During the brief period in which corporations thought it would be a good idea to indulge the political sensibilities of their junior employees, it became fashionable to adopt “mission statements” that expressed the supposedly higher purpose sought by the firm in its branches and divisions. This attracted a certain measure of ridicule, such as the case of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which decided that its real purpose was not to produce mayonnaise, but rather to “reduce food waste” by transforming leftovers into “delicious meals.” The obvious objection to this, expressed in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, was the tacit assumption that the product itself could not be the purpose. This appeared to concede the essentially anti-capitalist idea that there was something unworthy or grubby about just making mayonnaise and selling it to people, which then created the need to identify a “higher,” non-pecuniary purpose in order to edify the entire operation.

The mayonnaise mission statement became the object of public controversy when a major shareholder in Unilever (the parent corporation) complained that “a company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot.” I found this a bit uncharitable, since it’s not difficult to imagine why the company would have thought the mission statement to be not only good PR, but also good HR. For most people, sitting around at work every day thinking “I’m here to make money for Unilever” is less intrinsically motivating than “I’m on a mission to reduce food waste.”

I think about this episode sometimes as I’m driving to work. Technically, my job is to teach courses in philosophy. Students pay tuition, the university pays me, everyone goes home happy. The product is the purpose. No one thanks me, that’s what the money is for. I am, however, sometimes tempted by the idea that my work might have a loftier objective. Pressed to put it in the form of a mission statement, I might go with something like this: “reproducing the foundations of Western civilization, one lecture at a time.” Like the junior employees at Unilever, I find this more elevated statement of my task to be a greater source of motivation.

Of course, as in the case of mayonnaise, some people might find my mission statement a bit too lofty. In my defense, I should note that I don’t see myself making any particular contribution to human civilization or improving it in a noticeable way. I gave up on that a long time ago. Now I’m just trying to do my part to keep the show on the road, to discourage people from throwing away the stuff that works. Unfortunately, this leads to a natural follow-up question, which is why anyone would think that the reproduction of civilization requires help from the likes of me. That is something I also think about while driving to work, so here is my best response.

Allow me to kick things off with an observation made by Pierre Manent in his very interesting history of liberalism:

A singular feature of the present historical situation is that political thought and political life are, in modern times, intimately linked. This is something new. The political history of Greece or Rome can be related without referring to “ideas” or “doctrines.” In his work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides does not devote a single page to what we would call the “intellectual” or “cultural” life of the period … This fact is all the more remarkable since Greece was the birthplace of philosophy, and in particular of political philosophy. It was from the experience of life in the Greek city-state that Plato and Aristotle elaborated their interpretations of human life, which constitute the matrix of all subsequent philosophy. But these interpretations emerged after the great cycle of Greek politics occurred. The case of modern political philosophy is completely different. One is tempted to say that it was conceived and chosen before being implemented.

There are two points that I would add to this. First, because the ideas preceded their institutional realization, the reproduction of these institutions also requires the reproduction of the ideas. A generalized loss of conviction in our inherited principles of political philosophy would constitute a functional challenge to our institutions. Second, the ideas are unobvious; they do not coincide with anyone’s untutored intuitions. As a result, they must be explained to each new generation in order to carry any persuasive force. This has two enormous consequences. Sociologically, it means that the formal education system becomes an essential component of the core institutional structure of our society. Culturally, it means that cognitive elites become essential social actors, since they are the ones who do the explaining. (This has certain unfortunate byproduct effects, with perhaps the most important being that those who do not make it very far in the formal education system wind up being more or less out of the loop when it comes to the reproduction of civilization.)

What makes the reproduction of these ideas challenging is that the two sets of governing principles in our society—liberalism for the state and capitalism for the economy—are second-best arrangements. In other words, they do not coincide with most people’s sense of what an ideal world would look like. (Just to be clear, they are not second-best in the real-world sense. In the real world, they are the best that we can hope to attain, at least for the foreseeable future. The problem is that they are second-best with respect to most people’s personal values and moral ideals. They are not à la hauteur de nos espérances. This is why people got so annoyed at Francis Fukuyama for declaring the end of history. As Andrew Potter put it, “The suggestion that the endpoint of human development, the culmination of the ancient struggle for recognition, amounts to little more than the admixture of the Bill of Rights and Best Buy does not fill everyone’s heart with joy.”)

We have names for the first-best arrangements—those that most people come into the world wanting and wondering why we cannot obtain. In the domain of politics, the ideal is normally some form of communitarianism. People want to live in culturally rich communities with shared values and a dense network of high-trust social relations. In the economic realm, the ideal that corresponds to our everyday moral intuitions is socialism. Since the division of labor that characterizes our economic life is, fundamentally, a system of cooperation, it seems only natural that it should be governed by norms that directly enjoin cooperative behavior. We should all pitch in and do our part, selflessly devoting ourselves to the larger social project, sharing equally in the benefits.

And yet looking at the world we live in, what stands out most prominently are institutional arrangements that not only fail to promote these ideals, but in certain ways block their realization. In the political realm, we have a system of individual rights that recruits the power of the state to provide legal protection for self-evidently anti-social or self-destructive behavior. So we wind up living in a world of 4chan memes, Twitter Nazis, Russian trolls, Instagram thirst traps, mail-order drugs, etc. In the economic realm, instead of promoting cooperation, we instead strive to instill competition, creating winners and losers out of what should be a system of mutual benefit. And so we get a world marred by extreme inequality, environmental destruction, renegade billionaires, precarity for the young, etc.

When confronted by this spectacle, it is extremely natural to suspect that the profusion of anti-social behavior is elicited, to at least a large degree, by the legal protection that it is offered by our institutions. This leads many people to wonder why, instead of following this path, we do not use the power of the state to promote shared values or shared cooperative endeavors. Again, this is a perfectly natural thought. It is why, historically, the first pass at producing a political philosophy—whether it be in Plato or Confucius—came back with the same idea, that the law should be used to enforce morality and promote social cohesion, by rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked.