Chapter 8

Hjalmar Branting's Uppfostran

 

Regarded from a certain quite respectable point of view, one of the great merits of classical Swedish social democracy was that it was rational, in a sense of the word "rational" approved by Sir Karl Popper.  According to Popper, it is rational to change one or a few variables at a time, holding all other factors constant.  It is irrational to change society in many ways at once.  Multifaceted change is irrational because when many factors affect the achievement of many objectives, there are too many effects to measure, too many independent variables.  It becomes impossible to link causes to effects.  For this reason, revolutions are always irrational.  They change too much, and therefore the consequences of the changes cannot be evaluated. 

Swedish social democrats, during the halcyon days of the Swedish model, often thought in patterns Sir Karl Popper would commend.  The framework was held constant, while changes were limited and specific.  What Rudolf Meidner wrote about proposals for employee investment funds was typical: 

We are conscious of certain conditions which set the scene for us.  A number of these are already given and generally accepted, and therefore require no detailed discussion.  First and foremost among them there is the demand for full employment, or jobs for everyone.  The achievement of this most fundamental of all our aims must not be prejudiced by any reforms in policies toward redistribution. 

Closely related to this is the demand for a high level of capital formation; indeed, this is an essential condition for high and rising employment.  The Swedish economy is very exposed to foreign competition, and a high investment ratio must accordingly be sustained in order to defend our position in foreign markets.  Probably few trade movements are as positive as the Swedish one in their attitude to a high level of investment, to the steady expansion and technological regeneration of the apparatus of production.  This can be attributed not solely to a ready appreciation of economic relationships but primarily to a successful employment and labour market policy. . . .

Another important stipulation is that any attempts to meet our . . . objectives should be neutral with respect to costs wages and prices.  A measure of distributive policy which imposed a cost burden on enterprises could conceivably be shifted on to prices and be inflationary without at the same time achieving any real redistributive effect.  It also follows that wage policy must not be prejudiced, and wage bargaining must be assumed to exploit to the full the possibilities for consumption, without being responsible for the relationship between consumption and saving.

Finding an arrangement which reinforces solidarity in wage policy [i.e., a form of employee ownership of business] must finally satisfy the obvious condition that it does not run counter to the main aim of that policy, which is to equalise incomes between different groups of employees.  This means that any profit-sharing scheme which gives rise to new disparities in income within the total aggregate of employees would not be acceptable to the trade union movement. 

We have accordingly to conduct our search for solutions to the problems which we have posed within a fairly narrow framework of specific objectives and conditions, and this in fact means that the range of choices among various models for redistribution is a rather limited one (1978: 16-17, explanation added).

 

With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that the factors held constant in the types of macroeconomic discourse characteristic of the Swedish model were not constant in reality.  It is one thing for a model to postulate that government, or labor, or business, will undertake a small and carefully studied pilot program and carefully measure its consequences before expanding the application of the program to a larger scale.  It is another thing for history to stand still, allowing a social experiment to unfold ceteris paribus, with all non-experimental factors remaining equal, frozen in time like mute stone statues, from the moment the experiment starts until the moment the experiment ends. 

As Erik Lundberg noted in a passage cited in the previous chapter, in the 1970s the Swedish government repeated the same Keynesian policies it had applied successfully in the two previous decades.  Its model of reality had not changed.  Nevertheless, reality had changed.  Indeed, reality had always been more fluid, more complex, and more subject to variations due to humans not behaving according to expected patterns, than macroeconomic thinking supposed.  It was always a very rough and approximate form of thought, but for two decades it worked.  The reasons why it was working were not necessarily the same as the reasons why the actors whose actions were guided by it thought it was working.[1] 

We have been saying that classical Swedish social democracy should be near the top of the list in any ranking of the best cultures that homo sapiens has created so far. This may be a good place to mention two more excellent Swedish institutions, just to underline how well Sweden has done, before proceeding to dwell on the Swedish model's limitations.  One is "contact days."  In Sweden employers must give parents several days off work each year, in order to enable the parents to go to school with their children.  This keeps the parents in close contact with the part of their children's lives that is spent in school.  A second is subsidized enterprises for people with handicaps.  In a labor market there are always people who can work, but who cannot work fast enough, or skillfully enough, to make it worth an employer's money to hire them at standard wages.  But in Sweden even those with sub-standard speed, strength, or skill can and do work.  They even manage their own enterprises.  Public institutions are reluctant to treat the handicapped as disabled and to put them on the dole.  Instead, they contribute enough to the enterprises of the handicapped to make it possible for them to sell their products at competitive prices on the open market. 

