The 2016 GMC Sierra 1500. Couldn’t find a public domain image of the 2018 model.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on
And it makes me wonder.—Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven
For the opening sentence of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant famously wrote, “The only thing that is good without qualification or restriction is a good will.” In so doing, he threw down a distinctly modern moral gauntlet, and did so in a rather breathtaking fashion. With this statement, Kant announces his “Copernican revolution in morality”—we need not (indeed must not) look outside ourselves for the source of moral value. Pure reason in its practical employment, he insists, is that which gives rise to moral objectivity, such that the everyday rational agent, responsive to the categorical imperative’s “moral ought,” determines his or her actions in a way that is possessive of moral worth.
But we are not here headed down the road of trying to plumb the oceanic depths of Kant’s categorical imperative across its four formulations. This is rather a shame. Were we to do so, we would grasp the stunningly deepened conception of agency and moral personality he innovates to do justice to nothing more and nothing less than our ordinary moral experience. Instead, however, we are headed down a different road:
The road we are headed down is the one taken by the 2018 GMC Sierra 1500.
I’m sure I know what you are thinking. What in the world could possibly connect these two roads? Just this: Where Kant writes that the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will, the GMC Sierra 1500 and its marketing department do not agree.
I’m quite certain that Kant would have been very distressed to learn that two hundred and thirty-three years later, the makers of the GMC Sierra 1500 not only disagreed with him about this, but had simply dismissed his idea completely out of hand.
Professional Grade A-Hole: Fade to Black
Fade from black, and you see the open road, the yellow center stripes passing quickly under your truck. Cue the strings section, repeatedly playing the same contemplative note, ostinato. We briefly see the driver’s face, pensive in the rearview mirror. Now cue the voiceover. “How do you want to live?” The husky male voice asks in quiet tones. “As a decent person? Not a bad guy? A good friend? Is that it? — Good?” Briefly, we see our driver from the back, standing and staring across a dark winter lake to the cloud-shrouded peaks on the far shore. “Of course not,” our narrator says. Now the pensive glimpses of our hero are interspersed with the GMC Sierra 1500, barreling up and down roads. Now the narrator’s voice gathers speed, betraying a touch of excitement; “King of the hill? Better. Top of your game? Win. All powerful? Like a boss. Like standard bearer. Like a pro.” The scene resolves to the confident and powerful GMC truck advancing head on toward the camera. “We couldn’t agree more,” GMC reassuringly intones. Fade to black.
Several points need to be made here, about this rather distressing dramatization of the hermeneutics of “type-A, kind-of-a-dick” moral experience. To begin with: there is no need, apparently, to tarry over what it means to be a “decent person.” Especially since it slides, as if on a generous layer of grease, into “not a bad guy” which pretty much tells us, by its use of the negative, that anything short of a first-class a-hole will apparently do just fine. The immediate follow up with, “A good friend?” tells us something else too–since between some shallow, all-around notion of decency, and the sphere of (male) friendship, is likely the space of relations with the opposite sex and that of the family—the space where the “not a bad guy” self-reassurance lives, in order to rationalize (and thus cover up) whatever it is that actually resides there.
But it’s the part which comes next that’s really the inflection point. How do you want to live? Decent person? Not a bad guy? A good friend? Is that it–good?”
I Went to Morality and All I Got Was This T-Shirt
Since when did being a decent person become something you could just check off and call it done and then regard as a sort of consolation prize, rather than a perennial struggle between duty (respect for humanity in ourselves and in others) and our various desires and inclinations?
Kant’s Groundwork was written during a time when empiricism and moral skepticism weren’t actually the default assumption of most ordinary people; the claims of rational theology resolved to a widely accepted moral point of view, while empiricism at that time was considered something of a scandal. But if morality itself was not seen as a problematic concept per se, it was also perfectly understandable to Kant that, as empirical selves we nevertheless stand in resistance to the moral law (the law that we give to ourselves). We wish that virtue and happiness would just somehow naturally coincide for us; but the testimony of the world tells us a different story, since by and large, the righteous are made to suffer and the wicked often go unpunished.
Kant’s account of moral personality finds its coherence not in his metaphysics of morals per se, but via his account of the categorical imperative as binding on rational agents, and through its function in everyday casuistry (in the actual practice of testing our maxims of action to see if they meet our universalist moral standards).
The topic of this rant about GMC is therefore really my disgust at seeing the “human capital mindset” explicitly valorized over and against a distinctly moral point of view.
As I said before, the categorical imperative is deep, and is thus highly rigorist in its demands. Virtuous action is indeed possible, but it is a constant struggle—as the moral philosopher J.B Schneewind has written, if we could simply and without much fuss just do what is right, then either we would be trained animals (in which case our actions would not be moral) or we would be Gods, in which case the meaning of virtue would be effectively evacuated. This is why the struggle is real—because we are neither beasts nor angels.
Which brings me back to GMC Sierra guy, who appears to conflate something like the idea of the moral good with scoring only a “B on a test,” as if “good” here meant something less than excellent or outstanding on a grading curve. “How do you want to live? Is that it—Good? Certainly not.”
Much better than settling for being a decent person is to take it up a notch, because you know, that decency stuff is all well and good, but it’s mostly “for the stiffs.” Which is not to say that someone who lives their life to be “king of the hill, or top of their game, or all powerful” is some sort of a “wise guy.” No, aspiring to “be a boss, to be a pro,” is to have bought into what neoliberal ideology calls human capital.
Build on Moral Decency to Ensure Maximum ROI
Both Steve Heikkila and myself have written repeatedly on IDT about the accelerated and unacceptably reductionist “re-definition of the person” taking place under condition of an ascendant neoliberal ideology (in its various aspects–economic, political, and governance-related).
The topic of this rant about GMC is therefore really my disgust at seeing the “human capital mindset” explicitly valorized over and against a distinctly moral point of view.
To share in this disgust, by the way, you don’t have to partake of my enthusiasm for the rigors of Kantian moral theory. I chose to talk about it here because of the starkness of the contrast. But any garden variety Liberal humanism works almost as well. As a humanism, Liberalism at least recognized that our status as “free laborers” left us with needs and aspirations and interests that couldn’t be satisfied just by the law of supply and demand. This recognition of a lifeworld beyond the market is part of what led the Liberal state to protect its rights-bearing citizens from the vagaries of the market by extending social benefits.
Incidentally, even those who do not see themselves explicitly as moderns, but who cleave to a traditionally religious understanding of the dignity of the person, should find more common cause with their former Liberal humanist adversaries that with this sorry lot.
In the business world, Bill and Melinda explain, “people are a company’s most valuable resource.
Under the hegemony of Neoliberalism, the (hypothetical) citizen equality under rule of law and Liberal participation in popular sovereignty is replaced with a market formulation of only winners and losers. Since the market now supervises the state, it continually activates the state on behalf of the economy. To facilitate competition and growth, it now regulates the social by way of the market.
Wendy Brown has written that, “Today’s homo economicus is an intensely constructed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive position and with enhancing its portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.”
Where competition replaces concern over fair exchange and inequality becomes normative, labor ceases to be a central or meaningful category. There is only capital—financial and human, obscuring the remaining visibility of class and eliminating alienation and exploitation as the rationale for unions, consumer groups, and any other forms of economic and social solidarity. As human capitals, we are all equally entrepreneurs (except of course for our differing quantity of financial capital). Since our value as human beings is not intrinsic, it can appreciate or depreciate. If we turn out to be losers, there is nobody to blame but ourselves. So, don’t you want to be King of the hill? Top of your game? Don’t you want to be all powerful? Don’t you want to win? You know, like a boss. Like a pro!
What Bill and Melinda Want You to Know
This brings me to another (related) thing that seriously annoyed me this week, along with the GMC Sierra commercial (I’m not mentioning the things that made me want to weep). It was a “sponsored content” article developed as a collaboration between Vox Creative and the underwriter, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The title is Human Capital and the Benefits, Explained.
“In the business world,” Bill and Melinda explain, “people are a company’s most valuable resource. An individual can be the difference between closing a deal or losing a customer, for example, or they might boast a robust network of helpful contacts. In short, people possess intrinsic social and business currency.”
I mean, if you treat yourself like a commodity, is it really so bad if large capital investors do it too?
If you look closely at the subtle transition from “the business world” to “the world,” perhaps you will see what is going on here—namely, the naturalization of the market. The fact that it may be appropriate in the business world to think of people, first and foremost, as a resource, does not, in fact, mean that human beings as such possess intrinsic social and business currency. Business currency is not an intrinsic characteristic or quality or attribute of human beings–It is a characteristic of human beings as seen in the context of “the business world.” So, unless the business world is the whole world, the claim of intrinsic quality is false.
One way to assess “this personal value” is by considering human capital, which according to Bill and Melinda, is “the sum total of a population’s health, knowledge, and skills.” Since devoting funds to education and healthcare only has upsides, per Bill and Melinda, this leads to the big question— “why aren’t more countries prioritizing these investments?” Or put differently, why aren’t they thinking of them as investments?
By way of an answer, Bill and Melinda offer a brief history of human capital, to provide context. We are told that in the late 17th century, a certain Englishman first worked to “place a money value on laborers” and that a 19th century German economist came up with a formula to “figure out the total cost of producing a human being,” although, as it turns out, he neglected interest, depreciation, and maintenance. Despite the rise in the popularity of human capital after WWII, however, “…some hesitated to use the term due to the potential connotation with slavery, or an insinuation that people were a commodity.” Apparently, Bill and Melinda explain, the idea of treating human beings as wealth that can be augmented by investment ran counter to deeply held values.
Still, can it really be wrong to want to invest in people? After all, people invest in themselves, right? I mean, if you treat yourself like a commodity, is it really so bad if large capital investors do it too? Once we accept the idea of human beings as first and foremost human capital, all sorts of win-win scenarios are possible. Don’t you want to be like a boss? Like a pro? You just need to look at this the way an investor would—As Bill and Melinda tell it, “there are great global opportunities for human capital investments.”
For example, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Human Capital index, the bulk of the world’s younger workers are located in Africa. By 2035, the continent is on track to have the largest workforce in the world. Of course, it’s true that these investments might not offer immediate dividends–but wise investors can afford to wait, right? Can there really be any doubt that they will provide a dramatic payoff down the line? How do you want to live, Africa? Top of your game? Better. Like a pro? Win!
