Not by Bread Alone

Glenn Loury’s lifework as a social, moral, and spiritual project

NOT BY BREAD ALONE

Glenn Loury’s lifework as a social, moral, and spiritual project

Ben Peterson

If by keeping the old warm one can provide understanding of the new, one is fit to be a teacher.

—Confucius

Yet it is natural for man, more than for any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

The task of the social scientist and theorist is to help us learn about ourselves, about the determinants and implications of human behavior. Often, the social scientist and theorist can help us evaluate our public policies and priorities. Professor Glenn C. Loury, an increasingly prominent economist and public intellectual who is currently Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, has made significant, policy-relevant contributions to scholarly and public discourse in this vein, particularly in matters pertaining to persistent racial inequality, crime and punishment, and social policy. Professor Loury engages these questions and issues in an interdisciplinary manner with a level of rigor, depth, and clarity to which academics and public intellectuals should all aspire. To tell a stylized and much abbreviated story of Loury’s career, he began by proposing the concept of social capital to explain differences in the supply of marketable skills among black and white Americans, which led him to the importance of moral authority, which has led him ultimately to the crucial significance of spiritual values. He has journeyed from the economics of the labor market to the deep struggles of the inner life of the person, pointing out connections along the way.

In this essay I identify and develop three themes that embody lessons we can learn about ourselves. Loury himself often identifies the Enlightenment inheritance he seeks to preserve and develop; here, I emphasize the even older themes his work keeps warm. No doubt my own interests and proclivities as a political theorist and adherent of Christianity inflect my reception of Loury’s work, but I will try to show how these lessons, highly relevant to contemporary social problems and policy challenges, can be gleaned from a good portion of his writing and speaking:

1. We are social.

2. We are moral.

3. We are spiritual.

These may appear unlikely lessons from the pen and mouth of an economist. Yet, Loury’s training and skill as an economist, combined with his attention to the disciplines of history, sociology, political theory, and philosophy have allowed him to integrate his work into a framework for humane and wise policy analysis, leading to what I will call a “politics of empowerment,” the opposite of a politics of dependency. Such a politics does not necessarily eschew public spending on social welfare and other services or perhaps even spending calculated to improve the lot of members of racial minorities, but it recognizes that spending has to be carefully tailored to empower rather than infantilize recipients. Government services and programs are embedded within a broader ecology of initiatives and institutions that together constitute our common life, and these require constant attention, support, and renewal.

More broadly, our common life depends on the renovation of philosophical and spiritual orientations that teach us to respect more fully the dignity and value of our fellow citizens and human beings. Some of Loury’s insights on economics, society, and public policy have ancient roots. Aristotle famously described man as a “political animal,” and a host of medieval thinkers including St. Thomas Aquinas adopted and extended the idea, taking as axiomatic the idea that man is a “social being.” We are fundamentally interdependent, shaped tremendously by our social context, yet possessed of reason, will, and a spiritual transcendence essential to our being and the lives we live personally and publicly.

While these lessons have ancient roots, they are insufficiently acknowledged and too rarely blended. Our politics and political discourse tend either toward an excessive individualism or a theory of social conditioning that exaggerates environmental and social causes and exterminates the possibility of all human agency. Loury’s recognition of the human person as “freely choosing, socially situated, [and] spiritually endowed” offers a balanced and fruitful path forward that accords with the best of our intellectual and spiritual inheritance.

We Are Social

“Social capital” is a widely recognized concept from social science. While it has deep roots in political theory and sociology, and its popular diffusion is due in large measure to political scientist Robert Putnam and his 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone, Loury was one of several thinkers independently to coin the term, and he used it in a distinctive way, befitting an economist. In his dissertation—his most-cited work—and widely-cited papers building on it, Loury developed the concept and used it to capture something missing in standard “human capital” theory and its implication that establishing equal opportunity in the marketplace would be sufficient to set black Americans on a path to economic parity with whites.

Human capital refers to an individual’s investment in cultivating his or her own talents and abilities to maximize marketability in a labor market. In contrast, social capital captured the idea of inalienable or non-replicable experiences and inputs transmitted or mediated through personal connections. For example, a mother’s special bond with her child, a bond that begins even before birth, is a major contributor to human development and something no one but she can supply. This form of capital, as distinct from human capital, cannot simply be gained by choosing to invest more in a certain skill or form a better habit; it is socially mediated, a function of the community and network in which an individual is embedded. The capacity and choice to invest in human capital are, to a great degree, a function of social capital.

