A study of gift giving found that recipients undervalue presents by as much as 30 percent of the purchase price. Givers, by contrast, implicitly value them more or less fully ex ante; otherwise they wouldn’t have been purchased. Worldwide, this measure of undervalue (an economic “deadweight loss”) totaled $25 billion, a figure that ignored both the givers’ cost of time and other resources spent shopping, and the recipients’ cost of returning undervalued presents for store credit.

These findings led economist Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents For the Holidays (Princeton University Press, 2009), to counsel against giving in-kind gifts. His “beef is not with the level of spending and consumption at Christmas but rather with the waste the spending generates.” (p. 103) He quotes an ascetic passage written in 1850 by Harriet Beecher Stowe: “There are worlds of money wasted, at this time of year, in getting things that nobody wants, and nobody cares for after they are got.” (p. 77).

Transferring cash instead of in-kind goods and services often improves economic welfare by enabling recipients to indulge fully their private tastes and preferences. A stigma nevertheless attaches to cash gifts that seem cold and thoughtlessly indifferent. Consider also the absurdity of family members, friends, and colleagues celebrating special occasions by exchanging crisp $20 bills. Gift cards can be a more efficient alternative; a potential sweet spot between cash and presents, although some deadweight loss remains inevitable because cards typically are accepted only by the stores that issue them, and often go unredeemed. Waldfogel (pp. 131–133) suggests another alternative: donating cash to economically efficient charities in the name of gift recipients.

Waldfogel (p. 105) offers two robust straw arguments against his claim of wasteful economic behavior: (1) “Christmas giving among private individuals is voluntary, and whatever people do voluntarily cannot by definition be inefficient. Rather, it’s all for the best”; and (2) “People have been giving Christmas gifts, in their current form, for most of the last century—and do so throughout the developed world. An institution so durable could not possibly be inefficient. If it were, it would have gone away already. It must be all for the best.” Waldfogel counters by dismissing in-kind gifts as an objectively wasteful, yet persistent custom. An analogy might be drawn to the Native American tribal custom of “potlatch”: lavish feasts hosted by wealthy individuals, at which especially costly presents were given to guests who often destroyed them, and yet were expected to reciprocate their host’s generosity. That custom withered after naïvely paternalistic American and Canadian authorities banned it for being wantonly wasteful.

Waldfogel (p. 41) identifies “three basic economic reasons to give people stuff”:

The first, recalling Robin Hood, is to take from those who do not need and give to those, like our poor relations, who do. We call this ‘redistribution.’ The second, recalling the way parents treat kids and governments treat crackheads, is to promote sensible consumption. ... We call this second motive ‘paternalism.’ The third motive, to make recipients as satisfied as possible, is the way we treat loved ones whom we trust to make good choices. This is called ‘altruism.’

By this light, holidays and other special occasions provide face-saving cover for giving and receiving alms.

But consider whether presents are wasteful in a context that explains the institution’s evident durability. In an earlier work, Waldfogel [“The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” The American Economic Review 83, no. 5 (December): 1328–36 (1993), p. 1335, italics added] noted in passing that “the giver may derive some utility from giving the particular gift, which he would not derive from giving cash or another gift”; i.e., a fourth economic reason for giving presents. The Roman stoic philosopher Seneca [On Benefits, University of Chicago Press (2011)] emphasized this aspect of giving in his classic treatise on the nature of generosity.

Reciprocal in-kind gifts also serve to establish and maintain mutual trust, cooperation, and other social virtues that help individuals alleviate the devilish economic problem of resource scarcity; i.e., a fifth economic reason for giving. The choice of a gift, and the recipient’s response to it, encourage inherently self-interested givers and recipients to interact as if their private utility functions were entwined, and to continue maximizing their joint utility after gift-giving occasions have passed.

The giver’s utility is lessened ex post when recipients undervalue presents. Worthy recipients therefore reciprocate all gifts by valuing them according to the spirit in which they are given; Waldfogel dismisses this response as “sentimentality.” Less charitable recipients exaggerate valuations to feign good moral character and social grace, and also to encourage a continued flow of presents that are valued positively, albeit below cost. Astute givers recognize mawkish artifices, and adjust their giving practices accordingly.

A hackneyed cliché counsels that we shouldn’t give until it hurts; instead we should follow Seneca’s counsel by giving generously and receiving appreciatively until it feels really good. Individuals tend to agree, and scrooge economists are hard pressed to prove them wrong.

[This post draws from the author’s article, “Defending the Humanistic Virtue of Holiday Commercialism,” published in Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 23.2 (2015), pp. 265–276.]

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Consider now that getting the economics right can be as consequential for analytical philosophy as parsing language; note for example how the logic of public choice economics clarifies deep problems in political philosophy. Public choice represents a testable behavioral science that incorporates both the self-interest of individuals who create philosophical problems and the pragmatic “cash value” that those problems entail.

Cracking the longstanding puzzle of “free will” demonstrates economics’ value as a complement to philosophy.

Writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, philosopher Timothy O’Connor describes free will as “a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives.” Philosopher John Searle [Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, 2007, 11; 37] explains the hitch: “The problem of free will, in short, is how can such a thing exist? How can there exist genuinely free actions in a world where all events, at least at the macro level, apparently have causally sufficient antecedent conditions? ... we are nowhere remotely near to having a solution. ... The persistence of the traditional free will problem in philosophy seems to me something of a scandal. After all these centuries of writing about free will, it does not seem to me that we have made very much progress.”

Free will is the polar opposite of determinism. Philosophers who cleave to either system are labeled “incompatibilists,” as are “libertarians” who argue that emergent, conscious, and semi-autonomous mental processes resembling Freud’s ego and id place “us” rather than our physical brains in charge. By comparison, philosophers who believe that free will and determinism are reconcilable are labeled “compatibilists”; Daniel Dennett [Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (2015), pp. 21; 184] argues that “[w]e can have free will and science too ... as a natural product of our biological endowment, extended and enhanced by our initiation into society.” Neuroscientists disagree: Michael Gazzaniga [Who’s in Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (2011, 129)] concludes that free will is “an idea that arose before we knew all this stuff about how the brain works, and now we should get rid of it.” Apologists [Dan Barker, Free Will Explained: How Science and Philosophy Converge to Create a Beautiful Illusion (2018)] in turn characterize free will as a “beautiful illusion”; a social rather than a scientific truth that yields moral and spiritual benefits.

The grammar of this debate bleeds across academic disciplines, affecting economics along the way. Compatibilistic microtheory claims that individuals are free to choose, and also that their choices are determined by relative prices [see Gary Becker and George Stigler, “De Gustibus non est Disputandum.” American Economic Review 67: 76–90 (1977)]. The logic of public choice economics reconciles these philosophical, scientific, and methodological claims by focusing upon the self-interest of the individuals who introduced, expanded, and wielded the free will concept as a privately profitable artifice for achieving mischievous social outcomes.

The free will concept has a long and checkered history: Plato introduced it in his Republic dialog as a preventable source of evil; Augustine and Aquinas offered it as partial proof of God’s existence and significance; Cross and Crown invoked it for centuries to justify feudal, authoritarian, and totalitarian social structures. Plato and the early Church fathers are presumed to have been well-intentioned men of intellectual integrity. However, they also were entrepreneurial actors whose passions and self interests committed them to the rightness of their private causes; none was as indifferent to competing alternatives as he professed to be. Plato touted the disinterested virtue of philosopher-kings, yet his political ambitions in Athens and Syracuse belied his commitment to this ideal form. Augustine and Aquinas argued in God’s name for the necessity of comprehensive Church authority over the lives of ordinary individuals, yet Lord Acton correctly noted the corrupting effect that absolute power had upon the papacy. In short, the “beautiful illusion” of free will historically served private interests more efficiently than it furthered either the common good or the pursuit of truth.

The free will concept was introduced and furthered as an expedient justification for political action. It cannot be analyzed meaningfully without first getting the economics right. Philosophy’s failure to resolve the problem merely by getting the grammar right is unsurprising by this light.

[This post draws from the author’s “Free Will: Hail and Farewell” in Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 27 (2019), 98-124.]

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Library branches remained closed to the public, albeit staffed, for more than two months. Anxious patrons subsequently were permitted to request books online, for contact-free outdoor pickup. Four months after the initial closure, patrons were permitted controlled access inside branch facilities: masks were required; total occupancy was restricted; individual stays were limited to thirty minutes per day; the number of Internet terminals was reduced from twenty to five to accommodate social distancing; and Internet access was limited electronically to thirty minutes per patron per day. Rationing restrictions—nominally reasonable adjuncts of occupancy and distancing restrictions—astonishingly were enforced regardless of actual demand conditions.

The library system’s eventual reopening occurred as suddenly as its closure. A friend living out-of-state alerted me to a reopening announcement posted on the County’s website. The first morning back, and for several consecutive mornings thereafter, I was the only patron in the branch. Rationing strategies that clearly were unnecessary nevertheless were fully enforced. The fatuous reason given for limiting access time under actual conditions of superabundance was that the risk of contracting a viral infection was supposed to increase after thirty minutes—a patently inapposite conjecture that had been floated nationally to allay the fears of individuals who simultaneously were being cautioned to avoid exposure to groups, yet needed to shop for essentials. Accordingly, the logical palliative alternatives of shifting to another Internet terminal, or else returning later in the day to continue working, were precluded by rule. The librarian was not authorized to respond to actual circumstances, necessity, or reason (the potential effectiveness of a generously persuasive side payment was not explored). I departed the empty branch after thirty minutes, condemned to labor daily under similar conditions and rules.

Commercial enterprises eagerly began squeezing value out of long-idled private assets as the state-mandated COVID shutdown progressively was relaxed. Tax-funded county operations, by contrast, were content to deny service to patrons despite the conspicuous idleness of public assets under their jurisdiction. Rather than discovering ways to serve patrons who deemed library services “essential,” the librarian’s formal responsibility simply was to say, “No!”

As politicians and bureaucrats—whose own prosperity and flourishing typically are not jeopardized by their actions—strain to enact top-down, one-size-fits-all policies for equalizing suffering and compassion across the breadth of society, it is worth pausing to consider the waste, inefficiency, lost productivity, and foregone happiness that such policies entail. Experience at a branch library—a mere hangnail of county government—illuminates the reason for frustration and disillusionment with over-weaning government in the aggregate, and the growing contempt that Americans have for it.

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A recent book by Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska), Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How To Heal, captures these critics’ apocalyptic tone. He writes: “Why are we so angry?”; “We are in crisis”; “Something is really wrong here”; “We’re literally dying of despair”; “We are doubling down on division”; “We really don’t like each other, do we?”; “our contempt unites us with other Americans who think like we do”; and “[a]t least we are not like them!”

Sasse candidly admits that “[m]ost policymakers don’t seem to understand the problem—and they certainly don’t have any grand answers.” He resorts to vacant cliché: “America would be a healthier and happier place if we all agreed to set aside superficial differences more of the time, and instead struggled together.” The editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kessler, more ominously characterizes the situation Sasse describes as a “cold civil war.”

Neo-Hobbesian warfare seems a more apt characterization. Consider, for example, political theorist Francis Fukuyama’s recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

The synopsis on the book’s dust jacket notes that the republican values “on which [America’s] liberal democracy is founded has increasingly been challenged by restrictive forms of [progressive] recognition and resentment based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, and gender.” One indicium of this trend is the growing use of aggressive, angry, hateful, and violent language, which has strategic value for neo-Hobbesian warfare: it softens hearts and minds by instilling fear, thereby lessening resistance to supply-side social entitlements; and it hardens demand-side resolve within factions.

Anger and hatefulness project a purposeful tone of righteousness. As the biologist and evolutionist Richard Alexander explains in The Biology of Moral Systems:

We gain by thinking we’re right, and by convincing our allies and our enemies, because of the motivation it gives us. People often seem to like this aspect of self-deception: it provides an excuse or a rationale for sinking deeper into otherwise self-deception about motives and for justifying acts that could not otherwise be justified. [...] no other species has accomplished this peculiar evolutionary feat, which has led to an unprecedented level of group-against-group within-species competition. It is this competition that draws us toward strange and ominous consequences.

