Human Agency and the Working Class

Today I had the pleasure of participating in a conference convened by Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society. The conference explored the (expansive) topic, “Agency, Prospering, Progress and the Working Class.”  Highlights from the day included Richard Sennett (London School of Economics) offering a tour de force argument that the experience of class in the U.S. is intensely personalized; compared to Europe, Americans who struggle economically are more likely to believe that something is wrong with them, rather than with the system.  In this regard, Trump's victory cannot be explained as globalization's losers overcoming globalization's winners. It goes much deeper than that.

My panel included Philip Howard (author of The Death of Common Sense), Richard Robb (Columbia), and JD Vance (author of Hillbilly Elegy), all of whom reflected on paths by which human agency can be supported and enhanced among the working class.

Here are the questions I asked at the outset of my remarks: should caution about top-down, one-size-fits-all legal solutions to practical problems also apply to our assessment of top-down, one-size-fits-all legal resolutions of moral disputes? If we care about human agency, how do we discern the moral norms that should govern our public lives, and at what point should we invest them with legal authority?

I then explained how the disputes over transgender bathrooms, florists required to serve same-sex weddings, and demands made by Black Lives Matter protesters can all be understood as reflections of the desire for moral agency. Maintaining legal space for dissenting moral claims is a necessary but insufficient condition for moral agency; agency also requires empathy, which is essential to – some would say constitutive of – moral deliberation. We face a significant empathy deficit, as the 2016 campaign season displayed powerfully and painfully.  Strengthened commitments to civil friendship and local political engagement offer a promising path forward.

Human agency was almost completely ignored in the rhetoric and policy proposals of both presidential candidates, as JD Vance pointed out in his remarks. If we care about the insights of Catholic social teaching (e.g., subsidiarity, economic justice understood as participation in the economy), we can’t lose sight of its importance.