The importance of social capital helped explain how persistent racial inequality with regard to key social and economic indicators could persist even after legal equality had been secured for black Americans in the post-Civil Rights era. As Loury put it, the contemporary conventional wisdom that “the elimination of racial discrimination will result in the eventual elimination of racial economic inequality” was misguided because it did not “take adequate account of the effect of an individual’s family and community background on his acquisition of skills.” Doctrinaire free-marketeers were wrong to believe that establishing equal opportunity would be sufficient to set America on a path to equality of outcome. They were wrong because they failed to take into account the social context of human development. As Loury wrote in his dissertation:

The meritocratic notion that in a free society each individual will rise to the level justified by his competence must be tempered with the observation that no one travels that road entirely on his own. The social context within which individual maturation occurs strongly conditions what equally competent individuals can achieve…. An individual’s social origin has an obvious and important effect on the amount of resources which are ultimately invested in his development. It may thus be useful to employ a concept of “social capital” to represent the consequences of social position in facilitating individual acquisition of (say) the standard human capital characteristics.

The notion of social capital highlights the complex ways historical forces and patterns of interaction shape present realities. While the mother-child bond is one example of a form of social capital, other forms might accumulate over generations in a manner compounding inequality between groups, especially in a context like the United States where whites systematically excluded black Americans from social, political, and economic interactions of many kinds.

Thus, throughout his work, Loury has attended to the ways social reality—the assemblage of conventions and relationship networks in which the individual is embedded and which he must navigate—shapes the economic and social prospects of individuals and groups. His mantra “relations before transactions” captures the importance of the social context of human life and market activity: “All human development is socially situated and mediated. In other words, the development of human beings occurs inside social institutions.” This broad perspective informs what he calls “the development narrative” that he proposes as an alternative to the “bias narrative” to account for and address racial disparities. While Loury originally critiqued the laissez-faire, market-oriented approach to persistent racial inequality on the basis of this insight, his attention to the social context of human development has also led him to a singular focus on the importance of the bedrock social institution: the family. He has regularly drawn attention to the breakdown of the two-parent family in many black communities and its negative consequences for human development and racial inequality.

Loury’s focus shifted, however, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He reframed his insights about the social context of human development to craft a sustained argument about the causes of persistent racial inequality and how our “social imaginary,” to borrow philosopher Charles Taylor’s phrase, needs to change in order to address them. In The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (2002; second edition, 2021), Loury argues against a strictly colorblind approach to public policy because it is insufficiently attuned to the intergenerational and historical effects of racial insubordination, the importance of social institutions and social capital, and the ways racial biases subtly operate to perpetuate racial inequality. Here is how he diagnoses the problem of racial justice in the post-Civil Rights era in Anatomy:

The unfair treatment of persons based on race in formal economic transactions is no longer the most significant barrier to the full participation of blacks in American life. More important is the fact that too many African Americans cannot gain access on anything approaching equal terms to social resources that are essential for human flourishing, but that are made available to individuals primarily through informal, culturally mediated, race-influenced social intercourse.

To provide a vision for a healthy and vibrant democratic polity, our political theory must shed its “liberal-individualist morality of race-blindness” and its attendant faith in a pure equal opportunity doctrine. Thus, “achieving racial justice requires at this point in American history more than reforming procedures so as to ensure fair treatment for blacks in the economic and bureaucratic undertakings of private and state actors.” Because of our “raced” past and its intergenerational effects—because we are social, in the full, historical sense of the term—we must instead embrace “race-egalitarianism,” and aim to “eliminate the objective disparity in economic and social capacity between the race-segregated networks of affiliation that continue to characterize the structure of American public life, and that constitute the most morally disturbing remnant of this nation’s tortured racial past.” The book critiques liberal individualism precisely because of its inability to account for the social and historically conditioned manner of human life and society. A richer, truer anthropology is required to pursue racial justice.

In Anatomy, Loury sets himself the task of explaining how racial inequality on a number of performance-related social and economic indicators persists in the post-Civil Rights era, while abjuring a race essentialism that would simply attribute these disparities to genetic differences in populations. Race itself, Loury argues, is primarily a social phenomenon—a social construct. It’s best understood as an equilibrium, an outcome of continual choices regarding mating preferences that perpetuate the existence of population groups with distinctive physical characteristics and bodily markings. Race would not exist if we did not perpetuate it with our choices about intimate partnership.

That’s not to say it’s not real! Social realities confront the individual and affect his or her life prospects: “‘Race’ is all about embodied social signification. In this sense it is a social truth that race is quite real, despite what may be the biological-taxonomic truth of the claim that there are no races.” That’s the point—the social context is an important reality for a person, even if the biological basis of race is scant.

