their work yet, I think you’d really enjoy the biological theories of the developmental systems theorists or constructive interactivists (check out, especially, Cycles of Contingency). They argue that environment and genes can’t be separated, and carefully attend to the all levels of the ontogenetic process, ranging from genes to proteins to cells to environmental stimuli and nutrients, etc., showing how one of these factors cannot be seen as overdetermining the others (i.e., genes functioning as a blueprint that unfold immanently and inexorably without these other dimensions rebounding back on them), thereby explaining phenotypic plasticity as resulting in variations of these processes. Likewise, phenotypical regularity is accounted for not based on an inexorably unfolding genetic algorithm, but rather through the constancy of certain environmental conditions coupled to genetic, protein, and cell sequences in developmental systems for members of the same species. Really great stuff. Richard Lewontin’s article “Gene, Organism, and Environment” is particularly eye opening in this connection.
I share your assemblage based view of capitalism and see such network or assemblage based accounts of how social relations are built as ontologically more accurate and, additionally, as a necessary condition for explaining how change is possible. Where capitalism is conceived, as you put it, as an overdetermining system or structure, it becomes all but impossible to explain how any change is possible and we’re drawn into pessimistic forms of theory. I do think, however, that your point about “vortexes” sucking us in despite our own intentions is the key question with respect to how these assemblages function and exert their power.
April 1, 2009 at 5:02 am
Great post. I wish you’d write more about politics and society just because it’s relevant emotionally and practically (how do I feel about this? what do I do now?), not for any ontological prejudice. I hope that doesn’t make me a correlationist.
It’s even questionable how related the profit motive and capitalism are: what’s good for one isn’t necessarily good for the other, as the current economic crises can bear some evidence to (bankers’ search for profits leading into disaster, sketchy commissions on mortgages leading to record foreclosures). I do find that almost everyone I know fantasizes about riches but isn’t driven by desire for money: they spend their time doing their own work, constructing their own meaning of life.
April 1, 2009 at 5:43 am
Ejypt,
Thanks! If you look through the archives you’ll find loads of posts on various political meditations… Especially during late 2007 and early 2008. My more ontological writings are a very recent turn of thought.
April 2, 2009 at 2:20 am
Thanks for the suggestions, will check them out. I’ve talked about dst with people who are involved in those sorts of studies, but never read much independently.