III. Letters from Quebec: A Philosophy for Peace and Justice.
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Letter 63 The Denkform of the Middle Ages or Como Ha de Hacer el Arroz *1. Let us try to imagine a society where the presumed natural objective of each of its members was to live according to virtue. In that imaginary place people might not be any better than they are here and now, and discipline might not be any more strictly enforced, but it would be different from here and now in the extent to which it would be assumed (in the absence of any evidence to the contrary) that people were trying to be better, because being better would be assumed to be the natural aim of any creature. In terms of the categories of ethical theory, this would be a society where a perfectionist ethic prevailed. Trying to make one's conduct as nearly perfect as one could would be considered normal. *2. If I were a European I would be assisted in my effort to imagine a society guided by a perfectionist ethic by the continuing presence of the medieval cathedrals. If I lived in Paris, for example, I might live a modern life governed in its overall structure mostly by monetary calculations, but I might see Notre Dame every day on my way to work, and be reminded every day by its heaven-pointing spires of the philosophy they express. Medieval ethics was a perfectionist ethics, as was that of Aristotle, on which it drew. The cathedrals were designed to be instruments of moral education, whose office was to teach and to uplift; to make visible and moving the virtues, the paths to the virtues, the pitfalls of vice, the gifts of the spirit, and the beatitudes; in a world where the activity called "thinking" was classically shown in St. Thomas' synthesis of Greek philosophy with Judeo-Muslim-Christian religion. (See Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. New York: Meridian Books, 1957; John Ruskin, "The Bible of Amiens", in The Works of John Ruskin. London: George Allen, 1908, volume XXIII. The contributions of Islam to the medieval synthesis and to modernity's universal human values have been too little recognized; see Samir Amin, Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989) *3. Not being European, but Californian, I am reminded that there once were societies which conceived the point and purpose of life in a way different from the conceptions characteristic of modern economic society by the continuing presence of the Franciscan missions. The missions show a world not governed by money; not long ago and far away, but scarcely two centuries ago, and in my own state, even in my own county, in my own city, and, as it happens, on my own street; I have only to walk ten blocks up Laguna Street to find myself on the grounds of Mission Santa Barbara. A few blocks beyond the Mission is the Museum of Natural History, which features an extensive display showing the way of life of the people who lived here before the Franciscans came, the Chumash Indians, who were not governed by money either. They were a gathering, hunting, and fishing people, who developed a unique technology and culture. (If I still lived in Quebec, I could walk a few blocks to my older daughter's school, the Petit Seminaire, which holds classes in the old walled city, on the former campus of Universite Laval, founded by the Jesuits in 1636, in buildings whose very design and layout breathes the atmosphere of a worldview that is not modern.) *4. To be different is not, of course, necessarily to be better, although something is demonstrated just by being different and being worse - because it shows that what exists here and now is not necessary. It proves that other cultural structures are possible; the mind is assisted to imagine many possibilities, and among their array there may be some which are:
*5. I could articulate the guiding question, which motivates my exploration of medieval and other non-modern cultures in this way: what is the condition of the possibility of any viable democratic socialism ? *6. I still think socialism is a beautiful ideal - like Gandhi, "I love the very word" - even though in these days (I am writing this in 1992) when capitalism is triumphing everywhere, most people find it hard to imagine that there might be a condition under which democratic socialism would be possible. I realize, too, that there are people who hate the very word "socialism," and I would not want a mere nine letters to divide us. If they propose a democratic capitalism which can achieve the essential goals I identify with socialism, then we can agree. *7. My answer to my guiding question, in other words my thesis, might be articulated this way: ethical culture is the condition of the possibility of any viable democratic socialism. In one respect ethical culture is the usual form of culture, for to be governed by ethics (that is, by normative customs, and by ideals depicting character traits consonant with them, known as virtues) is the usual form of culture. To be governed by ethics is typical of the cultural animal, the human. It is, in Max Weber's terminology, traditional. In another respect ethical culture names humanity's need to do something it has never done before: to bring modern institutions under the control of democratic ideals, so that their performance can be evaluated, so that institutions can be shaped to be sustainable and to meet human needs. *8. "Yikes! Government by ethics sounds medieval." *9. Exactly. *10. The reason why "ethical culture" is the answer to the question asked might be compressed into a few words as follows: the patterns of human action need to be shaped into forms that produce the goods, the services, the satisfying social roles, the feelings of self-worth and dignity, which humans need. The "shaping" is the ethical culture. The meeting of "need" is the socialism. *11. Before expanding the meaning of my thesis and explaining in the process why I consider it to be true, and why because it is true it should be accepted not only by those of us who find it charming but also reluctantly by those who wish it were false; and before explaining farther why I believe modernity has much to learn from its own immediate predecessor, the European middle ages; and before discussing some structural traps which frustrate modernity's best attempts to improve itself; and before explaining why modernity needs cultural resources beyond those it contains within itself in order to accomplish its own transformation; I should explain my title's foreign words. The allusions implicit in these borrowings from foreign languages pertain to a sub-thesis implicitly tucked into my thesis, namely that the study and appreciation of non-modern cultures will help humanity to right its wrongs. *12. The word Denkform is taken from the book Atom und Individuum by Gideon Freudenthal. (Gideon Freudenthal, Atom und Individuum im Zeitalter Newtons. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982) A Denkform is a thought-form; the word is coined from the German word denken, to think. Freudenthal shows that the mechanistic philosophy characteristic of modern thought in its Newtonian version (and to a considerable extent in all its main versions) presupposes a world composed of equal elements whose essential qualities belong to them as individuals; they do not depend on the roles of the elements in systems. (p. 165 of English translation, Gideon Freudenthal, Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton: on the Genesis of the Mechanistic World View. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1986. Volume 88 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.) As a general Denkform of the age individualism is employed everywhere, not just in physics. For example: "Hobbes' broad concept of power [borrowed from Galilean physics. HR] thus justifies his view that a system consists of equal elements; moreover, this concept allows him to neglect the differences between the feudal and the bourgeois society, so that the determination of the essential qualities of the elements (the men) can be understood independently of a particular social system." (p. 126) Another example: "Seen from our perspective, the concept of `force' in Newton's mechanics is not merely a technical term of a particular discipline; it contains specifications derived from other individual sciences (e.g. physiology) or derived from philosophical disciplines (moral and social philosophy) or from the application of a general philosophical method." (p. 207) *13. I wish to suggest the characteristic shape of the Denkform of the Middle Ages. *14. Notice that the Denkforms in question are historically given socially constructed tendencies. They are not eternal essences; they are not theories independent of experience; they are not the form of any possible word; they are not categories of totality. Freudenthal derived the features of the mechanistic philosophy from historical research, and he utilized the research already done by Christopher Hill, C. B. MacPherson and others, and he found certain patterns which in fact pervade early modern thought. The resulting historical understanding is comprehensive; it