Despite his current, relished persona as a “woke buster,” Loury’s 2002 book presents what amounts to a sophisticated theory of systemic racism. He explains how, based solely on the beliefs and perceptions rather than the racist preferences of actors, implicit biases can dramatically shape outcomes to the detriment of a group bearing a “racial stigma”—an aura of dishonor and otherness that attaches to black Americans stemming from the legacy of slavery and racial subordination. Moreover, these biases can become self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping the behavior of the stigmatized racial group’s members. As an example, imagine that a cab driver believes that black riders are more likely than others to rob him. He avoids picking them up. Black taxi-seekers know this and respond by not waiting for his taxi—except the few who do plan to rob him. The taxi-driver’s prejudice that black riders were more likely to rob him proves correct—but only because of his stigma-informed prior about black riders. We could apply the example to think about racial minorities’ low participation in banks and financial institutions. Racial disparities may be thus reproduced and perpetuated, even absent inherent differences between members of racial groups. They are socially produced or enacted in a self-reinforcing system—our attitudes and biases shape the incentives and behaviors of stigmatized groups, which in turn reinforce our attitudes and biases.

While Loury’s recent speeches and writings express skepticism toward the concept of systemic racism, particularly as invoked without substantiation for rhetorical purposes, Anatomy introduces a theme that he has continued to explicate: problems in the black family and black communities are related to segregated patterns of social interaction in American society. For example, the generally low level of interracial dating and marriage between black women and white men affects the intra-racial pattern of intimate relations. Since this “exit option” does not exist in practice for black women, they have no choice but to accept the status quo with black men, a situation which has continued to generate a high level of multi-partner fertility and out-of-wedlock births.

So, even the pathologies and problems among many black Americans are partly the product of a system, a product of repeated stigma-infused interactions. These problems are ours to shoulder, but racial stigma prevents us from doing so. Loury writes in Anatomy:

I maintain the following: If there were a comparable group number of young European-American men on beer-drinking binges, or anorexic teenage girls starving themselves to death [or perhaps an opioid epidemic!], and if these were situations in which the same degree of human suffering was engendered as is being produced in this case, it would occasion a most profound reflection about what had gone wrong, not only with THEM, but also with US: “What manner of people are we to produce such an outcome?”

The recognition of the social nature of human life and development, of our very identities and our sense of ourselves, leads us to an understanding of the problem of racial inequality focused on broadening opportunities for social exchange and participation in common civic, economic, and political effort—a focus on inclusion, rightly understood. Anatomy thus introduces a theme pervading Loury’s writing and speaking: the imperative to construct a broader sense of common identity in American society. The book also deals with the related interplay between personal and public morality, a subject to which we turn now.

We Are Moral

If you listen to The Glenn Show or Loury’s recent speeches, you will hear a good bit of moralizing. One of his recent themes is the importance of living in “good faith,” contrasted with the “contemptible” behavior wreaking havoc in some black communities. Loury argues that one imperative is for leaders in such communities to find a way of effectively confronting such behavior—gang life, murder, thuggery—and instead call young people, particularly young men, to live in good faith, to strive to better themselves and make life better for those in their sphere of influence.

These themes echo Loury’s work in the 1980s for The Public Interest and other outlets calling attention to the “moral quandary” of black Americans. Loury’s breakout essay “Blacks Must Now Fight the Enemy Within,” where he began to discuss the need for black moral leadership as critical to black progress in the post-Civil Rights period, reflects this focus:

For the great barrier to progress for blacks today is not an “enemy without” that denies opportunity to blacks because of racism, but an “enemy within” that keeps our young people from taking advantage of the opportunities available to all Americans. In short, there is a profound need for moral leadership among blacks. The challenge now facing the movement is to find a way to provide that much needed leadership.

If Loury’s emphasis on the social context of human development and the ways racial stigma contributes to the perpetuation of racial disparities diminishes our faith in the power of market forces and equalized opportunity to secure the American dream for all, it also challenges a faith in government programs to solve the deep pathologies also evident in many communities, creating a cycle of dysfunction and dependency. Addressing these problems requires a recovery of both personal and public morality. Loury addresses this in his debut essay for First Things, “Two Paths to Black Power,” urging civic leaders to get comfortable with concepts of “dignity, shame, personal responsibility, character and values, deservingness.” He calls for a shift from a pursuit of rights to a pursuit of worthiness. In the post-Civil Rights period, he argues, the greatest need is for black Americans to shoulder the burdens of liberty.

Yet, in addition to calling for renewed moral vigor in black communities exhibiting high crime and other social dysfunctions, Loury calls for broader attention to public morality. In Anatomy and Race, Incarceration, and American Values (2008), he builds a case that racial stigma has led Americans to turn a blind eye to the slow-moving catastrophe of inner-city urban life in our country, responding with an unprecedented level of punitiveness in criminal justice policy that would not have been countenanced for a non-stigmatized group. In a felicitous, but damning phrase describing the drug war policy of the 1980s and ‘90s, and our criminal justice policy more generally, Loury argues in Anatomy that we middle class Americans “balance our cultural budget on the backs of the weakest and darkest of our fellow citizens.” It is a powerful indictment.

While he has become increasingly skeptical of the rhetorical uses of “systemic racism” and systemic injustice, Loury has not disavowed the public morality aspect of his analysis, the recognition that there are indeed systemic injustices, some of them facilitated by our democratic structures of policymaking.

Individual and Collective Responsibility

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the mark of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It is fruitful to interpret a good bit of Loury’s career as a sustained attempt to hold together and reconcile two opposed ideas: 1) Individual people bear moral responsibility for the quality of their lives; 2) Society bears moral responsibility for the quality of its members’ lives. Almost—but only almost—inadvertently, Loury’s shifts in emphasis from personal to public morality have contributed to our understanding of the interplay between individual responsibility and social systems. These frames of reference, the individual and the systemic, are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing. To talk about a social system is to talk about a sustained pattern of interactions between people. We cannot attend only to one or the other, personal responsibility and public morality. Rather, we have to understand the importance and interplay of each.

Consider an event. A gang member, attempting to settle a score, accidentally shoots and kills an eight-year-old girl in Chicago. (This reportedly occurred on January 23^rd of 2022.) Obviously, the shooter is at fault. He bears personal responsibility. Because of his bloodlust and recklessness, the girl is dead and her family bereft. A society that cannot hold him responsible cannot continue to function with any semblance of order or justice. As Loury recently said, “I know despite whatever causal factors may be at play, that Black intellectuals must insist that each youngster is capable of choosing a moral way of life. I know that for the sake of the dignity of my people and for the future of my country, we American intellectuals of all colors must never lose sight of what a moral way of life consists in.” That also means respecting and supporting those who are especially charged with keeping law and order, imperfect as our criminal justice institutions are. But does the moral analysis end there? How did the gang member come to be in this situation? What was missing in this young man’s life that led him to join a gang? Perhaps he did not see a better option. Who were his role models? Where was his father? So, the fault lies not only with the shooter but also with others who should have given him better options.

We go back and back and back. Does the reality that he lived in a poor neighborhood that was de facto segregated due to past policies and a host of decisions on the part of middle-class people have anything to do with it? Yes, much. We can keep going, tracing the social and historical roots of the personal disaster in this young man’s life—ultimately to the Fall, in Christian terms. It is not just a personal moral failure, but a societal failure, a failure of public morality. As Loury writes:

To the extent that the socially marginal are not seen as belonging to the same general public body as the rest of us, it becomes possible to do just about anything with them. Yet, in my view, a pure ethic of personal responsibility could never provide an adequate foundation for justifying the current situation. In making this claim, I am not invoking a “root causes” argument (he did the crime, but only because he had no choice) so much as I am arguing that society as a whole is implicated in the offender’s choices. We have acquiesced in structural arrangements that work to our benefit and the offender’s detriment and that shape his consciousness and sense of identity such that his choices, which we must condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him.

Loury’s social scientific and philosophical attention to the issue of human agency, nested within its social and environmental contexts, exemplifies a balanced concern for the decency and moral bearing of our society’s institutions, a sense of collective responsibility that nevertheless holds aloft the dignity and responsibility of the willing, thinking, and acting human person. This view of human nature has implications not merely for abstract exercises in philosophy and theory but also for public philosophy and the public response to inequalities and entrenched disadvantage.

Personal Agency, Public Morality, and Racial Inequality

Loury’s long career pursuing a middle course between the two prongs of individual behavior and social systems, personal morality and social justice, should have made unthinkable the claim that racial disparities are either the result of the innate inferiority of blacks or of unjust policy simpliciter. Unfortunately, it has not—that’s the position of bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi, for example. Loury’s work offers a much richer analysis, incorporating the complex interaction among native endowments of persons, cultural proclivities of groups, personal choice, and social systems.