We have been showing that Swedish social democracy encountered limitations inherent in the normative framework it took for granted.  Maintaining high wages in an intensely competitive global marketplace was one of Sweden's successes that proved to have limits.  Now that global markets are even more competitive, and now that Sweden--as a member of the European Union--is even less able to act independently of global markets, those limits can only be more confining.  The basic ethical foundations of the market, freedom and property, limit what Sweden can do now even more, now that Sweden is even more dependent on the free play of market forces. 

Leaving the constitutive rules of society unquestioned is a great merit from the point of view of the philosophy of social research of Karl Popper.  There comes a time, nevertheless, when the possibilities for improvement within a framework of unquestioned premises are exhausted.  We should confess, however, before going on, that we have been exaggerating Sweden's allegiance to Popperian rationality.  Myrdal, for example, observed that under the social democrats, the Swedish population became more individualistic and more hedonistic, not because anybody intended that result, but because of general historical trends, which were not holding constant while Sweden tinkered with one variable at a time.  Many Swedish authors make similar observations about the shift from blue-collar to white-collar employment.  Thus Swedes, like everyone else, are quite aware that history is not standing still while social engineers conduct experiments.  Nevertheless, the very idea of building socialism by gradual incremental steps tends to assume that society is not rapidly moving in some other direction. Whatever merit confining attention to a few variables at a time may have depends on some degree of faith that the variables regarded as constant are not changing in ways that overwhelm the variables studied.  In Sweden, as in other countries, the historical evolution of capitalism changed the context for social democracy.

What we are calling “daring to question the unquestioned” has more than one dimension.  We have also been suggesting that the paradigms of social science which regard the reality as a set of "variables" or "factors" which have "impacts on" and are "functions of each other” are inadequate paradigms.  A distaste for what was perceived as metaphysics led to bad metaphysics.  The "impact and function" paradigms of social science do not grasp the main source of law-like regularities in social life, namely, rules.  Rules, as the later Wittgenstein pointed out, are not in the end comprehensible in terms of metaphors drawn from the hard sciences at all, but necessarily depend on what he called a Rechtfertigung, an appeal to authority.  Thus the broadening of horizons we are calling for has three levels: 1) considering alternatives to the premises that social democracy has taken as givens; 2) placing social democracy today in the context of the historical evolution of the global capitalist system; and 3) openness to alternative forms of thought. 

French postmodernism and post-structuralism have recently made great contributions to the intellectual task of destabilizing assumptions about the rules of society that economics takes for granted, whether it is the old classical economics, Keynesian economics, or contemporary neo-liberal economics.  Just a few decades ago, it was possible for Myrdal to describe social democracy as a "created harmony," implicitly contrasting it with laissez faire capitalism, which presumably therefore would have to be regarded as something not created, a natural order.  That was certainly how the founders of laissez faire regarded it.  They explicitly put Nature in the place of the Creator, and the principle of contract in the place of the principle of divine command.  In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's works on political economy, on education, and on civil government, it is especially clear that there is a systematic shift in discourse, in which the role previously assigned to God, as Creator and source of authority, is assigned to Nature and to human will.[2] 

Now that Rousseau's work has been so thoroughly deconstructed by Jacques Derrida, and, in general, the humanism of the 18th century has been deconstructed by postmodernists, it is no longer defensible, if it ever was, to regard laissez faire capitalism as natural, while treating social democracy as an artificial creation.[3]  Similarly, the detailed accounts of the genesis of modern ideas and institutions produced by Michel Foucault, the Annales historians, Immanuel Wallerstein, and others remove any plausibility there ever was to treating the normative framework of modern western culture--which is by extension that of the global economy--as natural.  It never was plausible to deny that freedom, property, markets, and money are not natural but rather conventional.  Now their ideologies have been deconstructed, and their historical origins have been precisely chronicled. 

Our ethical construction philosophy, which Howard Richards has developed in detail in other writings, is a way to put a positive spin on postmodernism.  What happens in history is that people construct cultures.  Even wars construct cultures.  Of course, destruction happens too, but it could not happen unless something were constructed first; without construction there would be nothing to destroy.  Homo sapiens sapiens is an animal whose ecological niche is to be the creator of cultures.  The work of constructing cultures is ethical both in that it is about norms ("what should be" or what should be according to some particular culture) and--going to the ancient root of the word "ethical"--in that it is about customs, i.e., conventions. 