The economist Paul Rubin, in Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom, extends Alexander’s insight to political economy:

One relevant implication for political analysis of this self-deception is that humans (acting as individuals or as members of interest groups) wanting special favors from the government can easily convince themselves that these favors are actually in the public interest. They convince themselves that the benefits are not just for the private benefit of the interest group.

Self-deception regarding victimhood and entitlement have cash value, which loosely qualifies them as pragmatic truths. These truths self-justify pseudo-moral endeavors, righteous indignation, aggression, intimidation, anger, hatred, and violence. As Shakespeare wrote of Hamlet’s delicate condition, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

Nemesis predictably follows hubris. Fukuyama, in an earlier book, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, characterized America as being in an advanced state of social and political decay due to successful entitlement demands by identity groups. Social death by accretion is a recurring theme within political economy as well. The late economist Mancur Olson, in The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, concluded that:

The common interests that all or most of the people in a nation or other jurisdiction share can draw them together, as they are drawn together when they perceive a common interest in repelling aggression. In distributional struggles, by contrast, none can gain without others losing as much or (normally) more, and this can generate resentment. Thus when special-interest groups become more important and distributional issues accordingly more significant, political life tends to be more divisive. [...] The divisiveness of distributional issues, and the fact that they make relatively lasting or stable political choices less likely, can even make societies ungovernable.

Resentment and division eventually ripen into aggressive blow-back.

Restoring civility entails reversing disruptive social incentives and constraints. The overarching tradeoff is not merely between progressive Rawlsian moral equality and mundane economic efficiency, as the late economist Arthur Okun famously argued, in Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Rather, it is between equality and civility.

The majority of today’s pundit class overlooks this tradeoff at our peril.

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Sanders’ politics echo the social ideology of Herbert Croly, whose book, The Promise of American Life (1909), introduced a progressive liberalism that lost its intellectual respectability decades ago (for more on this loss, see The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, 2^nd edition [1979], by Theodore Lowi). Croly, in turn, was influenced by the “positive polity” of French philosopher Auguste Comte, who coined the term “altruism” to denote the personal sacrifices that his social ideology entailed. Comte claimed to disdain utopian social visions yet proposed (across numerous volumes) “the wildest of them all.” By his lights, “[o]ur harmony as moral beings is impossible on any other foundation but altruism. Nay more, altruism alone can enable us to live, in the highest and truest sense” (see Comte’s primer, The Catechism of Positivism, 1858 [1852], 310–311).

The ethicist and philosopher of economics John Mueller offers a distinction between altruism and everyday generosity: “benevolence [altruism], or good will, can be extended to everyone in the world, and beneficence [generosity], or doing good, cannot” (Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element, 2010, 36). Yet sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and economics teach that sacrificial altruism among humans occurs naturally only within the family. Voluntary generosity, by comparison, usually entails no true sacrifice (see my 2018 paper, “Altruism: From Pagan Virtue to Political Biology,” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 26: article 4, 1–19).

Croly echoed Comte’s call for altruistic social policies:

The Promise of American life is to be fulfilled—not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial. [...] To ask an individual citizen continually to sacrifice his recognized private interest to the welfare of his countrymen is to make an impossible demand, and yet just such a continual sacrifice is apparently required of an individual in a democratic state. The only entirely satisfactory solution of the difficulty is offered by the systematic authoritative transformation of the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to a special object [e.g., a “truly” democratic state]. (The Promise of American Life, 1909: 22; 418, italics added.)

Croly, like Comte, embraced Enlightenment progressivism, by which Robespierre attempted “to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror”; the people’s reason ultimately led Robespierre onto the guillotine. The other Enlightenment choice available was classical liberalism, from which America’s early political fabric was woven. (For historical analysis of these developments, see two books by Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 [2012] and The Enlightenment that Failed: Ideas, Revolution, and Democratic Defeat, 1748–1830 [2020].)

Altruism and progressivism necessarily entail coercion. The historian Vegas Liulevicius shows that “[a] clear connection exists between 20th-century plans for utopias and use of terror to bring them about. [... Terror was necessary] because plans for perfection encountered either passive or active resistance” (Utopia and Terror in the 20^th Century, 2003, Part 1). The “harmony” that Comte imagined would flow from altruism was illusory.

The prominent academic psychologist and avowed Enlightenment humanist Steven Pinker characterizes modern altruism as “[t]oday’s Fascism Lite, which shades into authoritarian populism and Romantic nationalism, [and] is sometimes justified by a crude version of evolutionary psychology in which [...] humans have been selected to sacrifice their interest for the supremacy of their group” (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, 2018: 448). The prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins sides with Pinker on the facts, but differs with him on the spirit: “Human superniceness is a perversion of Darwinism, because, in a wild population, it would be removed by natural selection. [...] Let’s put it even more bluntly. From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human superniceness is just plain dumb. But it is the kind of dumb that should be encouraged” (Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, 2017: 276–277, italics added). “Dumb” behavior and “impossible demands” are unlikely means for perfecting individuals and societies.

The Roman Stoic philosopher Lucius Annæus Seneca wrote of generosity that “people must be taught to give benefits freely, receive them freely, and return them freely and to set themselves a grand challenge: not just to match in actions and attitude those to whom we are obligated, but even to outdo them, for the person who should return a favor never catches up unless he gets ahead” (On Benefits, n.d.). Seneca argued that an upward eudæmonic spiral results whenever benefits are given and reciprocated voluntarily.

Generosity and reciprocity nevertheless arise most often as instrumental means to purposeful ends. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes aptly argued that “No man giveth but with intention of good to himself, because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts, the object is to every man his own good; of which, if men see they shall be frustrated, there will be no beginning of benevolence or trust, nor consequently of mutual help” (Leviathan, 1651). Ayn Rand similarly saw, in “the grace of reality and the nature of life,” a “rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires and feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered the industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment” (The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964: 31).

Sanders, like Comte and Croly, proposes to perfectioneer society through the kind of altruistic policies that, since the late eighteenth century, have wrought havoc on mankind.

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The distinguished economist Joseph Schumpeter noted, in 1942, the similarity between theocentric and secular religions:

Marxism is a religion. To the believer, it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. ... [It] belongs to that subgroup [of ‘isms’] which promotes paradise this side of the grave. (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, p. 5)

The historian Michael Burleigh included fascism and national socialism among secular religions. American Democratic Fundamentalism also belongs on this list.

The theologian Paul Tillich followed Schumpeter, in 1951, with a related point:

We have seen that everything secular can enter the realm of the holy and that the holy can be secularized. On one hand, this means that secular things, events, and realms can become matters of ultimate concern, [i.e., they can] become divine powers; and, on the other hand, this means that divine powers can be reduced to secular objects, [and so can] lose their religious character. Both types of movement can be observed throughout the entire history of religion and culture, which indicates that there is an essential unity of the holy and the secular, in spite of their existential separation. (Systematic Theology: Reason and Revelation, Being and God, vol. 1, p. 221)

Accordingly, theocentric and civil religions often are studied as substitutable pubic institutions, whose ebbs and flows reflect relative costs, benefits, and economic payoffs. In this light, the economist Ludwig von Mises characterized secular officials and bureaucrats—political progressives in particular—as acting out of a desire to emulate, if not to be gods:

The terms ‘society’ and ‘state’ as they are used by the contemporary advocates of socialism, planning, and social control of all the activities of individuals signify a deity. The priests of this new creed ascribe to their idol all those attributes which the theologians ascribe to God—omnipotence, omniscience, infinite goodness, and so on. (Human Action, scholar’s ed. p. 151)

Burleigh candidly notes historians’ concern regarding whether deified civil power constitutes a “substitute religion” or a “substitute for religion;” the philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, having argued that “true” religion’s defining characteristic entails belief in an afterlife.