At times in his career, Loury has critiqued the political right and left. In a show of self-awareness and humility, he often attributes his intellectual shift leftward in the 2000s to non-intellectual desires, including a desire to be accepted by prominent black leaders. I’ll comment no further on his subconscious and leave him to explain his own motives in his forthcoming memoir. However, there is a thread of continuity running through his work, whether it is critiquing the right or the left. That thread is the rejection of simplistic social analysis. Different political groups tend to latch onto or channel different features of the very complex problem of racial inequality in the United States. Loury’s work on racial inequality can be seen as an attempt to incorporate all the different facets of a very complex problem.

In Anatomy and elsewhere, Loury chastised conservatives for their simplistic view on the problem: black people need to get their act together! That doesn’t cut it, Loury responded, and it is “morally superficial in the extreme.” Yet, Loury does agree that there are behavioral problems within many black communities contributing to continued racial inequality. Leaders in those communities need to address these issues, to more effectively condemn and discourage the behavior of gang members and those who commit violence, and more broadly to call black Americans in the inner city to higher standards of behavior and achievement.

He defended himself briefly against the charge of inconsistency in a 2004 essay defending his stance in Anatomy: “It is not inconsistent to hold that black parents, like all other parents, are responsible for the behaviors of their children, and simultaneously to hold that the nation is responsible for the ghetto poor.” Further on, he continues:

Fifteen years ago, I was sure that the largest obstacle to incorporating the ghetto poor into the commonwealth was that their leaders had the wrong ideas. Today, I see that position as having been mistaken and I am laboring to correct the error. As I said in the conclusion of my book, the role of a responsible black public intellectual today is to keep in play an awareness of the need for both communal and civic reforms, finding a way to make progress in either sphere complement that in the other.

Today’s most prominent simplistic narrative once again focuses on systemic racism and promotes anti-racism as the solution. Prone to emphasizing the missing piece of the puzzle, Loury is once again highlighting the behavioral, cultural issues more than the structural, systemic issues of which he is also aware. He has consistently tried to “chart a middle course” between a racial liberalism along the lines of Great Society policies and affirmative action and a do-nothing conservatism denying Americans’ social responsibility for problems in poor black communities. Racial liberalism has failed and may have worsened problems in poor black communities or at least distracted from them. On the one hand, an excessive focus on public morality or “social justice” can inadvertently lead to dependency and adverse incentives. On the other hand, a callous disregard for the quality of life and opportunities of the least fortunate among us is unjust and unbecoming of people sharing the political relationship of citizenship, which is, among other things, a civic bond that entails mutual responsibilities. 

Moralism without roots in a vision of human flourishing, without a sense of purpose and meaning, is arid and harsh. The most effective moral reform movements ground their appeals in spiritual truths—recall Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of “the beloved community,” a vision of the common good anchoring a call for moral renaissance in American society. Moral analysis rests on and leads to the deeper and higher realm of both private and public consciousness: the realm of the spiritual.

We Are Spiritual

In addition to taking a moral turn, Loury’s public reflections have moved in a spiritual direction. This is most evident in speeches and writings from when he was a professing Christian, but even in his post-Christian phase, he continues to frame public issues from racial inequality to the challenge of climate change in spiritual terms. His critique of race essentialism, of viewing ourselves as primarily “raced” and treating race as the dominant feature of personal and group identity, evinces an emphasis on the spiritual aspect of human life, the thrilling effort to craft an identity out of the raw material of our genetic and social givens. His advocacy for “transracial humanism” exists in slight tension with his critique of colorblind liberal individualism in Anatomy, but not at all with the goal of building a “single political community of mutual concern” articulated in that work. Loury’s emphasis on spirituality also contrasts with the fetishization of “the black body” expressed by other black thinkers, notably Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though no longer a professing Christian—I pray that will change—Loury appreciates the spiritual dimension of human life and personhood. His attention to spiritual matters is more reflective of black American history and experience than Coates’s atheist, materialist perspective.

In a remarkable 2005 lecture entitled “On Being a Christian and an Economist,” Loury reflected on the spiritual aspects of economic, social, and political life:

I am of the view that social science can capture only a part of the human subject. Of necessity, our methods project the full person onto those material and deterministic dimensions that we think we understand. As an object of scientific inquiry, the human subject must ultimately be reduced to a mechanism. Yet, in so doing the social scientists leave out that which most makes a person human. We leave out the soul. As a believer, my fundamental conviction is that human beings are not defined by our desires at a point and time. Indeed, I would even deny that we are defined by our biological inheritance. “God is not finished with us when he deals us our genetic hand,” I would say. As spiritual beings, what we are in the fullness of our humanity transcends that which can be grasped with the particular vision that an economist, a sociologist or psychologist might bring.