Modern society, defined by Max Weber (1947; 1958) as "rational," in contrast to traditional society, which was "customary," is only apparently an exception to the proposition that all cultures are customary.  Because rationality itself is a set of customs.  Notably, it is conventional, not natural, to call profit maximizing "rational." 

We interpret the great thinkers of the past as cultural activists who facilitated the reshaping of norms. Thus we do not look on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a fool (or charlatan) who imagined (or feigned) illusory conceptual unities, which a smarter (or more honest) philosopher like Jacques Derrida could later deconstruct.  We see Rousseau as a creator of culture. 

In what follows, we will offer a retracing of a few of the steps by which Swedish social democracy was constructed.  At certain stages of its construction, architectural choices were made which allowed some options and ruled out others.  The purpose of this retracing of steps is to suggest reconsideration of some options long ago ruled out.  No discoveries.  Just a thought experiment designed to locate ethical choices most people are already aware of on a conceptual map of a European past imagined as a centuries-long labor of ethical construction. 

If we take a short step backward in time from the days when the reign of the Swedish model, narrowly defined, was about to begin, or was just getting underway; to 1948; we find an election that marked an architectural choice.  In 1948 the socialists put before the voters a radical program, which would have continued into peacetime some wartime emergency measures, and, generally, extended the economic powers of the government.  Whether the conservatives were being accurate or exaggerating, when they called it an attempt to install in Sweden a command economy like that of the Soviet Union, it was true that the socialists proposed a rapprochement with the USSR; reducing economic ties to the West, which--Myrdal predicted--would soon relapse into a depression like that of the 1930s; and enhancing ties with the East; balancing the two, not relying too much on one bloc or the other. 

Friedrich von Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom was influential in Sweden in 1948.  Von Hayek cited Hitler and Stalin as two proofs of the same theorem: governments wielding economic power crush individual liberties (1976: 24-31, 85-87).  The results at the polls showed that his voice had been heard.  Although the socialists were not turned out of office, they were warned.  The voters of Sweden did not want a command economy. 

Retracing Swedish social democracy's steps four more years backward in time, we find another architectural choice made during World War II.  Sweden lived under wartime conditions even though it was not formally involved in the war.  It had rationing and price controls, and called on its citizens to make sacrifices.  As elsewhere, full employment at good wages was achieved for the first time during the war.  The maintenance of full employment assumed the status of a right of the working classes, and a duty of the government. 

Thus the rules of the game were fixed; the social structure took shape.  The options for social democracy were circumscribed.  There would not be a command economy.  And yet there would be full employment.  Given that other options had already been foreclosed by architectural choices made earlier, full employment without a command economy could only mean one thing: booming export sales. 

Sales must be expanded to expand the demand for labor.  A standard accounting text states the major premise succinctly: "The number of direct labor employees is a function of the work to be performed, which is a function of materials in inventory, which is a function of the sales forecast" (Tuller 1977: 73).  Given that the employment of labor will be generated by consumer demand (because there will not be a command economy), full employment can only arise from high demand, which means high sales, and which means, in the case of Sweden, high sales in foreign markets. 

Already in the late 1930s, with the establishment of the system of nationwide collective bargaining, and the historic pacts between capital and labor at the national level, it had become clear that the tone of the Swedish economy would be set by the major unions and the major firms--most of which were export-oriented.  The radicalism of anti-bigness so common on the American left, trailing shades of Jeffersonian farmers tilling their own soil, and evoking images of local self-rule among pioneers on horseback riding the lone prairies of the New World, was not to be the Swedish way. 

The early 1930s was the time of the invention of macroeconomics (although some say that Knut Wicksell gave Sweden a precocious head start on the rest of the world by anticipating Keynes' major ideas a generation earlier).  The rapid rise to hegemony of macroeconomics represented an architectural choice, because it meant that the ideas of the Stockholm School, and not Marxism, would be social democracy's ideological alternative to classical laissez-faire capitalist economics. 

The rise of macroeconomics and the eclipse of Marx meant that the ideal of production for use was off the main agenda, although in Sweden, as elsewhere, there were persistent, visionary, frustrated souls who continued to dream of it and to work to put it into practice.  Macroeconomics, after all, was about aggregate demand.  Increasing aggregate demand meant putting money into people's pockets so they could spend it; thus generating expectations of profit among entrepreneurs; thus stimulating investment; and therefore, finally, achieving what the social democrats wanted, employment.  If the only way to boost demand for labor is to boost sales, that is fine with Keynes. 

It is not fine with Marx.  For Marx what is wrong with capitalism is that it is production for exchange, not for use; for sale, not for people.  The main concepts in Marx's arsenal flow from his critique of exchange: alienation, commodity, commodity fetishism, surplus value, accumulation, the exploitation of labor, private appropriation of the social product, the reserve army of the unemployed, the holy trinity (profit, interest, and rent), the falling rate of profit, the immiseration of the proletariat.  The time of social democracy is, for Marx, by definition, the time after capitalism when food and other goods will be produced for people, not for profit. 

Hjalmar Branting was the leader of the Swedish social democratic workers party during most of the early twentieth century.  He took the ideal of production for use seriously.  For Branting, the decisive step in the achievement of socialism was the achievement of universal suffrage.  Branting believed that acquiring and exercising the right to vote was a means for achieving socialism.  Socialism was a rational outcome of the evolution of humanity, which the people would implement when they acquired the authority to name the legislators who would write the laws.  Gradually the authority to write the laws would produce a society geared to producing for people not for profit. 

In Branting's time the socialist party devoted much effort to preparing the people for their role as rulers of a democratic society.  In a speech he gave in 1923, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the LO, he said:

[N]ow as before it is quite simply a matter of our continuing to train our great working people for both political and economic self- government.  Now as before we want to win our victories by persuasion, not by force, and to gain an ever stronger position of power in our society for both those great co-operating organizations . . . L.O., whose day we celebrate, and our Swedish Social Democratic Labor party.  They both exist not to carry out a fixed plan down to the last detail . . . but as much as they can to lay the foundation for the society that lbsen dreamed of--where there is room for free and noble men and women, for personalities who in serving their fellow man can realize their own yearning for lofty personal development (Branting quoted in Tilton 1990: 36).

 

The ABF, the Swedish worker's educational association, sponsored evening classes for working people throughout the nation.  There was a proliferation of party and union magazines and newspapers, of union schools and study groups, intended not just to enhance job skills, but to prepare the majority of the people to be the ruling class--a ruling class that would reorganize society according to principles of cooperation and solidarity.  The best education of all was, moreover, active participation in the new institutions organized according to non-capitalist principles, which the socialist party was already sponsoring and encouraging: consumer cooperatives, producers' cooperatives, labor unions, innovative forms of local government, burial societies and other mutual aid societies. 

Branting's expectation that in the future people would build new institutions, in which production for sale in order to make profit would be replaced by cooperation to meet needs, led him to promote education for citizenship, for participation.  Education for social democracy meant education for a world not dominated by exchange.  He repeatedly stressed the importance of uppfostran, "upbringing" or "character formation," a Swedish word similar to the German word Bildung.  He declared, "To be able to overthrow the bourgeoisie's domination the working class must therefore raise itself to organizational, intellectual, and moral superiority over its opponents.  It must have at its disposal a sum of energy, self-sacrifice, intellectual power, knowledge, and maturity that can only be acquired by unremitting work and schooling in political and union struggles and in the co-operative movement which we have labororiously built up" (Branting quoted in Tilton 1990: 22).

Marx was one of the 19^th-century thinkers who founded social democracy by carrying out what Marx called, in the subtitle to Capital, "a critique of political economy."  If we trace the steps of the process of social construction even farther back, we come, in the 18th century and earlier, to the invention of the object of Marx's critique: political economy.  Political economy was capitalism's theory. 

As socialism set out not to be capitalism, and as Marx's Capital set out to be a critique of political economy, so modern society, which was born in Europe's nascent international capitalist market economy, had its other, which it set out not to be.  Medieval Christendom was modernity's other, its first other, the other that created it. Modern thought had its object to critique: the philosophy of the schools, scholasticism, of which the most famous exponent was St. Thomas Aquinas.  (Even today, first semester students in economics often learn that St. Thomas's theory of the "just price" is a paradigm of what economics is not.)  Later, as the European world economy expanded, as it spread secular modernity around the world, it encountered other others: Islam, Hinduism, Shintoism, Confucius, Buddha, and thousands of smaller and less famous cultures and belief-systems. 

If one compares what the teachings of traditional religious and spiritual cultures have to say about the topics studied by economists (e.g., "Feed the hungry!"--the first of St. Thomas's seven corporal works of mercy), with the careful and thorough empirical studies prepared by economists, it is hard for some people to resist the conclusion that economists are smarter than God.  What, they ask, as a matter of empirical historical fact, has God created?  Medieval Europe, also known as Christendom, a cultural region whose peoples acknowledged God as the source of legitimate authority, was marked by poverty, disease, ignorance, short life expectancy, and (in spite of its official agape ideology) frequent and commonplace acts of cruelty.  India, the cradle of several of the world's great religions, is and was a cradle of misery.  In contrast, those societies where the market, and the principles of property rights and freedom of contract, are acknowledged as the sources of legitimate authority, boast the achievements of modern medicine, modern agriculture, and modern sanitation.  It is hard to resist giving three cheers for the paroles of Jacques Prevert: 

Pere notre qui est dans le ciel 
Restez-vous dans le ciel 
Nous restons sur la terre 
Dans cette miracle qui est New York 
Dans cette miracle qui est Paris 
(Our Father who art in heaven 
Stay in heaven
We will stay on earth 
In that miracle that is New York 
In that miracle that is Paris.)[4] 

 

Those who cheer asking God to remain in heaven, far away --like the God of the 18^th-century deists, Who would not think of interfering with the Laws of Commerce because they were Laws of Nature, and Who, like a clockmaker who had made a clock and then left it to run by itself, would never think of interfering with any Law of Nature-- will probably readily agree with us that important architectural choices were made when modern society's foundations emerged from the matrix of medieval Christendom.  But it will be another matter to make a plausible case to persuade readers that the choices then made should now be reconsidered.

Medieval Christendom was counted by Max Weber as a member of a large class of "traditional" cultures.  By dint of heroic generalizations, Weber characterized traditional (as distinct from modern) societies as ones ruled by customs and conventions, by value rationality (Wertrationalitat), and by enchantment (1958: 26-27).  Thus he did as good a job as anyone has ever done of summarizing the essential qualities of nearly one hundred thousand years of human experience, on six continents and more than three thousand islands. 

If we broaden the question to make it one about all traditional societies, and answer it by asserting that surely somewhere in the many wisdoms of the world's traditional peoples, there must be lessons to be learned about how to cooperate and share to meet needs, which can teach modernity some options worth considering, or reconsidering; then surely no one will deny that our assertion, trivial or banal as it may be, is, at least, true. It is evident that when Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae proved that the lower angels can teach nothing to the higher angels, because the higher angels already know everything the lower angels know, that the good saint's vision was blinded by the clarity and consistency of his concepts.  It should be equally evident that modern cultures can learn from traditional cultures. 

However, we are retracing the steps of the construction of Swedish social democracy, back to the century when economics itself was invented, not in order to prove a general proposition that is self-evident if one thinks about it, but specifically in order to reopen the question of whether economics should have been invented at all.  Economics specifically denied the specific principle that unified the ideology of medieval Europe.  To reconsider economics, starting at its beginning, is to ask whether what economics denied might actually be true. 

In a famous and typical remark, Adam Smith stated that he could rely on the self- interest of his baker to get his daily bread, but he could not rely on his baker's benevolence.  The word "benevolence" can be divided into two parts, "bene” and “volence," which come from two Latin roots meaning "good" and "will."  In other words, Smith denied that he could rely on the good will of his baker to get his daily bread.  Similarly, Bernard de Mandeville, in his Fable of the Bees, or Private vices, Publick Benefits, originally published in 1714, argued that luxury, selfishness and greed, which were vices according to the teachings of tradition, were sources of material progress.  In his book From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (1977), Louis Dumont gives many other similar examples.  Dumont shows how the early economists were quite aware that they were departing from the ethical norms of medieval Christendom.[5]  The economists presumed the existence of a society in which norms of solidarity, expressed in terms of God or kinship or loyalty, no longer reigned.  Acting from self-interest, which medieval theology defined as sin, was no longer seen as the problem, but as the solution. 

The official constitutive rules of society approved by the church universal of the European Middle Ages were recorded in Saint Thomas's Summa.  The central organizing idea in that voluminous work is caritas.  Caritas translates the Greek agape, which is one of the New Testament's names for God: ho theon agepen estin ("God is love.").  Another meaning of agape in Greek is "welcoming." From caritas, the Latin equivalent of agape, flowed the accepted rules for the organization of society, as they were articulated and idealized in the reigning ideology: law and justice, the use of property, the rules governing markets and exchanges, just prices, the duties of rulers and ruled, the sharing of goods, the duty to serve others.  All norms were derived from caritas, directly or indirectly, and all were, finally, judged by caritas, the ultimate standard. 

The rise of modern society, and its ideology, economics, marked not just an architectural choice, but a change of form of thought, different ways of naming the problems to be solved, different conversations about different topics, discourses governed by different root metaphors. 

For the tradition, as it was taught in the schools, it was supremely important to cultivate a good will.  Thus a classic of the counter-reformation, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, begins by saying that the purpose of spiritual exercises is to achieve a good will, first to purge the will of disorderly tendencies, then to identify the will with the divine will.  There is an important similarity among Ignatius' idea of identification with the divine will, the Marxist idea of de-alienation, and Barbara Marx Hubbard's idea of emerging into essence.  In all three cases humans realize who they really are, and find joy, by becoming servant leaders whose being is a being-in-relationship.  In Marx's terms, people, who are already human and always have been, become truly human when they realize what he called the Gattungwesen, the social essence of the species. 

The economists had a better idea. Or, at least, in the 18th century it seemed like a better idea.  They believed self-interest more powerful and more reliable than good will.  Adam Smith expected his daily bread from his baker's self-interest, not from his benevolence.  Therefore, it seemed, if one could construct a science of self-interest, ignoring the educational and spiritual issues that arise when one worries about how to transform wills, one could construct a more powerful and more reliable intellectual engine for the improvement of society.

This story has a moral.  If one thinks of social democracy as a social engineering project, then one is likely to treat the constitutive principles that organize society as an unquestioned background while making measured and carefully studied changes.  To a considerable extent, this is what Swedish social democracy did.  Typically, as is illustrated by the quotation from Rudolf Meidner at the beginning of this chapter, there were only a few options to choose from, in an environment where most parameters were fixed.  Looked at from one point of view, this was sound Popperian methodology. Looked at from another point of view, it was a slowly closing trap out of which all the exits were being closed, one by one.  In the end, for the classical Swedish model there were no options at all.  The number of viable options declined from three to two to one to zero.  Then social democratic ideals had to be put on hold.  Neo-liberal reforms had to be accepted.  At that point books were published like After Social Democracy (1980) by Ralf Dahrendorf, and The Death Knell of Social Democracy: Sweden's Dream Turns Sour (1992) by Peter Stein and Ingemar Dörfer.[6] 

The moral is that there is another way to look at the building of social democracy. If one thinks of history as a process of ethical construction, then one will think about rules, principles, and values.  One will ask what principles were laid down when, for what reasons, and with what results.  We have been showing how the basic rules of freedom and property, which constitute market culture, laid down long ago, limit what is socially possible.  Gunnar Myrdal's dream of building social democracy on the foundation of the ideals of the 18th century was not a feasible dream.  For the same reasons, by extension, his dream of a world anti-poverty program was not feasible. Meanwhile, since his time, the context has changed.  Tendencies inherent in capitalism since its beginnings have been accentuated, namely the tendency toward a global market and the tendency toward a global iron law of wages.  The power of any national government to regulate markets and thus buffer its citizens against the blows of market forces has been weakened.  As Jacques Derrida has observed, as the power of nations declines, the need to criticize the rules of civil society increases.[7] 

Therefore, the movements most likely to make a generalizable contribution to advancing cooperation, sharing, and sustainability are the ones that rest, explicitly or implicitly, on a radical critique of the basic rules of modern society.  Fortunately, there are many such movements today.  There are many thinkers today who realize that humanity and the planet can not move forward without reconsidering the 18^th-century European ideas that provide the ethical framework for the global economy.  Some of those to whom we refer are feminists, ecologists, Jungian analysts, theologians, spiritual practitioners, architects, labor union members, innovative economists, students of the psychology of moral development, anthropologists, sociologists, schoolteachers, criminologists, poets, artists of all kinds, lawyers, missionaries and technical experts working in developing countries, medical doctors and medical researchers, historians, industrial designers, sensitive adolescents, and thoughtful parents; as well as philosophers who specialize in ethics and the history of ethics.