can serve to orient the masses concerning the causes and cures of their suffering; it contributes to building a change-oriented ideology which is not "philosophical" in the sense in which to be "philosophical" means to be established on grounds independent of experience. Consequently, to the avant-garde theoreticians of disorder; the nouvelles philosophes, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard et al. we can say, that insofar as their aim was to deprive the Left of any comprehensive ideology which could serve to orient historical understanding, they have dedicated an enormous amount of ammunition to attacking decoys. (Similarly, it can be said that ideas like Wallerstein's "the logic of capitalism," Jameson's "the cultural logic of late capitalism," Merchant's "death of nature," and Amin's "accumulation on a world scale," reflect socially constructed institutional facts, and are consequently not dismantled by the heavy artillery that deconstruction deploys against traditional metaphysics.) *15. The deconstructionists can reply that even if their critiques do not apply to the works of Gideon Freudenthal, Christopher Hill, C. B. MacPherson, Immanuel Wallerstein, Fredric Jameson, Carolyn Merchant, Samir Amin, Susan Bordo, Karl Polanyi, Louis Dumont, and many others who have traced from historical materials the outlines of the symbolic structures of modern culture; still they do apply to the works of Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Ignatius, Rene Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and many others, including the person most important for present purposes, Saint Thomas Aquinas, who were metaphysicians, in the enlarged sense the deconstructionist tradition has given the word "metaphysics" since Heidegger called for the "destruction of the history of ontology." But granted that deconstructionist critiques apply, it does not follow that classical writings no longer have value. If one reads the classical writers as builders of social meaning, then the fact that subsequent critics can dismantle what they have built should be no surprise and should imply no evaluation. To evaluate we need to ask, "What good will it do humanity to deconstruct these ideas and institutions ?" And, "What, if anything, should we construct to replace them ?" *16. My other foreign phrase Como ha de hacer el arroz is the title of a recipe in an old Spanish cookbook. It means, more or less, "How one is supposed to make the rice." But I do not believe this foreign phrase has any translation into modern English which fully captures its meaning. The old Spanish carries the nuance that in this world there is a customary, rational, proper, and ultimately divine right way - and many deviant wrong ways - to do anything whatever. I take this recipe-title to be an artifact of a culture different from modernity, one where everything from the heavenly stars above to the pots and pans below was suffused with the aura of the virtue of obedience. *17. I am developing the opinion that humanity needs a general change in its style of thinking, not just a new approach to economics, not just a transfer of power from the elite to the masses, not just a stronger and reconceived United Nations, not just the replenishment of reservoirs of trust and spirituality, but also a revision of what I am calling here the Denkform, which might also be called the paradigm, or the set of symbolic structures, the intellectual dimension of the cultural structure, and any number of other things. Even though I am borrowing here Freudenthal's Denkform (and making rather more of it than he did), I believe "intellectual dimension of the cultural structure" would be a better phraseology, if it were not so clumsy, because it implies that thinking changes with acting, discourse with practice; it is not likely that humanity will first invent the new world in thought and then implement its invention by practicing it; rather, the structures will change as practices change, and along with culture's other dimensions, the intellect will change. The word "new," by the way, is used in this context with some reservations; especially when we are trying to appreciate some of the values of our older heritage we should bear in mind that humanity is not as likely to invent sheer novelty as it is to "back into the future" by relearning ancient wisdom. *18. To show why this opinion - that humanity needs nothing less than a change of the prevailing Denkform - is true, I will discuss here two structural traps, related to each other and to structural traps I have discussed in other letters, one of which can be called "the market market," and the other "economic power." Another name for the market is "shopping for laws," and another name for economic power is "sit still until bribed to move." *19. The perspective I am trying to develop with the idea of "structural trap" is this: in both ancient and modern times humanity has created many ways to shape behavior to make it pro-social instead of anti-social; all of many such moral, educational, therapeutic, and spiritual resources are at least candidates to be considered as possible means for attaining the ethical culture which I will be claiming to be the condition without which there cannot be a truly human society. The key problem is not that humanity lacks resources for improving its own behavior: it is that there are certain defects in the forms of our institutional structures, which tend to make our best intentions and best inclinations inoperative. Two of these "structural traps" I will show here (admittedly in a somewhat redundant manner, since I have already shown essentially the same thing in earlier letters) are integral to institutions and practices constitutively linked to mechanistic patterns of thinking, and are not likely to be changed until there are culturally-aware patterns of thinking.
*20. The English word "market" and its cognates in other modern languages derive from the Latin verb mercari, "to trade." The word was originally a verb, a sign of activity; then its substantive form mercatu became the noun designating the group of people gathered together with their respective wares for the purpose of conducting that activity. Only much later did mercatu's descendants become the name of the abstract world-embracing framework for human action that we know today as "the market." *21. The word "market" seems not to have become established in English until the 12th century. The first sense of "market" given by the Oxford English Dictionary, and the one which best reflects the word's traditional use, is as follows: "The meeting or congregating together of people for the purchase and sale of provisions or livestock, publicly exposed, at a fixed time and place; the occasion, or time during which such goods are exposed for sale; also the company of people at such a meeting." A typical early use of "market" is in the nursery rhyme:
"Market" was often synonymous with "fair" as the latter is used in:
The ancient sense of "market" refers to activities rather similar to what we today call a "farmer's market" or a "flea market." *22. Moral rules, a subset of the many moral rules which guided the whole of human conduct, prescribed proper conduct at markets, including the fixing of just prices when exchanging money for goods. Some of the rules, such as the famous one prohibiting "forestalling" (meeting suppliers on the roads before they got to the market, buying goods from them cheaply, then selling goods dear) were enforced by church and/or civil law. *23. The earliest American illustration of the use of the word "market" (in its old spelling "mercate") given by the Oxford English Dictionary is this sentence from the year 1649: "By order of court a mercate was erected at Boston, to be kept upon Thursday." *24. If we turn now to study the use of the term "market" in 20th century economic science, we find economists concerned to stress that the true definition of "market" is different from what tradition and common sense would lead us to believe. A "market" is not merely a gathering of people in a place to exchange money for wares and wares for money. A market is not located at a particular place, such as Boston Common; instead it exists throughout an area. Some markets are worldwide; there is a world market when, as is the case with bananas and crude oil for examples, the products are sufficiently standardized that they can safely be bought and sold without seeing them, and where the value is high at the point of resale compared to the cost at point of purchase plus the cost of transportation. (Brick markets usually cover only a comparatively small area, because bricks are costly to move, and when they arrive where they are going they are not likely to be appreciably superior to bricks which could have been produced close to the building site.) A market is constituted partly by communication - i.e. by people knowing what bargains are to be had by changing sellers or buyers or by traveling farther or shipping goods longer distances. Markets are partly constituted by unrealized possibilities - because bargains which really are