Loury goes on to draw a connection to his perennial concern with inequality and persistent racial disparities, and with the need he identified for moral leadership:

Fortunately, government is not the only source of moral authority. In every community there are agencies of moral and cultural development which seek to shape the ways in which individuals conceive of their duties to themselves, their obligations to each other, and their responsibilities before God. The family and the church are primary among these. These institutions have too often broken down in the inner city; they have been overwhelmed by an array of forces from within and without. Yet, these are the natural sources of legitimate moral teaching—indeed, the only sources. If these institutions are not restored, the behavioral problems of the ghetto will not be overcome. Such a restoration obviously cannot be the object of programmatic intervention by public agencies. Rather, it must be led from within the communities in question, by the moral and political leaders of those communities.

The problem of racial inequality is and always has been ultimately a spiritual problem, a problem of how we view and relate to our fellow human beings. It is at that level that Loury has begun to articulate the broader change in orientation to which we must aspire. While we human beings are constrained by our social circumstances and burdened by our history, the task of building a life and a society is to a great extent a spiritual one in which we play an active role, drawing on intellectual, cultural, and religious resources we have inherited from our ancestors.

A Politics of Empowerment

Loury’s stances on affirmative action and reparations are connected to the multidimensional premises outlined above: we are social, we are moral, and we are spiritual. Since his early, qualified advocacy for affirmative action, Loury has consistently opposed affirmative action as an institutionalized way of doing business in perpetuity. Likewise, he has consistently opposed reparations for the descendants of slaves, even during his semi-“woke” phase in the early 2000s, on the grounds that such a project would be worse for black Americans and the country as a whole than a project of general, de-racialized uplift.

With fellow economist Stephen Coates, Loury developed a model of affirmative action to address the question of whether a regime of race-based preferences can diminish negative stereotypes and make itself obsolete or instead requires indefinite perpetuation. In the model, there are circumstances in which an affirmative action requirement—a requirement to hire disadvantaged minorities assumed to be equal in competence for desirable positions—correctly worsens employers’ views of that minority group. Just as in the taxi driver example, affirmative action generates a self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-enforcing system. Since the minority worker knows she’s getting preferential treatment, she has less incentive to work hard, meaning on average minorities in the target group don’t perform as well. The general implication is that it may be better to reward workers on an individual basis for their performance, at least if we want to eliminate negative stereotypes.

There is also a public morality argument against affirmative action in perpetuity. He writes, “It is patronizing. It is horrible for black Americans to embrace, and the establishment to adopt, a set of practices rooted in the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Loury’s stance against monetary reparations is likewise attentive to the consequences for public morality. His objection is not due to a lack of concern for the injustice of slavery or awareness of its long-lasting effects. Indeed, he argues that reparations would “commodify” the injustice of slavery, accepting a short-term, quick fix rather than a serious national effort to shoulder the burden of our history with race. Not only that, but reparations would perpetuate the very emphasis on racial identity that generated the injustice it intends to remedy:

Enacting reparations for slavery would be to create a Social Security-level-of-magnitude fiscal/social policy in America, the benefits from which would be based on racial identity. That, quite simply, is a monumental mistake. It’s South Africa-esque. Our government would have to classify people and enact statutes and administer law based on people’s race. We ought not go down that path.

In place of affirmative action or reparations, Loury’s ideas suggest a politics of empowerment. Loury’s politics of empowerment, here primarily directed toward black leaders, explicitly draws on the “self-help” tradition of Booker T. Washington, without discrediting the pursuit of justice championed by W. E. B. DuBois and the civil rights activists of the 1950s and ‘60s, necessary in its time. The politics of empowerment captures a more fundamental disposition about the possibilities of human life in community and the ultimate sources of human motivation. It reflects centuries-old wisdom from the religious and philosophical inheritance of the West: the idea that human beings, as individuals and as members of communities, are actors and agents, and not mere automatons.

Keeping the Old Warm

Loury’s insights point toward recovery of a proper understanding of human life in society, against increasingly prevalent tendencies toward individualism on the one side and determinism on the other. Thinkers often treat the individual and collective dimensions of human life as mutually exclusive alternatives, threatening to drown out Loury’s insight that both personal choice and public morality, individual and collective responsibility, must be factored into analysis. These two sides are conveniently represented by two prominent thinkers: Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris.

On the one hand, pushing back against identity politics, the rise of interest in socialism and collectivism among young Americans, and general despair, Peterson emphasizes individual responsibility and the Western discovery of the “sovereign” or even the “divine individual.” For Peterson, tribalism is the natural instinct, and the great triumph of Western civilization is to overcome this primal, herd mentality. While acknowledging we are social beings, Peterson emphasizes the individual to the exclusion of any notion of collective responsibility or social justice.   

A number of other classical liberal and conservative thinkers in the tradition of F. A. Hayek have likewise criticized the very concept of “social justice” as unduly collectivist, and some applications of it are indeed nefarious. But the concept itself need not rob individuals of agency or create a false image of “society” as a unified actor. Rather, thinking systemically can identify patterns of behavior that result in unjust outcomes, bad conventions or equilibria, in the parlance of social scientists such as one of Loury’s mentors Thomas C. Schelling. Social systems are worth studying because understanding them can help us identify behaviors that need to change. What actual choices do people need to make differently? Here again, the economist’s attention to micro-level choices and their macro-level consequences is useful for thinking about reform. Loury once briefly speculated in this vein on the issue of climate, suggesting personal behaviors pertaining to consumption may need to change.

The deeper challenge comes from the prophets of determinism. Harris makes the increasingly popular case in Free Will (2012) that free will is an illusion. Indeed, Harris argues even more shockingly that the self, the thinking and feeling subject, is an illusion. The point of life is to be found in transcending the self; self-transcendence is the essence of spirituality. Once we grasp this point, we will no longer blame individuals for their actions; we will no longer punish, only use incarceration or other instruments of what has been called the criminal justice system—how could it make sense to keep calling it that?—to deter or rehabilitate individuals who behave badly. All human behavior will be understood to be a result of conditioning, determined biologically or environmentally. Harris argues that we will be able to view people who commit even the worst behaviors with equanimity and compassion; we need not hate perpetrators of crimes when we realize they are just unlucky in terms of their genetic makeup and the environmental inputs to which they’ve been subjected.

Then again, as a number of researchers have discovered, human beings freed from the burden of free will may very well take to heart the notion that they are not the authors of their own actions and cannot be held responsible for them. What’s more, Harris’s new and improved criminal justice system raises the problem C. S. Lewis identified in his critique of the “humanitarian” approach to punishment: some members of society will impose costs and inflict pain on others solely for the purposes of protecting society and promoting socially beneficial outcomes—that is, outcomes beneficial to the members imposing the costs and inflicting the pain. But if we cannot say the recipients of these costs and pain deserve such treatment in any meaningful way, how is the treatment justified? Only a utilitarian calculus is left. Whatever is beneficial for the greatest number, or for whomever happens to control the levers of the social conditioning system—for that is what was called criminal justice would be. And, as Lewis asks in The Abolition of Man, how will these conditioners themselves be conditioned, if not in light of their accountability to the moral law as persons with the capacity for will, reason, and agency? Loury’s own perspective on crime, punishment, and justice is much subtler and more nuanced, balancing the need to hold people accountable for their actions with the demands of justice and decency, and it supports his advocacy of a focus on human development and empowerment. 

Loury’s perspective, taking account of both individual choice and social responsibility, is essential for preserving the ancient belief, central to many of our social institutions, in human agency. That belief in agency, constrained and conditioned as it is by cultural, historical, psychological, and biological factors, accords with common sense and an ancient tradition of thought, traceable at least to Plato and Aristotle, that gives attention to the development of human virtue. In this view, human persons are ensconced within social systems, to be sure—these thinkers extensively consider education and social arrangements. Yet, they and the Christian thinkers who built on their work, from Augustine to Aquinas, recognized that the sociality of the human person is related to the reason, will, and indeed ensoulment of the person. Humans’ capacity for speech and collective deliberation hints at both the rational and the social elements of our nature.

In his subtle analysis of the interplay between the social conditions of human development and individual agency, Loury’s work not only resonates with echoes of ancient and medieval thinkers, but it stands in and furthers the tradition of the more recent social and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, whose attention to social mores, religion, and liberty he likewise models. Tocqueville was attuned to the historical, geographic, and social conditions of society, but he insisted on the reality of human agency, which undergirded his defense of human liberty.

Loury’s eschewal of determinism has implications for social science and public policy. In his 2005 speech, “Hope in the Unseen: On Being a Christian and an Economist,” he pointed out the following:

Social science tends to offer deterministic accounts of human action… Our theories say, in effect, that material conditions mediated by social institutions cause people to behave in a certain way. Yet, it may be more plausible to think of material and institutional givens as establishing only a fairly wide range within which behavior must lie, with the specific behavior within this range for any particular person being dependent upon factors of motivation, will and spirit— factors having to do with what that person takes to be the source of meaning in his or her life, with what animates him or her at the deepest level. If this is right, then it is crucial to grasp the implication that the behavior of freely choosing, socially situated, spiritually endowed human beings will in some essential way be indeterminate, unpredictable, and even mysterious.