One promising movement has been founded by the Swedish anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge.  She found inspiration for a radical critique of the principles and values of modern society not in Europe's past, but in an ancient Buddhist culture located in the high, barren, and thinly populated Ladakh region of India, in the far north of Kashmir, bounded on three sides by mountainous areas belonging to Pakistan, China, and Tibet.  "In Ladakh," she writes, "I have had the privilege to experience another, saner, way of life, and to see my own culture from the outside.  I have lived in a society based on fundamentally different principles. . .” (1992: 1).  Having grown up in Sweden, she came to disagree with a premise that we have been assuming, that Swedish social democracy ranks among the best societies the human species has invented so far.  She came to believe that the life of the Buddhists of Ladakh living on the Tibetan Plateau was superior to life in any western industrialized nation.  Unfortunately, however, we cannot go there to see the ancient culture of Ladakh that Norberg-Hodge praises, because during the sixteen years she was learning from it, Ladakhi culture underwent the process of modernization that is rapidly destroying many cultures around the world.  Norberg-Hodge writes, "Increasingly, Western culture is coming to be seen as the normal way, the only way.  And as more and more people around the world become competitive, greedy, and egotistical, these traits tend to be attributed to human nature" (Ibid.: 3).  The cooperation and sharing that existed, the respect for and cooperation with nature that existed, the happiness and love of ceremony that existed, serve as a proof that human nature is not what Adam Smith thought it was, even though they exist now only to the limited extent that Ladakh has been able to resist westernization and modernization. 

Norberg-Hodge writes:

 

Once I was in the village of Sakti at sowing time.  Two households had an arrangement whereby they shared animals, plough, and labor for the few days before sowing could start.  Their neighbor, Sonam Tsering, who was not a part of the group, was ploughing his own fields when one of his dzo [draft animal, a cross between a yak and a cow] sat down and refused to work any longer.  I thought at first that it was just being stubborn, but Tsering told me that the animal was ill and that he feared it was serious. Just as we were sitting at the edge of the field wondering what to do, the farmer from next door came by and without a moment's hesitation offered his own help as well as the help of others in his lhangsde [work-sharing] group. That evening, after they had finished their own work, they all came over to Tsering's fields with their dzo. As always, they sang as they worked; and long after dark, when I could no longer see them, I could still hear their song (Ibid.: 54, explanations added).

 

Ladakh convinced Norberg-Hodge that there are alternatives to modern western ethics.  How to put alternative ethics into practice on a large scale is a large question in a world where there are issues such as those concerning capital formation, long-range investment in research and development, the management of pension and retirement funds, working long hours just to pay rent in order to have the right to be somewhere, the division of the revenues of enterprises between capital and labor, a reliance on money and profit which makes effective demand chronically insufficient to keep everyone employed, underutilized resources existing side by side with unmet needs, the exit power of capital, investment strikes, capital flight, tax evasion, structural unemployment, inflation, currency speculation and other forms of profit-making bearing little or no relation to any truly useful purpose, the design of giant systems delivering health care and education in ways that are chronically inadequate, competitive pressures to lower wages and to produce shoddy goods that will soon be thrown away and land-filled, and culture manufactured by the mass media for the sole purpose of selling commodities.  We hope to shed some light on this large question--i.e., the question how to put alternatives into practice--as we discuss other experiments in social democracy around the world. Meanwhile, let it be noted that increasing numbers of people in Western Europe and in some other parts of the world are taking seriously the concept of living a post-materialist lifestyle, albeit often in small groups and in prototype forms.  Concerning Sweden, Norberg-Hodge reports: 

A movement to build eco-villages is sweeping Sweden: two hundred are already planned, all of them based on renewable energy and the recycling of waste.  Increasing numbers of people are choosing to buy organic food and are strengthening the local economy by buying from farmers close to home.  The government has committed itself to establishing an environmental accounting system in which the destruction of natural resources will be subtracted from the gross national product. 

These changes in Sweden reflect a crucial shift in direction.  Throughout the industrial world, people are searching for a better balance with nature.  In the process, they are starting to mirror traditional cultures.  In fields as diverse as hospice care for the dying and mediation as a way of settling disputes, striking parallels are emerging between the most ancient and the most modern cultures.  Just as Ladakhi villagers have always done, increasing numbers of people are making the kitchen the center of their household activity, eating whole foods that are grown naturally, and using age-old natural remedies for their health problems.  Even in more subtle ways, such as a reawakened interest in storytelling, a renewed appreciation for physical work, and the use of natural materials for clothing and construction, the direction of change is clear. We are spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth (Ibid.: 191).

Notes