Yet, lest “secular religion” be mistaken for solecism, consider the economist (and Independent Institute senior fellow) Robert Nelson’s insight:

In the twentieth century it showed greater energy, won more converts, and had more impact on the Western world than the traditional institutional forms of Christianity. (The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, p. 349)

Covenants that once were symbolized by the rainbow, cross, and crescent nowadays are symbolized instead by flags, slogans, all-too-human deities, and re-imagined enemies.

The psychologist and self-styled “informed amateur in the field of religion” Mortimer Ostrow offers a comprehensive definition of religious fundamentalism:

We consider a religious community fundamentalist if it displays several of the following qualities: unusual zeal, separatism, authoritarianism, religious stringency, intolerance of the deviations of others, aggressiveness or defensiveness or both, an apocalyptic frame of mind, a belief in the inerrancy of the scripture that they value, intolerance of alternative translations and of modern commentaries, intolerance of all sexual language and activity except for marital sex. (Spirit, Mind, and Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and Religion, p. 174)

Ostrow’s characterization of fundamentalism is sufficiently broad to encompass both theocentric and secular religions.

America’s conception of its own democratic experiment has fit the pattern of religious fundamentalism ever since President Woodrow Wilson entered America into World War I on the premise of making the world safe for progressive democracy. President John Kennedy later affirmed America’s prevailing commitment to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, and oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Recent presidents have furthered America’s commitment by seeking to restructure foreign governments worldwide through coercive political and military means. The present commitment to “make America great again” follows in this vein, albeit perhaps less enthusiastically, and along more gossamer and arguably less coherent lines.

Fundamentalism of all sorts is objectionable when it diminishes the ability of individuals to prosper and flourish in privately beneficial and meaningful ways. It typically is the consequence of powerful elites—often, but not necessarily, the intellectual sort—imposing their peculiar passions, ideals, and interests through twisted logic and rhetoric, backed by coercion and the power to tax. History teaches that fundamentalism must be opposed under these circumstances.

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The founders understood the potentially disruptive power of faction within a democratic republic. They took seriously the philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ pejorative characterization of faction as representing “a city within a city ... an enemy within the walls.” Accordingly, they sought to constrain the political phenomenon that Adam Smith described as “the clamorous opportunity of partial interests” to transform State power into the weapon of choice for waging neo-Hobbesian warfare.

The philosopher David Hume aptly summarized the fundamental concern: “As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honored and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated; because the influence of faction is directly contrary to that of laws. Factions subvert government, render laws impotent, and beget the fiercest animosities among men of the same nation, who ought to give mutual assistance and protection to each other. And what should render the founders of parties more odious is, the difficulty of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root in any state.”

The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau complemented Hume: “Let us suppose now a state in which the social bond has begun to wear thin. It has, we assume, entered upon its decline; particular interests have begun to make themselves felt in it, and narrower associations to affect decisions of the wider group. The common interest, in such a state, is clouded over, and encounters opposition; votes cease to be unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of everybody.”

James Madison synthesized these antecedent remarks into a memorable essay. Writing in The Federalist No. 10, he defined “faction” as being “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” By Madison’s lights, “the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” Madison was mindful as well of religious factions’ historically and potentially disruptive effects, but following Locke, he dismissed this concern in light of the number, diversity, and dispersion of sects within colonial America.

Alexander Hamilton’s complementary discussion in Federalist No. 9 described the pending constitution as “a powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained, and its imperfections lessened or avoided. ... [specifically] the “utility of confederacy ... to suppress faction.” Madison explained in Federalist No. 51 that the proposed constitution enabled majorities to overrule minority factions directly, and moreover would undermine factional influence spontaneously by letting “ambition ... counteract ambition.”

Madison and Hamilton might have underestimated the ability of factions to adjust their strategies and tactics over time in order to lessen the effectiveness of these constitutional controls. Factions exist perforce because the social cost of controlling them exceeds, at some point, the expected marginal benefit from further constraining their influence. The upshot, in the argot of modern economics, is a Nash social equilibria that can, and often does, privilege factional interests over the general will.

Madison and Hamilton surely would despair over the ability of modern factions to amplify, by means of identity politics, social dissatisfaction over the “unequal distribution of property.” The founding duo also would despair over the emergence of super-factional political parties, whose secular ideologies are professed with religious certitude—theocentric and secular “religions” being closely substitutable behavioral responses to the intrinsic economic problem of resource scarcity. As Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 1, “nothing could be more ill judged than that intolerant spirit, which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For, in politics as in religion ... [h]eresies ... can rarely be cured by persecution.”

America’s present state of social malaise manifests three consequences of factional influence: (i) adverse effects upon the bonds of national unity; (ii) destructive effects upon political ideology, and (iii) as Hume noted, “the difficulty [if not the impossibility] of extirpating these weeds, when once they have taken root.”

No certain means of reversal and extirpation are obvious at this juncture. The most likely course follows Hamilton’s belief that “the representation of the people in the legislature, by deputies of their own election [can erect a] barrier against factions.” This presumes, of course, that the people will choose, in effect, to erect political barriers against their own selfish, short-term interests. Generalized social anger and hatred are inevitable consequence if they continue choosing otherwise.

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The philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, who stressed destiny over causality, characterized The Decline of the West (1926) as the final stage in the evolutionary cycle of culture and civilization, during which “Late-Classical man [re]turns to the practice of the cults ... dispense[s] with proof, [and] desire[s] only to believe and not to dissect.”

More recent thinkers have stressed causality over destiny. In the 1990s, the sociologist Robert Putnam launched his now-famous Bowling Alone (2000) thesis, which sought to explain the apparent decline of civic engagement, and with it, the decline of social capital. Putnam defined “social capital” as “connections among individuals—social networking and the norm of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arises from them.” Putnam concluded that the decline of “social capital is a cause, not merely an effect, of contemporary social circumstances [i.e., general malaise].” Putnam attributed this decline principally to “Americans’ love affair with television entertainment ... [and also to] a pervasive and continuing generational decline in almost all forms of civic engagement,” which he attributed, as a first cause, to the Great Depression and Second World War.

Comes now New York Times columnist David Brooks’ commentary on “the quality of our [social] relationships [which] has been in steady decline for ages.” Brooks, like Putnam, places the onus on technology. Putnam called television “the single most consistent predictor” of civic disengagement. For Brooks, the villain is modern social media; smartphones, and Facebook in particular, which are responsible for worsening the epidemic of “loneliness and social isolation.” By Brooks’ lights, “[t]he mass migration to online life is not the only force driving these trends, but it is a big one.”

Blaming technology confuses correlation with causation. Individuals are not lonely and isolated because of television, smartphones, and Facebook: if they were, then they might be expected to seek help. Rather, lonely and isolated individuals retreat willingly into these divertissements.

Aristotle famously observed more than two millennia ago that human individuals were social and political animals whose brains were geared—by evolution, as we now know—for working in harmony with other individuals. Modern economics and evolutionary biology teach that the purpose of civic engagement and social capital is to mitigate collectively the adverse consequences that resource scarcity has upon every individual’s prospects for survival and reproductive success.

In the mid-Nineteenth Century, social thinkers like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx predicted that the social-scientific management of capital would create a sunny and carefree world of economic abundance, in which individuals would put aside their socially destructive egoism and come together through the “charm” of altruism. Gains from capital accumulation subsequently exceeded those thinkers’ wildest imaginings, and yet civic engagement declined, against predictions.

Beginning around 1960, America and other Great Societies began creating webs of social “entitlements” for distributing rising economic prosperity. Spengler’s “cults” became the political factions of identity politics. Economic redistribution reduced the necessity for civic engagement as a counterforce against scarcity. Social programs now administer to hard luck cases, like Brooks’ example of Bob Hall, who died tragically in 1936, leaving his family debt-ridden.

Pace Comte and Marx, and Brooks as well, economic abundance dulls the edge of scarcity, diminishing in the process the importance of social cooperation, reciprocity, trust, and of civic engagement generally.

Modern social media fill the increasing void created by prosperity. For many individuals, life would be lonelier and more isolated without smartphones, Facebook, and the rewards of online life.

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