Loury argued that, “until economic science takes this aspect of the human drama with the utmost seriousness it will do justice neither to the subject of its study, nor to the national [community] that looks to it for useful advice about a host of social ills.” When it comes to human behavior, social scientists, to be true to their subject, must leave room for the reasoning, willing, acting person. We must leave room for the spiritual, meaning-oriented nature of human life.

A number of public problems bedeviling modern Americans, from the drug crisis to mass shootings, to crime, force us to confront the unpleasant reality that human beings, without exception, often desire, will, and do evil. As the Apostle Paul writes, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Yet confronting that fact does not diminish the importance of social determinants of opportunity and outcome; rather, the possibility and reality of freely chosen human evil heightens the need for a robust suite of social efforts and norms that help form and shape human persons. We need ultimately to be redeemed by grace through redemption in Jesus (Rom. 3:24). But we also need to be shaped, formed as persons in order to achieve some degree of virtue. In his abundant grace, God gives us families, neighbors, and the church, through which we form each other, articulate our ideals and aspirations, and shape our common destiny.

Loury’s rejection of determinism and materialism suggests his recognition of the importance of the spiritual dimension of human life and supports his politics of empowerment, specifically as related to addressing racial inequality:

My conservative prescription for the problem of persistent racial inequality in the twenty-­first century is as follows. First, fortify the mediating institutions—families, churches, civil associations—through which citizens, especially the most vulnerable, develop the competencies to enjoy the fruits of liberty that our constitutional framework can deliver. Second, the state can ­supplement, but it cannot substitute for, those mediating institutions. There are times when the state needs to step in; but solutions to problems in our communities can and should come from those communities. Third, each and every one of us who believes in modest national government and mediating institutions should look for the grassroots leaders in our own communities and quietly, without fanfare or virtue-signaling, ask how we can help them do the important work they do: educating children; helping wayward young men find their way; teaching the vocational skills that support gainful employment; instructing young mothers on how to meet their parental responsibilities; comforting those who have lost loved ones to gun violence; bringing “hope in the unseen” to those seeking spiritual enrichment. (If you detect a Tocquevillean sensibility in these prescriptions, that’s no accident.)

Loury has kept warm the old idea that we are social, moral, and spiritual beings. We ignore any of these elements of human personhood and our common life at our peril.

A Black American Man of the West

Loury’s attention to spiritual matters is deeply rooted in the experience and tradition of black Americans. Decades of suffering, of striving, and of hoping for liberty cultivated among black writers, singers, orators, artists, ministers, and politicians a spiritual vitality that has nourished and challenged the consciences and souls of Americans. As an economist, social theorist and critic, and public intellectual, Loury can claim an important place in this tradition.

He can claim a place in the Western tradition—indeed as a defender of the Western tradition against the attractions of determinism and denial of personal reality. “I am a man of the West,” he proclaims. “I am an inheritor of its great traditions: Tolstoy is mine. Dickens is mine. Newton and Maxwell and Einstein are mine.” The moral and spiritual tradition to which Loury appeals is deeply shaped by Christian belief and practice. Yet there is also a powerful drive for individual autonomy, for agency, recognized and exalted at times in the Western tradition by thinkers like Immanuel Kant, among Loury’s favorite Enlightenment luminaries.

Finally, Loury claims a place in the uniquely American tradition. It is a decidedly mixed tradition that he and all of us inherit. On the one hand, as Loury’s early scholarship and public work in the late ‘90s and 2000s explicated, the inheritance is one of institutionalized racial subordination and deprivation, the legacy of which still burdens us. On the other, Loury has characterized the United States as “the greatest force for human liberty on the planet.” Our situatedness in a particular national history comes with constraints and burdens, but it also offers a rich inheritance of institutions, ideas, and traditions that sustain our common life and offer resources for its renewal and improvement. Through his scholarship and public engagement, drawing on his training and experience as a black American intellectual, Loury has kept old truths warm to provide understanding of the new. He is a man uniquely fit to be a teacher, urging and equipping us to take up the task of envisioning and pursuing a better and more empowering common life for all, never wavering in our “hope in the unseen.”

---

Ben Peterson is an assistant professor of political science at Abilene Christian University. In his writing, he draws from resources in Christian social and political theory, the broader Western tradition of political thought, and contemporary social science to address questions related to public policy. You can find links to his other writings and information about his scholarship on his website.