struck are influenced by other alternatives open to buyers and sellers which might have been pursued but were not. Economics texts commonly define a "market" as a context or arena (not necessarily located in a particular place) in which buyers and sellers work out the terms on which goods and/or services will be exchanged. The great economist Alfred Marshall stated, "A market is an area within which buyers and sellers are in such close communication with each other that price tends to be the same throughout the area." (quoted by Lloyd G. Reynolds, Microeconomics: Analysis and Policy. Homewood, IL.: Irwin, 1973. p. 23) *25. The idea of "market," as it functions in 20th century economics, is inseparable from the idea of "price." One needs to refer to the process through which prices are determined in order to say that there is a market, and in order to specify which market it is, and in order to define the geographical area (if any) where the market functions. A price, as everyone knows, is a number, and numbers lend themselves to the building of logico-mathematical models of the kinds typical of modern science. *26. The scholastics of the Middle Ages engaged in moral deliberation to arrive at the "just price" for which a given good in a given market ought to be exchanged. It is often taken as an emblem of the shift from the medieval to the modern worldview that a new science arose in modern times, called at first "political economy," and later "economics," which eschewed the study of the "just price." Instead it built logico-mathematical models designed to explain and to predict the price phenomena observed in markets. *27. Not infrequently economists have overstated the significance of their models, by writing as though a logical implication valid in the theory they have constructed were identical with a causal nexus obtaining in the real world. Thus Paul Samuelson: "In a competitive market, price is determined by the schedules of supply and demand." (Paul Samuelson, Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, p. 407.) Yes, it is one hundred percent true that schedules of supply and demand "determine" prices in competitive markets, but only because the technical terms are so defined and related that certain constants (i.e. numbers) put into the schedules imply certain prices. How well the network of connected concepts thus employed sheds light on the causal processes at work in actual human behavior as it occurs in history is another question - a question, to be sure, with an answer that is not entirely negative, for if the institutions and characteristic patterns of motivation prevalent in modern society were not such that standard economic theory sheds some light on at least some real behavior at least some of the time, then modern society would never have come to see itself through the lenses provided by economic theory. *28. The detailed history of the word "market" has yet to be written. When it is written it will fill in the gaps between the beginnings of the word and the end-point reached in our times, viz.:
*29. When the history of the word "market" is written, it will surely show that its shifting meaning is only a small fragment, a small piece of the jigsaw puzzle, a symptom and a sign of the processes that have given shape to modernity's basic cultural structure, i.e. to capitalism, which is at the same time global and individualistic. Whatever the importance of the word "market," the institution it names is a key piece of the puzzle; it is what makes it possible for the global economy to be organized while the firms and persons in it make separate decisions. As Lloyd Reynolds has written: "What holds the economy together? A brief answer is that the system is coordinated through an interlocking network of markets." (Id. p. 22) *30. It is the interlocking of many markets, which gives rise to what I am calling the "market market." Thus Fernand Braudel writes of the origins of capitalism: "Certain groups of privileged actors were engaged in circuits and calculations that ordinary people knew nothing of. Foreign exchange for example, which was tied to distant trade movements and to the complicated arrangements for credit, was a sophisticated art, open to a few initiates at most. To me, this second shadowy zone [the first shadowy zone being the material life of the masses not yet incorporated into the money economy HR], hovering above the sunlit world of the market economy and constituting its upper limit so to speak, represents the favored domain of capitalism, as we shall see. Without this zone, capitalism is unthinkable: this is where it takes up residence and prospers." (Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th -18th Century. Volume I: The Structures of Everyday Life. Harper and Row: New York, 1981. p. 24) *31. It was not the peasant bakers selling their pies at county markets who produced capitalism. It was the people who made money by playing the market market. *32. As Wallerstein and others have shown, industrial production is best understood as more a consequence than a cause of the expansion of markets and the creation out of the dissolution of the old empires of nation-states (the first of which was Holland) - each one smaller than its trading area, and by nature an institution geared to compete in an economy larger than itself. *33. It is a feature of the "market market," especially as it has developed in our times, that what the buyer buys is, among other items, laws. The kind of market in question is one which is coterminous with a political subdivision, so that the political conditions prevailing in that place are features of its economic environment. The buyer, say a Multinational Corporation, shops in the market market to find a market which offers the conditions for producing maximum profits, such as:
*34. The difference between using money and being governed by money can be explained through the concept of "market market." In a market (in the old sense of the term) money is used, but it does not govern. The use of money is itself governed by laws, by customs, by morals.... But in a market market the laws, the customs, the morals ... are themselves among the merchandise bought and sold. Then there is government by money. *35. When mobile wealth goes shopping in the market market, to find conditions enabling it to invest itself so that it can maximally accumulate more of itself, it is not always clear exactly which market, all things considered, offers the most benefits at the lowest price. Different jurisdictions hawk their wares, some emphasizing their cheap labor, others the purchasing power of their consumers, still others the cultural attractions which draw highly skilled personnel to want to reside there. The structural trap inherent in the situation, from the point of view of anyone who wants to construct democratic socialism, is that any attempt to shift downward the benefits of economic activity, which improves the standard of living of the people at the expense of profit, risks inducing the owners of mobile wealth to go shopping in the market market to find a seller of laws who offers investors more favorable terms. *36. The real-world changes in early modern Europe, which produced the market market and eventually led to its contemporary forms, were supported by changes in philosophy. The characteristic Denkforms of modernity emerged. Its most characteristic Denkform (the one described by Freudenthal) made it possible to reconceive the old idea of "market." A market in the new sense of the term, in the intellectual context of the mechanistic worldview, was thought to be - as everything else on earth and in the skies was thought to be - a set of forces which determined the observed phenomena. The forces were the preferences of buyers and sellers (demand and supply), and the observed phenomena were prices. The new institutions were - as most institutions in most societies typically are - disguised as non-institutions, as nature. *37. To cope with the situation in which humanity now finds itself - a situation in which "economic reality" has become oppressive to the point where it sometimes seems scarcely worthwhile to engage in deliberation concerning ethics, politics, ecology, or the implications of scientific findings of any kind for public policy, because in the end "economic necessity" will govern - several solutions are commonly proposed; among them are:
*38. Although my list of suggested ways to escape from the market market trap could be continued, I believe that any additions I might make to it would meet the same reaction I assume to have been elicited already by each of the items (a) through (g) just listed. Namely: "It sounds good, but if it happens at all, it will happen only on a limited scale, and will not alter the main trends of history. Measures such as those suggested in (a) through (f) above all presuppose a capacity for concerted action in pursuit of common goals greater than the very limited capacity for unified and coordinated action which our species possesses." *39. The question I am now pursuing now becomes: "Why are we, the humans living on this planet at this time, so confident that any social project requiring concerted action to reach common goals is unrealistic ?" The contrary is the truth: institutions which rely on the human capacity for sincere cooperation are the only ones that will work; cynicism is unrealistic, because it is nonfunctional. An important part of the explanation of the persistence of the nonfunctional belief that only individual self-interest is a strong and reliable motive, is that the assumption that reality is individual is the cornerstone of the most characteristic Denkforms of modernity. People like us, socialized in the cultural forms prevailing in the 20th century, cannot think at all without using categories which introduce biases in favor of drawing the conclusion that only individualistic capitalism can work. *40. I am almost at the point in my analysis where I am ready to draw the conclusion that the condition of the possibility of democratic socialism is the creation of a Denkform different from the one now prevailing, and to name that as-yet-unconstructed Denkform as "ethical culture." The reason why I am nearly ready to draw this conclusion is that otherwise it is not possible to escape the market market structural trap. The reason why I am not quite ready to draw this conclusion, is that I need to make my conclusion a positive one and I still do not have the necessary premises. I need to say, positively, under what conditions we could escape the market market structural trap. But I do not believe such an escape to be possible without a simultaneous escape from another trap: economic power. *41. Even if humanity could, for example, legislate through the United Nations universal enforceable standards protecting the environment, it would by such an action only succeed in stopping business activity. That is to say, business could not operate unless it complied. Thus humanity would not escape from, and would even aggravate, another structural trap, the one I am calling "economic power" for there would be no evident way of promoting the necessary starting of good and useful work. Economic stagnation, unemployment, shortages, depression... and the whole panoply of miserable mysteries associated with idleness and poverty in the very presence of all the elements and resources necessary to produce happiness, would continue to plague our species on into the indefinite future just as they already have plagued homo sapiens for so many years, without any reasonable explanation and without surcease. *42. The word "power" came into English as a derivative of the French pouvoir, to be able, which is at the same time a noun and a verb which can be conjugated. Pouvoir came from the medieval Latin potere, a late form of the classical Latin potesse, formed by adding the prefix pot to esse, "to be." Hence the etymology of the word, as well as the primary senses of it given in dictionaries, identify "power" with the ability to do something, with capacity. There is also etymological support for Rom Harre's thesis that the powers of a thing (its causal efficacy) contribute to defining what it is. *43. Hannah Arendt has defined political power as "the human ability not just to act but to act in concert." (Hannah Arendt, On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970. p. 44) She is one of a number of thinkers, many of them women, who assert the importance of thinking of "power" as "power with" as distinct from "power over." They hold that power rightly understood, or understood as it would be best for humanity to understand it, is the ability to cooperate. *44. Concepts of "power" are more central to political science, which is sometimes defined as the study of power, than they are to economics. Major traditions in political science and in sociology have followed the "power over" model criticized by Arendt, in which to have power means to have a high probability of succeeding in imposing one's will on others. Otherwise put, one has power when one's commands are obeyed. "Power" is sometimes distinguished from "authority;" the former is taken to mean one's commands really are obeyed, the latter to mean that the norms prescribe that one ought to be obeyed. *45. Certainly one of the attractions of the idea of "power" for the social sciences, especially when it is identified with what really is, as distinct from what merely ought to be, is that "power" is also a term used in physics, where it is defined as the capacity to do work. The precise meaning of "power" in physics is perhaps less important for social science than the general availability of a family of related words including "power," "force," "variable," "factor," and "equation," as resources of the characteristic Denkforms of our culture considered suitable for use in any science. *46. As Freudenthal and others have pointed out in connection with the writings of Hobbes and others, the ubiquity in modern thought of "power" and the other elements of the semantic field with which it is connected, makes it easy to talk about "economic power" as if it were just another form of some general underlying reality called "power." If the truth be told, there is nothing as mysterious as "force" or "power," or "a factor," and yet it is one of the canons of the modern worldview that when phenomena are redescribed in the language of forces, powers, and factors, they are "explained," or at least recast in a form that will make their explanation possible. Bertrand Russell, recognizing the philosophical debility of thinking which simply slides from one kind of human activity to another, assimilating them to each other by using the word "power" frequently in any context where one happens to find oneself, nevertheless defended the tendency to equate "forms of power" by claiming that as a matter of historical fact forms of power are equivalent because once you have one kind you can use it to get the others. For example, if you have military power you can use it to get economic or political power; if you have economic power you can use it to get political or military power; etc. (Bertrand Russell, Power, a New Social Analysis. London: Allen and Unwin, 1967.) *47. In analyzing what is unique to "economic power;" in distinguishing it from other "forms of power," and in perhaps even marking it as so different from other socially constructed entities called "power" that the same word "power" should not be used to name both it and those other entities; and in perhaps even concluding that the whole idea of "forms of power" is mistaken because there is no underlying reality properly called "power" which manifests its same self in different "forms" in different arenas; I shall suggest a contrast between the modern and the medieval Denkform. *48. Among the several processes and entities called "power," "economic power" is anomalous because it is negative. According to its etymology and many of its uses, power is capacity or ability to do something. But economic power is attributed to persons and institutions because of the consequences of their inertia. A labor union is said to have economic power to the extent that it can mount a successful strike. Landowners have economic power because they have a right to exclude trespassers; without their permissive acts no one can use their lands; they are able to charge rent only because they can forbid entry. The International Monetary Fund has economic power because it can bring a small third world country to its knees by putting the country's loan application in a desk drawer in an office on the seventh floor of its building in Washington DC, and doing nothing with it until its terms are met. A dentist may have any amount of pouvoir, any amount of can-do, measured in terms of capacity to cure the ills which plague people's teeth, but to have economic power the dentist must resist the temptation to do good; the dentist must not relieve the toothaches of people who have no money to pay for his services. Any business, be it a shop on Main Street with a small stock of greeting cards and art objects, or be it an international cartel with a large stock of titanium and high-technology patents, can only succeed if it does not deliver products to the customer until the price is right. Chester Barnard cites Walter Bagehot on the dire consequences - given our economic institutions - which befall those who lack the resolve to do nothing: "...operations with their own capital will only occupy four hours of the day, and they wish to be active and industrious for eight hours, and so they are ruined; if they could only have sat idle the other four hours, they would have been rich men." (Chester Barnard, Organization and Management. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948, p. 67, citing Walter Bagehot, The Works of Walter Bagehot. Vol. IV. pp. 566-567, Hartford, Conn. 1889). Investors and economic agents of all kinds show the extent of their economic power by bargaining; their right to charge money for their permissive acts is valid only because if they deny permission the productive actions using their resources are forbidden; the threat by which they use their power is the threat to call the deal off. *49. Where economic power reigns, the people who consider one person's need to be a sufficient reason for another person helping are punished for being good. They are driven bankrupt, their friends think they are insane, they are hospitalized as mentally ill. Those who complain that socialism will never work because it requires people to be better than they are, should be asked, "Why not first design a society in which people are allowed to be as good as they already want to be, and then later think about how to encourage people to be better ?" *50. One might object, on the other hand, that economic power is not necessarily negative, because it is a good thing that people in modern society are not compelled to work against their will, or to permit others to use their property without paying. This objection is surely partly correct if one means by "negative," "bad." A slave has no economic power; he or she is in principle obliged to do what his or her owner wishes all day every day, with no compensation and no choice. Nevertheless, I believe that to define economic power as negative is to make an accurate analysis. When mechanistic metaphors articulated and thus constituted modern society, simultaneously creating rights, freedom, the rule of law, freedom, property, economic power, and the notion that a social science could be built upon the premise that avarice is the natural condition of the human soul, they built the conceptual grid of a global system, capitalism, which was and is, as Fredric Jameson says, both the best thing and the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. To say economic power is negative is not to say it is bad; it is, indeed, a feature of our social structure in which the good is intertwined with the bad so closely that it will take us and our descendants generations to find ways to keep the good while discarding the bad. I do not believe it helps to deny that economic power is negative out of loyalty to an ethic of freedom; such a way of talking avoids problems without solving them. *51. Our "bargaining society" might be contrasted with any of many others, with, for example, the Aymara culture of the Andean highlands, but to bring the contrast closer to the contemporary USA, let us contrast it with an "ideal caring society," which follows a care ethic, as defined by Carol Gilligan. In the ideal caring society people participate in relationships in which they attend to and respond to each other's needs. They do what they should do, where what should be done is defined by certain social expectations - which, like all sets of social expectations, build upon possibilities inherent in the biological makeup of our species. In the case of the care ethic the expectation is that people care whether other people's needs are met. If this is taken to be the ideal, then by definition economic power should not, in general exist, because it functions by holding out for a high price, regardless of people's needs. (Admittedly, the ideal of a caring society is not an example of modernity's need for cultural resources beyond those it contains within itself in order to accomplish its own transformation; it is an example representing "a different voice" within our own culture.) Bargaining is, for the most part, not caring activity, not virtuous activity by the standards of any ethic; it is inactivity or the threat of inactivity; it is not doing what needs to be done just because someone else needs it done, but rather obliging the other to make it worth one's while to act. Nevertheless, a care ethic does not hold that one should act always for others, never for self. It is not easy (as Carol Gilligan emphasizes) to decide what one owes to oneself and to the other's self-respect, and to harmonize these with responding to need; maintaining self-respect, is an intrinsic part of maintaining caring relationships, because, as she notes, where one simply sacrifices oneself to the other, there is no relationship. Economics and caring do not in general coincide, but neither do they always conflict. For example, it happens sometimes that the exercise of economic power coincides with what a care ethic would prescribe anyway - for example, a landowner might refuse to renew a contract to use his or her land to plant tobacco, as a gambit to get the farmer to pay more rent, and the result might be to produce less tobacco and to deplete the topsoil less, which might well be the course of action an intelligent care ethic would recommend. The fact that economics and caring sometimes coincide, or can be made to coincide with suitably engineered systems of incentives, leads to an overly optimistic view of the prospects for achieving the equivalent of a care ethic by incremental reform without structural change - overly optimistic because it does not acknowledge structural traps like the "market market." *52. There are, of course, worse social organizations than bargaining societies; for example, those based on direct exploitation of slaves by violent subjection. History also knows cases of chaos where economic activity instead of being "coordinated through an interlocking network of markets" is not coordinated at all. And there have been vast and clumsy government bureaucracies which have tried to plan everything and have only succeeded in oppressing everyone. My point is not that humanity could not do worse, but rather that it could do better than to live, as it does, mainly in bargaining societies where prices are set through legally allowed and regulated economic combat, where the participants threaten each other with various forms of non-action, and actually practice massive doses of voluntary and involuntary idleness, and actually carry out massive activities which are not designed so much to meet needs as to implement the bargains arrived at by catering to the caprices of people who have the economic power to indulge their tastes. *54. Jean-Paul Sartre made a point somewhat similar to mine about the incompatibility in principle between the ideal caring society and the existence of economic power, when he analyzed the motives of the French students who revolted in 1968. He wrote that the students were in school learning the "universal," i.e. they were learning the results of "universal labor" in the sense Hegel gave that phrase. That is to say, they were studying knowledge acquired for all of humanity by the inventors and discoverers of modern science. The students wanted to use their knowledge for such purposes as growing wheat (if one is studying agronomy) or for curing sickness (if one is studying medicine) or for systematically coordinating activities (if one is studying management or accounting) etc. But the students knew that once out in the world they would be condemned to "the particular," i.e. to taking a job working for a boss whose necessary aim would be to make money. Their "universal" skills would be subordinated to the "particular," and that was why, according to Sartre's analysis, the students revolted. *55. John Rawls seems to me to have implied a point somewhat similar to mine about the incompatibility in principle between the ideal caring society and the prevalence of economic power, when he proposed a "difference principle" as a criterion of justice. On this principle inequality is justified to the extent that better prospects for some, e.g. the better prospects of those who start out in life as members of the entrepreneurial property-owning class, act as incentives producing material benefits for the disadvantaged. (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. p. 78) It would seem to follow that if humans were brought up to care more about each other's welfare than they now do, then the need for incentives to motivate the privileged to act in ways that favor the poor (and therefore the degree to which on Rawls' theory inequality would be justified) would be less. *56. Peter Maurin (co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement) made a point somewhat similar to mine when he wrote:
(Peter Maurin, The Green Revolution. Fresno CA: Academy Guild Press, 1961, p. 39) (The Greek ergon, like other words in older languages, is translated "work" or "function." Thus when Plato asks, "What is the function of the human being as such?" he could also be translated as asking, "What is the work of the human being as such?" It is only when wage-labor becomes the norm that it comes to seems normal to define one's "work" as what one does for pay.) The Maurin Principle, which he and Day lived by, and which many people both in and out of the movement they founded still today live by, is that a great deal of what needs to be done in this world would get done if people would just go ahead and do it. *57. Frances Moore Lappe and Paul Dubois make a somewhat similar point when they say that social transformation requires "initiating power," not just "veto power." Empowerment means developing the people's power to make things go, not just their power to make things stop. (Frances Moore Lappe and Paul Dubois, "Power in a Living Democracy," in Creation Spirituality, September-October 1992 issue, p. 23 ff.) *58. St. Thomas Aquinas held that apathy (acedia) was a sin; it was a mortal sin because apathy kills the life of the spirit, which lives in us by love, since through love God lives in us. (tollit spiritualem vitam, quae est per caritatem, secundum qum Deus nos inhabit) To be apathetic is not to care, which is to extinguish the life of the soul. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a 2ae. Question 35, article 3. Blackfriars edition, volume 35, p. 28. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972). *59. The thought cited in (50) from Sartre is a fragment of his larger philosophy, which is itself a fragment of modern continental philosophy. Rawl's thought in (51) is a fragment of liberalism. The thoughts cited from Peter Maurin and St. Thomas are fragments from a civilization with a characteristic Denkform different from the characteristic modern ones. If I were to try to write in a few words a key to the characteristic medieval symbolic structures I would write: everything is ordered to some end. (in St. Thomas' Latin, everything is ordinator ad quemdam finem) The thought that apathy is a sin has as its context a creation story, a theory of truth, a logic, a theory of human nature, a natural science, a theory of law, rules for commercial activity, doctrines concerning the sacraments and morals, an astronomy ..... all of which fit a pattern in which God's creation is designed and governed for purposes; and the proper purpose and function of human life is, as Aristotle said in the Ethics, virtuous activity. (The Latin verb ordino also means "govern" so to say everything is ordered to an end is also to say that everything is governed to an end.) *60. Nobody admired the Middle Ages (he called them "the Christian ages") as much as John Ruskin. Disgusted by the industrial 19th century England it was his fate to inhabit, he tended to see the phase of European history immediately preceding capitalism as paradise lost. In "The Bible of Amiens" (first published in 1881) he interpreted the cathedral of the town of Amiens, in Picardy, in France, as the town's educational institution par excellence, its Bible in the forms of architecture, statuary, and decorative arts. I will quote Ruskin at length because although he paints medieval Amiens couleur de rose, he highlights something important and true about the Middle Ages: it was a time when public institutions provided systematic instruction in the practice of virtue. "It is not easy for the citizen of the modern aggregate of bad building and ill-living held in check by constables, which we call a town, - of which the widest streets are devoted by consent to the encouragement of vice, and the narrow ones to the concealment of misery, - not easy, I say, for the citizen of any such mean city to understand the feeling of a burgher of the Christian ages to his cathedral. For him, the quite simply and frankly-believed text, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them," was expanded into the wider promise to many honest and industrious persons gathered in His name - "They shall be my people and I will be their God"; deepened in his reading of it, by some lovely local and simply affectionate faith that Christ, as He was a Jew among Jews, and a Galilean among Galileans, was also, in His nearness to any - even the poorest - group of disciples, as one of their nation; and that their own "Beau Christ d'Amiens" was as true a compatriot to them as if He had been born of a Picard maiden. ("The Bible of Amiens," cited above, p. 123) Concerning Madonna-worship: "...neither Madonna-worship, nor Lady-worship of any sort, whether of dead ladies or of living ones, ever did any human creature any harm, - but that Money worship, Wig worship, Cocked-Hat-and-Feather worship, Plate worship, Pot worship, and Pipe worship, have done, and are doing, a great deal, - and that any of these, and all, are quite million-fold more offensive to the God of Heaven and Earth and the Stars than all the absurdest and lovingest mistakes made by any generations of His simple children, about what the Virgin-mother could, or would, or might do, or feel for them. " (pp. 164-65) Concerning the statue of Christ and other artwork at the main entrance to the cathedral: "Of the statue of Christ, itself, I will not speak here at any length, as no sculpture could satisfy, or ought to satisfy, the hope of any loving soul that has learned to trust in Him; but at the time it was beyond what till then had been reached in sculptured tenderness; and it was known far and near as the "Beau Dieu d'Amiens." ... "Dominus Virtutum," "Lord of Virtues" is the best single rendering of the idea conveyed to a well-taught disciple in the thirteenth century by the words of the twenty-fourth Psalm. Under the feet of His apostles, therefore, in the quatrefoil medallions of the foundations, are represented the virtues which each Apostle taught, or in his life manifested; - it may have been, sore tried, and failing in the very strength of the character, which he afterward perfected. Thus St. Peter, denying in fear, is afterward the Apostle of courage; and St. John, who, with his brother, would have burnt the inhospitable village, is afterwards the Apostle of love. Understanding this, you see that in the sides of the porch, the apostles with their special virtues stand thus in opposite ranks.
"Now you see how these virtues answer to each other in their opposite ranks. Remember the left-hand side is always the first, and see how the left-hand virtues lead to the right-hand -
*61. To what extent the Middle Ages were as good as John Ruskin thought they were, and to what extent they were as bad as Edward Gibbon thought they were, need not be decided. To the extent that these are answerable questions, the answers are perhaps best sought in the works of demographic historians who have gathered detailed data on the living standards of the masses during medieval times, and data concerning the impact on the average person of the transition to capitalism; and also in the detailed studies of the subsequent pauperization of traditional peoples elsewhere, as India, Africa, Egypt, the Caribbean, the Orient ....etc. were incorporated into the global capitalist system. (See the introduction and bibliographical references to the works of the Annales historians in Quentin Skinner (ed.), The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. And see also Andre Gunder Frank, On Capitalist Underdevelopment. Bombay and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.) *62. The argument that it would be possible to construct a social reality in which people were systematically encouraged to attend to each other's needs has two steps. First, what liberal ethical theory calls an "ethics of perfection" is the human norm, inasmuch as it is normal for a society to seek to mold behavior according to whatever ideals its culture honors. A "virtue," in the most general meaning of the term, is simply a character trait deemed desirable; it is the habit of acting as the social ideal prescribes. Second, among the ideals which a culture might prescribe, and which various societies at different times and places to a greater or lesser extent actually have taught, are those of what we now sometimes call a "care ethic," an ethic which expects concern for others. *63. It would be possible to construct a social reality in which decisions concerning how to allocate scarce resources (in order to get the right mix of inputs into factories and farms, and in order to get the right mix of outputs into stores) were made without (or with fewer of) the threats and counter-threats to use economic power through which prices are now often fixed. Prices could be set (as they often are) by custom and by reasonable negotiations. Allocation of industrial inputs can be planned with input-output tables, using the principles pioneered by Piero Sraffa. (Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: prelude to a critique of economic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.) *64. Sraffa has shown that the production process can be organized by calculating its physical requirements. The technical coefficients needed can be determined by engineers, agronomists, and the like. Production will proceed, and will reproduce itself year after year, as long as its physical requirements are met. Humans have certain roles to play in cooperating with nature in productive processes, but as long as they do play those roles, it does not matter why they play them. It does not matter to the machines on the shop floor or to the trees in the orchards whether their human partners act from love of money or love of companionship, from fear or from aesthetic delight, from hostility or from playfulness, from military or from religious motives, from pride or from duty. There is an historical connection, but there is no logical connection, between the engineering requirements of high technology and a culture of avarice. *65. It is a mistake to try to build socialism by taking economic power, as if economic power were a capacity to act which could be conceived as a thing which could be taken away from one class of