23: Carver: reluctant demi-georgist

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  April, 2004  by Robert V. Andelson

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In 1954, just prior to becoming a nonagenarian, Dr. Thomas Nixon Carver, who had retired from the Harvard faculty more than two decades before, began a new career as a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times. The vigorous and trenchant pieces that appeared under the by-line of this remarkable man until his death, seven years later, at the age of ninety-six, are well remembered by the present writer, who was then pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Southern California--coincidentally, Carver's alma mater.

Iowa-born, educated at U.S.C. and Cornell, Carver was the author of eighteen books (on sociology, social philosophy, and even religion, as well as on economics), including Essays in Social Justice, which contains a unique chapter, "The Single Tax." In 1915, when this work appeared, he was David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy at Harvard, and had just spent two years as a high official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The following year he served as president of the American Economic Association.

What makes the chapter unique is that in it Carver firmly endorses a large measure of land-value taxation for reasons of his own, while at the same time attacking, sometimes scathingly, many of the arguments advanced for its adoption by Henry George and his followers. Let it never be imagined that this crusty scholar was not an independent thinker!

Nature and Morality

Carver was a Darwinian empiricist, who had no use for what he regarded as abstract metaphysical ideas of right and justice, and who defined morality as the facilitation of human adjustment to the material universe. (1) That social group the members of which best manifest such qualities as industry, frugality, enterprise, fortitude, and mutual helpfulness will be best adapted to the inexorable and universal laws that govern the material universe, will be strong, and will survive in the inevitable competition with other groups:

   Instead of saying that nature is non-moral or that science is unable
   to discover the moral order of the universe, we should say that
   nature is the final authority on morality, and that our opinions,
   likes and dislikes, approvals and disapprovals, must be modified to
   suit that final authority.... If we once perceive that morality is
   merely social hygiene, and that anything is moral which works well
   for society in the long run, which prolongs its life and enables it
   to grow and flourish and hold its own in competition with other
   societies, and beat out all those which are organized on immoral
   bases, we should think no more about questioning the moral order of
   the universe than we do now of questioning the hygienic order. We
   should then say frankly that whatever the order of the universe is,
   that, per se, is the moral order, likes and dislikes, approvals and
   disapprovals to the contrary notwithstanding. We should then say
   that whatever social customs and conventions are found to fit into
   the order of the universe, and whatever private conduct is found
   to permanently strengthen the social group, that is per se
   morality. (2)

Let it be immediately noted that this formulation exhibits the socalled Is-Ought Fallacy: one cannot get an ought solely out of an is, cannot derive a value judgment merely from a factual one. But this is an issue about which logicians are by no means in agreement, and, in any event, Carver would doubtless retort that if his formulation is deductively invalid, then so much the worse for the deductive method; he prefers to rest his case at the bar of induction.

Despite his stated antipathy for metaphysical abstraction, Carver sees no conflict between his Social Darwinism and "the highest form of religious thought which the world possesses today," (3) asserting that "the laws of natural selection are identical with the laws of divine approval; and ... the process of exterminating the unfit or the unadapted is only a manifestation of divine disapproval." Behind the material universe is the divine energy and will, which not only created it but sustains and re-creates it continuously every moment. This belief is stated only in passing in the Essays, and is not the dominant theme even in Carver's slim volume The Religion Worth Having, (4) which seems to make utility in promoting human prosperity the ultimate criterion for religious value. Yet it may help to provide the answer to what would be otherwise a mysterious element in Carver's thought--the individual's motive for embracing the work ethic. Carver some times speaks as if the stern code of natural selection operates undeviatingly upon individuals, so that industrious and provident persons automatically prosper and survive while the idle and profligate suffer and are doomed. But, as Job protested, in this world such inevitability of personal desert does not obtain. Although it may be that the Puritan virtues make the possibility of individual prosperity and survival greater, still, as Carver recognizes, many a man has been so circumstanced as to be able to enjoy a life of luxurious indolence with no ill effect other than perhaps an occasional attack of gout. Apart from a theological impetus, it is difficult to understand why such a one would be moved to abandon his parasitic existence for the strenuous "worldly asceticism" Carver would have him embrace in order to make a productive contribution to his nation or race. True, Carver endorses social arrangements that would remove, to a considerable extent, opportunities for luxurious indolence. Moreover, he does not consider human nature wholly selfish. But he places immense stress upon the cultivation of a kind of sacrificial patriotism that, when not informed by powerful religious sentiment, one normally observes only in wartime or other periods of extraordinary national emergency.