Assholes
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2. Some might consider Trump’s getting President Obama to release the long form of his birth certificate a blow for justice, as Trump does. In that case, one could count this morally motivated act as an exception that proves the rule; Trump doesn’t normally act from a sense of higher cause, even if he did in this one case.
3. Which appears to be some combination of being a “clown” and being an “ass,” but perhaps without the entrenched sense of entitlement that we take as the mark of the asshole.
4. Thus the element of truth in Ben Affleck’s SNL spoof (see www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/countdown-with-keith-olbermann/805561/). On a personal level, Olbermann is also apparently irascible, hypercontrolling, and generally not a team player. He, for instance, refused to share the spotlight on Current TV. See Brian Stelter, “Olbermann in a Clash at New Job,” January 4, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/business/media/olbermann-in-a-clash -at-new-job.html?_r=1.
5. Sam Stein, “Neil Cavuto Called an ‘Asshole’ by AFL-CIO Economist on Live TV,” Huffington Post, June 25, 2010, with video, www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/25/neil-cavuto-called-an-ass_n_626211.html.
6. Thus David Letterman cleverly spoke for the common man (or at least the registered Democrats) in an exchange with O’Reilly over comments made about the Iraq war: “I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling … about sixty percent of what you say is crap.” http://newsbusters.org/media/2006-01-03-CBSLSDL.wmv.
7. A former executive with Fox News’s parent, News Corp., suggests a culture of intimidation. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders.… There are people who turn people in.” Rush Limbaugh, a friend, explains the centrality of Ailes personality: “One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it.… Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him.” Tim Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory,” Rolling Stone, May 25, 2011, www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-roger-ailes-built-the-fox-news-fear-factory-20110525. Unless otherwise noted, the factual assertions about Ailes in the text below are corroborated in detail in this article.
8. Ailes has an elaborate security detail and constant anxiety of personally being subject to an al-Qaeda terrorist attack. One false alarm with a dark-skinned man led him to order a lockdown of the Fox News building. The man was a janitor.
9. Rupert Murdoch, head of Fox’s parent company, News Corp., reportedly says of his extremist politics: “You know Roger is crazy. He really believes that stuff.” Dickinson, “How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory.”
10. Brian Stelter, “Victory Lap for Fox and Hannity,” New York Times, October 9, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/business/media/fox-news-and-hannity-at-the-top-after-15-years.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=ailes&st=cse.
11. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
12. Eric Wilson, “Kanye West, Designer (Yawn),” New York Times, October 5, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/fashion/kanye-west-designer-yawn.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=ericwilson&adxnnlx=1317923369-PMvObE5LYvsSTzJYBKN24A.
13. Jon Pareles, “The Ego Sessions: Will Success Spoil Kanye West,” New York Times, September 5, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/arts/music/05westhtml?ref=kanyewest, offers these lyrics as evidence of West’s self-awareness, even suggesting the distinctive, West-inspired name “starcissism,” for “a pop star’s mixture of self-love, self-promotion, self-absorption and self-awareness.” Pareles wrote before the Paris fashion debacle, when the suggestion was more plausible.
14. It is not easy, after all, living with a profound sense of divine purpose. As West explains, “God chose me. He made a path for me.… I am God’s vessel.” Except that his greatest worry is not letting God down. As he goes on to explain, “But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.” See “Kanye: ‘I Am God’s Vessel,’ ” www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/565894-kanye-i-am-gods-vessel.
15. A particularly stark example is Buddy Rich, whose greatness as a drummer is nearly matched by his rudeness, justified in the name of his own artistic perfection. Observe his rancid eloquence in addressing those not quite up to snuff at www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ssZeOZkWU.
16. It is still important that we feel different about the successful artist such as Gauguin. In “Moral Luck,” Bernard Williams argues that Gauguin’s success in Tahiti substantively mitigates our moral feelings about his having abandoned his family in France for a risky artistic venture. See Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 23–26. Gauguin might thus seem less of an asshole than he would have been had he never made it to Tahiti, or never found inspiration, even if this resulted simply from a stroke of bad luck that reflected nothing about him or his character. But we might also say that he is equally an asshole whether he succeeded or failed. As Thomas Nagel explains, our specifically moral objection to Gauguin might consider only the choices he made when his artistic prospects were uncertain. (“Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24–38. Is this ex ante perspective the right one for assessing someone as an asshole? Or should we also look at who the person actually perchance becomes over time, including any ultimate contribution to human culture? We leave this deep problem unresolved.
17. Carmen M. Reinhardt and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). part 5.
18. Nelson D. Schwartz and Eric Dash, “In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated,” New York Times, October 14, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/business/in-private-conversation-wall-street-is-more-critical-of-protesters.html?_r=1&ref=occupywallstreet. One banker does argue that bankers contribute a lot in taxes. But of course the basic issue is why bankers should have incomes high enough such that they pay a lot in taxes.
19. According to the Bank of England’s Andrew G. Haldane in “The $100 Billion Question,” a lecture available at www.bis.org/review/r100406d.pdf.
20. Former IMF head Simon Johnson and James Kwak argue for breaking up the big banks on these grounds in 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (New York: Pantheon, 2010).
21. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 158.
22. Letter to Fortune, June 16, 2010, http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/15/news/newsmakers/Warren_Buffett_Pledge_Letter.fortune/index.htm.
23. Schwartz and Dash, “In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated.”
24. For present purposes I am assuming that the arguments against taking aggressive measures to stop crises are thin. I offer a more developed defense of that proposition in Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 8.
25. Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 424, describes Blankfein as “whipsawed between cocky and penitent.” Penitence is usually a sign of not being an asshole. If he is an asshole, he’s a half-ass asshole.
26. Suskind, Confidence Men, 425.
27. Robert Nozick, the most famous philosophical libertarian, would defend banker pay not as a just deserts but as a matter of one’s natural right to exchange with others without interference, in this case, in labor markets. See Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Bo
oks, 1974). Nozick admited that such rights don’t allow one to harm others, however, so one wouldn’t have the right to create systemic risks that cause financial crises without also having to compensate those injured. Paying for the costs of crises may require dramatically scaling back financial markets with taxes that “make bankers pay.” In addition, Nozick allows only a minimal state, whereas large-scale financial markets arguably depend on robust enabling institutions supported by taxation that Nozick would regard as theft. In a Nozickian paradise, large-scale financial markets arguably wouldn’t exist.
28. Suskind, Confidence Men, 54.
[4] GENDER, NATURE, BLAME
Having now examined numerous assholes, we observe a pattern: assholes are mainly men. Why should that be so? What explains why assholes are so overwhelmingly distributed among only one-half of the human population?
Is it because men have been socialized so differently from women—that is, is it a product of culture? Or is it something about men themselves—something about male nature—that explains why newborn boys are so much more likely to become assholes than are newborn girls?
The answer, we will suggest, is gender culture rather than maleness. Maleness per se, seen as a mere biological category, is not causally to blame, or at least any influence it has is swamped by deeply entrenched, nearly universal gender culture. This causal thesis implies nothing about morality by itself. It does raise a deep philosophical question about moral responsibility, about who, if anyone, is morally responsible for what. If culture systematically steers newborn babies into becoming assholes simply because their sex is male, how can the grown-up asshole be blamed or condemned for his foul condition? Responsibility might seem to lie squarely upon society. It allows gender culture to have this profoundly influential steering role. The foulness of the asshole may therefore seem to reflect not the foulness of the individuals we routinely blame for their asshole ways but rather the foulness of a social condition that produces assholes in abundance. We usually do single out the individual asshole, blaming him. But why should this be fair? Why isn’t the lone asshole just a hapless soul caught up in a grand cultural asshole-production machine?
A measure of sympathy for an asshole might be laudable, but it shouldn’t be taken too far. He still has freedom of will. He usually acts in his assholish ways freely and of his own free will. That is the source of his actions and the proper target for management, criticism, and blame—or so we want to maintain.
Philosophy won’t simply take that for granted. The philosophical skeptic will deny it outright: according to the skeptic, no one, not even an asshole, is the appropriate object of condemnation or blame. Moral responsibility is, at most, a useful fiction. As usual in philosophy, there is no easy refutation of the dug-in skeptic. But even if refutation isn’t in the cards, the skeptic’s salutary role is to force those of us who aren’t skeptical to say what we might mean in claiming that people do indeed have “freedom of will.” Why is it, exactly, that assholes are the appropriate object of blame, whereas the insane or the drug addict are not justly held responsible? What, precisely, is the difference?
In one traditional interpretation, the asshole indeed has freedom of will, and so qualifies for blame, in the sense that he has control over his actions and the nature of his character. His actions and character are finally up to him, despite the strong cultural currents he swims in. As we will see, however, requiring this special kind of countercultural control makes blaming the asshole more problematic than it needs to be. There is a better, more modest interpretation of what his freedom of will consists of that more easily saddles him with moral responsibility. Roughly, the asshole is rightly to blame simply because of the outlook reflected in his behavior, simply because he thinks like an asshole in a way that makes his actions his own. That is true whether or not he is “free” in any further way and whether or not he has any further special control over his fate in the cultural asshole-production machine. He can be a product of the machine and blameworthy anyway.
ASSHOLES AND BACHELORS
Before we delve further, we should consider the possibility that our supposedly profound philosophical questions are founded upon a huge but simple mistake. It is not quite true, we might say, that assholes are mainly men. Rather, assholes are only men, and for a simple and completely unmysterious purely linguistic reason: the term “asshole” refers only to men by definition, in just the way the term “bachelor” refers only to unmarried men. We simply agree, by linguistic convention, to use the term “asshole” in a gendered way, much as we do with “bastard.” We could have equally coordinated speech behavior in a different way. And, it may be suggested, we do indeed have a useful further name for the same kind of person when that person happens to be female: we call her a “bitch.” If this is right, there is no grand mystery about why assholes are men: this reflects nothing more than the way we happen to use words.
Natural as it might seem, this view is wrong. Suppose I consider the proposition that Ann Coulter is an asshole. I don’t feel forced to withhold that term simply because she is not a man. Rather, there is a substantive debate to have about whether she qualifies (or rather how she could fail to qualify) as an asshole. That debate cannot be settled by reflecting on how we happen to use words. If I ask instead whether Coulter is a “bachelor,” the question is plainly confused. A bachelor is by definition an unmarried man (of a certain age, etc.), much in the way a spinster is by definition a woman. That holds simply because of how we use words. “Female bachelor” is a contradiction in terms. “Female asshole” is an interesting possibility (and, I would say, a reality in cases like Coulter).
To take a more complicated example, the suggestion that “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua is an asshole isn’t undermined by the mere fact that she is a woman. There’s a case to make that she is an asshole, but it won’t suffice simply to observe her tough parenting methods, which have included calling her daughter Lulu “garbage” in order to motivate her; rejecting a birthday card because “I deserve better than this”; and turning her house into a “war zone” in order to coerce Lulu into learning a difficult piano piece, despite objections from her husband that she was insulting her by calling her “lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.”1 One can be a misguidedly tough parent without being an asshole, perhaps by standing ready to reconsider one’s parental prerogatives, including one’s assumptions about what is best for one’s children. What set Chua apart was that she wrote with maternal bravado, certitude, and claim to superiority, all based on the questionable assumption that child achievement is all important, while inviting suspicion that she’s concerned as much with her own status in light of her daughters’ success or failure as with their health and happiness. On the other hand, she is in fact deeply concerned for the welfare of her daughters, sincere and articulate in her views, and open to changing her mind.2 She has in fact softened her views and manner, showing that she is not entrenched in the way assholes are. (Coulter, by contrast, shows no sign of easing up.) Chua is ultimately not an asshole, but, again, her gender is quite beside the point.
If women can be assholes, the fact that assholes are mainly men presents a deep explanatory problem. Things presumably could have been otherwise. In a fairer world, assholes might be distributed equally across the male and female human population, giving newborn males and newborn females roughly equal chances of becoming or not becoming assholes. Given that things are as they are, however, we have to ask why the asshole type crops up in the set of human beings born male so much more often than the set of human beings born female. This is a truly marvelous fact of life, which presumably has some explanation. But what?
THE BITCH
A natural answer is: pervasive gender roles. To appreciate how powerful this is as a potential explanation, consider the following definition of “bitch,” which shadows our definition of “asshole.” A person counts as a bitch, we may say, when, and only when, she systematically takes special advantages in interpersonal relations o
ut of an entrenched sense of entitlement that leaves her open to the voiced or expressed complaints of other people, but immunized against their motivational influence.
The only difference between the asshole and the bitch, in this proposal, appears in the italicized phrase “leaves her open to the voiced or expressed complaints of other people, but immunized against their motivational influence.” In other words, the bitch listens to the voiced complaints of others, making at least a show of recognition. Nevertheless, what is said makes no motivational difference to what she does; once her face-to-face encounter with you is over, it is as though you never talked. She “recognizes” you in one sense: she acts as though she feels it is important to hear you out, to entertain your concerns. But this turns out to be only for show. In her private reasoning and motivation, she is, in the end, insusceptible to anything you might have said. Her sense of entitlement is “entrenched,” in that sense, but not so entrenched that she is unwilling even to entertain voiced complaints. The bitch betrays you behind your back. The asshole fails to recognize you to your face.
One advantage to the asshole is that his ugly conduct takes place out in the open. This makes him easier to avoid. The bitch presents uncertainty, because hidden motives are harder to discern. Some bitches may not be particularly good at feigning concern face-to-face. Other bitches are convincing. You really feel things have been sorted out between you, and that you really are mutually understanding and responsive to each other’s concerns, until you later learn that the discussion made no difference. Perhaps you learn this by happenstance, only after seeing how things play out, perhaps over numerous similar occasions, after repeatedly giving the benefit of the doubt and being let down.