persons and delivered to another, and then turned from being put to bad use to being put to good use. Economic power is essentially negative; it functions by not doing things and by threatening not to do them. Socialism can only be built by dissolving economic power, i.e. by substituting for it democratic ways of performing the necessary functions now performed through the bargaining where the threat to use economic power is employed (e.g. price-setting, e.g. motivating). (This intellectual mistake, a consequence of inability to escape the prevailing Denkform, has cost millions of lives.) *66. Recently some people think the mistake just mentioned can be avoided by delivering economic power to the people instead of to the government. Instead of nationalized industries, grassroots cooperatives are advocated. But the mistake is in principle the same, as is the consequence: economic stagnation. Fortunately, however, many of the grassroots movements in practice combine the empowerment of the people with a care ethic. (Examples: Habitat for Humanity; the Church of the Savior in Washington DC, which is described in Elizabeth O'Connor's book, The New Community. New York: Harper and Row, 1976; the Parents and Children project in Chile, described in my book The Evaluation of Cultural Action. London: Macmillan, 1985.) Practice is ahead of theory. *67. Now I can return to my thesis. The condition of the possibility of democratic socialism is ethical culture. *68. "Socialism" as defined by Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1983 edition), is community ownership of the means of production, such that all members of society share in the work and in the products. Etymologically "socialism" is a variant of "social," from the Latin socius, which as an adjective means "sharing, associated, or allied," and as a noun refers to a "partner, comrade, associate, or ally." The Latin verb socio means to "unite, combine, or associate." (J. D. Simpson, Cassell's New Compact Latin Dictionary. Dell: New York, 1971) The 1992 platform of the Socialist Party of the USA states, "The aim of democratic socialism is the social ownership and democratic control of the major means of production and distribution of goods and services." (Platform 1992 published by Socialist Party USA, 516 W. 25th St. #404, NY, NY 10001.) Although it is thus common to define socialism as public ownership, it is not, in my opinion, perspicuous. I believe that most people who call themselves socialists would agree with me that public ownership of productive resources is more a means-to-an-end than an end-in-itself. "Public ownership" expresses a valid principle - the principle that the goods of the earth should be used for everyone's benefit and not just for the benefit of privileged classes. But private ownership sometimes works for everyone's benefit more than does public ownership, and one is not less socialist for favoring what works over what does not work, or for favoring fact over fiction. "Public" and "private" are in any event only convenient labels approximately describing some of the many types of complex bundles of rights, powers, privileges, and duties called "ownership." (See N. Wesley Hohfeld Fundamental Legal Conceptions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964) I recommend defining socialism - with due weight given to the importance the ideal of public ownership has had in the histories of socialist movements - as the practical consequence of a scientific discovery. The scientific discovery is: human reality is socially constructed. Hence the derivation of the word "socialist" from "social." The more the human sciences learn how thoroughly social we humans are, in the very roots of our being, including (but not limited to) in the very formulae of the DNA molecules which destine us to be physically capable of speaking, and in a million other ways design our bodies to be those of social creatures; the more our understanding leads us to draw the practical consequence. In this respect it is true - as right-wing critics hostile to the social sciences have sometimes charged - that the very study of the social sciences leads young people into socialist thinking; this is true due to the very nature of the social science enterprise, and in spite of the historical origins of many of the disciplines and subdisciplines of social science in conservative ideological projects. The scientific discovery of human social nature is not something that happened all at once, nor is it something which is through happening. Aristotle said long ago that the human being was a zoon politikon (an animal whose characteristic it is to live in a polis). Still today even the most advanced scholars in the human sciences have not finished discovering how thoroughly we humans depend on each other even to be able to perform such a seemingly simple act as uttering the English sentence, "I am a self-sufficient individual." (Descartes was perhaps correct to make the inference, "I doubt that I am, therefore I am." However, from the moment that a performer of Descartes' cogito writes, or says, or even thinks je doute, then already we are.) To draw the practical consequence requires good will in addition to understanding. The practical consequence is: human social reality can be reconstructed to serve human needs. The first people to call themselves "socialists" were utopians; they quite unabashedly designed ideal societies, continuing the tradition of Plato and Saint Thomas More, who were socialists avant la lettre, naively expecting that the merits of their proposals would lead to their implementation. They were followed by the scientific socialists. Marx and others drew on a scientific understanding of the social nature of production when they denounced the private appropriation of production's benefits. "Public ownership" emerged as the name of the solution to the problem, but the phrase only hints at the depth of Marx's outrage and at its scientific basis. A more flexible approach to socialism than the one which defines it as public ownership identifies socialism with the power of the people and with democratic control. From the premise that the economy will operate for the benefit of those who control it, the conclusion is drawn that only democratic control will lead to production and distribution for the benefit of the demos, the masses. When socialism is thus defined in terms of who has power, even a free market economy (and certainly a mixed economy) with many privately owned enterprises (and certainly with many cooperatives) could be socialist, provided only that the mass of the people exercised through some set of participatory institutions the power to compel the economy to serve their needs. One could call such a power-defined socialism "public ownership in principle," inasmuch as even though there might not be any publicly owned enterprises, the voting public would always have the power, if it chose to do so, to make any or all enterprises public, when and if they ceased to function for the benefit of the democratically organized populace which (on this hypothesis) would hold power. Utopian, scientific, and power-defined socialisms have all failed in practice, and many people have drawn the conclusion that socialism is inherently unworkable. The definition I suggest assumes that it has not yet been proven that socialism is inherently unworkable, and it preserves what I believe to be the principal merit of the socialist tradition, its drive to recreate social reality so that human needs will be met --to which must be added, in accord with the idea that the findings of science and the appreciation of their consequences only gradually become available, that in the light of what we now know and now appreciate, the needs of nature, as well as the needs of humans, should be regarded as criteria for judging norms for conduct. Here is the definition: socialism is the reconstruction of social reality to meet needs. Socialism is equivalent to the practice of a care ethic, as Carol Gilligan has defined it. It is equivalent to the project of the organic intellectual, as Antonio Gramsci has defined it: "...to adjust culture to physical function." (Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince. New York: International Publishers, 1959) The adjective "democratic" in the phrase "democratic socialism" is although desirable redundant. The gentle means of sweet persuasion and consensus-building, which are named by the word "democratic," are, human nature being what it is, means without which socialist ends cannot be achieved. Democratic socialism should not be conceived as choosing collective goods over individual goods, because, "...the individual and society are not in a zero-sum situation; ... a strong group that respects individual differences will strengthen autonomy as well as solidarity; ...it is not in groups but in isolation that people are most apt to be homogenized." (Robert Bellah et al. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. p. 307) That democratic socialism is possible only where there is ethical culture is true by definition, because practicing virtues whose consequences are that needs are met is one species or type of living according to normative customs, which is ethical culture. Behind this conceptual scheme which makes the "democratic" in "democratic socialism" redundant, and which makes ethical culture by definition the condition of the possibility of socialism, is an assessment of historical experience which makes it seem, in retrospect, remarkable that anybody ever believed that socialism could be built through the government of a nation-state "taking" economic power. The concept of ethical culture does not imply that all of humanity needs to adopt the same ethics, nor does it follow that whatever ethic is adopted must be strictly enforced. It does follow that it is normal to assume that everyone is trying to live according to virtue, however any particular ethical culture defines virtue, and it does follow that society should help people to achieve what is presumed to be their natural objective. Nevertheless, it is a corollary of Piero Sraffa's "production of commodities by means of commodities," that any number of different sets of cultural values are compatible with sophisticated and appropriate technology, which is able to make it physically possible to meet human needs. If humans would just have the good sense to organize productive processes intelligently, then they could relax and let nature work for them; the multi-cultural mosaic could include lots of toleration for absurdities, and lots of forgiveness. The ways in which people manage to build trusting relationships and to fill their imaginations with pleasant fantasies could be praised because they work, without anyone needing to worry too much that deviations from confirmable truth would disrupt the essential means of producing the daily bread. As long as the system was working to satisfy basic needs, justice could be inexact. Social reality does not need to be uniform; it is better if it is not uniform; and the process of reconstructing it is best conceived not as working to implement a single great blueprint, but as Claude Levi-Strauss conceived much of the work of the anthropologist, as bricolage, as respecting what is, as making do with the materials that one happens to find. Such an approach to culture, at once functional and easygoing, would not maximize or minimize anything (and hence could not be an optimum in the terms of classical economic theory; see Kenneth Boulding and W. Allen Spivey, Linear Algebra and the Theory of the Firm. New York: Macmillan, 1960, pp. 4-5) but it would be perfection as Aristotle conceived it; it would be pursuit of a golden mean. *69. Does what I have been saying imply that the Chumash Indians held a perfectionist theory of ethics ? I would rather not pose the matter in the terms of this question, but rather as follows: I believe that it is normal for cultures to embrace perfectionism in a broad sense, in which to encourage people to try to be perfect is simply to encourage them to live up to whatever ideals the culture has. Of course, nobody can be perfect, but to try to be a better person, to be more nearly the sort of person honored in the relationships which define one's being as a cultural creature, to aim for perfection as one understands it in one's milieu, is typical of the species. The anthropologist William Powers rather pointedly highlighted the tendency of humans to be preoccupied with ideals when he remarked, in the course of reporting on the role of number in the culture of the Lakota Sioux, "The Lakota - all peoples of the world - are not so much interested in the way things are as the way things should be...." Powers goes on to illustrate his point about the relationship between norms and reality by saying, "...and the way they should be is perceived [i.e. by the Lakota Sioux] as a structure which is organized into seven constituent parts in a very predictable way. It is the naive anthropologist and historian who expects to find numerical systems that reflect reality. It is rather reality that is filtered into the numerical system, which preexists as a structural organizational principle of perceived reality." (William K. Powers, "Counting your Blessings: Sacred Numbers and the Structure of Reality," Zygon, vol. 21, #1, March 1986, p. 83) What is true even of number is, I submit, true a fortiori of virtue. I think it more likely than not that the Chumash were a normal human group, and therefore in a broad sense perfectionist; that is to say, that they were centrally concerned with their own ideals, perceived reality through normative structural organizational principles, and expected their members to live according to their norms. Modern European (now global) culture I find, however, to be abnormal, and not just in the extent in which it encourages people to deviate from the norms to be naughty (e.g. as in the romanticizing of deviltry in the picaresque novels whose appearance coincided, not accidentally, with early capitalism) - and I certainly do not want to say that the modern West is unique in its celebrations of norm-violation, for the figure of the joker and the observation that it is fun to be bad are found in many cultures. The abnormality of Europe consists more importantly in its ethic of freedom - which I do not intend either to disparage or to exalt, but rather to work with and to improve - which raises to the level of sacred principle a large space for personal choice not usually found in the organization of human groups. It is central to our (I repeat: now global) culture's ethic to respect persons, where respect for a person importantly means respect for a person's autonomy, and autonomy means (sometimes to a greater and sometimes to a lesser extent, depending on variant interpretations within our culture) that the norms do not in general prescribe what should be done, but rather to a great extent leave the individual free to choose. (Could economic theory make sense if this were not so? Could price theory, for example, make any sense if the culture prescribed that the amount of money exchanged for each good was to be determined by tradition ?) Within the context of our culture's prevailing admiration for scientific theorizing and within the context of its prevailing liberalism, our sages outline a series of options in "ethical theory," as if one could have "theory" of ethics as one has a theory concerning the causes of spots on the sun, and more often than not as if the function of competing ethical theories were not to provide critiques of liberalism but to decide which theoretical framework (Kantian? utilitarian? emotivist? imperativist? Rawlsian? Nozickian?) best systematizes our intuitive liberal feelings and judgments. And on the list of possible theories the sages must find a place and a label for Aristotle's writings on ethics. In this context the classical Aristotelian and medieval writings, and some others, appear as instances of a "perfectionist" approach to an activity called "ethical theory." Perfectionism is necessarily, in such a context, a mistaken approach, because it does not do justice to our intuition that a, or even the, central principle of ethics is respect for personal autonomy. I think it would be better to say, instead, that Aristotle and the scholastics were philosophers in cultures very different from the modern west. Instead of thinking of them as advocating one of several possible approaches to eternal problems, it would be better to think of them as "bridges," as thinkers who can help us to understand cultures different from our own, by understanding certain cultures different from the modern west which happen to be at the same time the roots of the modern west's historical origins. So what I want to say about the Chumash is not that they did perfectionist ethical theory, or that they did ethical theory at all, but that in their dancing, in their ceremonies, in their symbolic and imaginative life generally, they were, like Aristotle, closer than is the modern West to normality. The practical conclusion I wish to draw from this reflection is an optimistic one: the fear that economic problems will never be solved because economics is intrinsically connected with an anti-social version of the ethic of autonomy ineradicably rooted in human nature, is an unjustified fear, because human nature ordinarily and normally expresses itself in cultures where the prevailing ethic calls on people to pattern their lives according to ideals. I am also an optimist concerning the fear that the characteristic problems of modernity can only be solved by sacrificing the modern values of autonomy to the ancient values of conformity. This is an unjustified fear because moral development (as research in the psychology of moral development has shown, and as is discussed in Letter 23) in fact succeeds in combining greater solidarity with greater respect for individual differences. Where the cultural norms prescribe expectations of virtue, it is possible to construct what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a "beloved community," where "freedom" means "self-directed but not self-centered." (See Letter 49 on King's "beloved community.") |