Modernity: Its Cause and Cure
A Series of Articles by Howard Richards
Parts 31 through 40
:: Part 1 :: Part 2:: Part 3:: Part 4:: Part 5 :: Part 6 :: Part 7:: Part 8:: Part 9:: Part 10 :: Part 11 :: Part 12:: Part 13:: Part 14:: Part 15:: Part 16 :: Part 17:: Part 18:: Part 19:: Part 20 :: Part 21 :: Part 22:: Part 23:: Part 24:: Part 25:: Part 26 :: Part 27:: Part 28:: Part 29:: Part 30 :: Part 31 :: Part 32:: Part 33:: Part 34:: Part 35:: Part 36 :
:: Part 31
Walter Wink's Theology
Wink translates the Greek word kosmos as "domination system." The commission appointed by King James rendered kosmos as "world." The King James Version has Jesus say that His kingdom is not of this world. Wink has Jesus say that He has come to free humanity from the domination system. The Greek texts are the same.Wink borrows from the early work of Michel Foucault the idea of episteme. As Foucault articulated the overall framework for knowing and being that made possible 17th century European biology, grammar, and economics, so Wink articulates the epistemes that govern the discourses of Saint Paul and the gospels. Choosing "domination system" to translate kosmos is a fragment of Wink’s articulation of the patterns of discourse that structure the early Christian texts.
Wink aims to rid theology of "otherworldliness and illusion." (The Bible in Human Transformation, p. 47). But he is against demythologizing. For Wink it is arrogant to suppose that modern western civilization possesses a scientific apparatus that can be employed to thresh the rational kernel out of the mythical chaff of non-modern and non-western civilizations. We are no less myth-driven than the others are. Wink is influenced by Freud, and by thinkers who have learned from Freud, for whom dreams are private nocturnal myths, while myths are collective diurnal dreams. The latter move history.
The great myth that moves history today is the myth of redemptive violence. It is today’s prevailing religion. Compared to redemptive violence Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are minor sects. In the film business redemptive violence is called "action." Children are socialized into its norms and roles from an early age through all the media and through role models. (Wink’s book, Engaging the Powers, includes an extensive analysis of childhood culture in America.)
Methodologically, materialist and positivist science cannot grasp the mythic structure of modernity. For example, no matter how many multiple regression analyses show the impact of television violence on children, such analyses will never show how violence constitutes the self of the child. Stories make selves. Who controls the cosmogonies controls the children.
Wink can grasp the mythic structure of modernity. As a student of Biblical times, and of comparative civilizations generally, he is able to see the mythic structure of this particular civilization by noting ways that it works as other civilizations do.
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The Right Wing Near-Majority
Walter Wink's theology contributes to understanding and answering the conservative majority (or near majority) which now runs the United States.I myself understand (or think I understand) the people who form America's conservative majority (or near majority) because I have taken the trouble to hang out with them and to listen to what they say. They say America has gone downhill since the 1960s.
The decade of the 1960s was the time when undisciplined behavior got out of hand. Teenage addicts, drunks sleeping on the sidewalk, divorce, working mothers, disobedient children, man-hating feminists, abortion, tattoos, affirmative action, orange hair, blaming America, high taxes, pornography on the internet, children who abandon their parents in their old age, bussing, sex on TV, farting in public, Palestinian bombers blowing up Israeli schoolchildren, gay marriages, spitting on the flag, adult bookstores, see-through bras, nose rings, crack cocaine, unshaved legs and armpits, Bill Clinton's sex life, New Age spirituality, removing the stone engraving of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse lawn, muggings in school hallways, rapes in public parks, burglars who break into homes and murder the people who live there, homosexuals who seduce children, Ted Kennedy's drinking binges and the woman he killed when he was driving drunk, welfare cheats, shoddy workmanship, not believing in the Bible, steroids, Michael Jackson, short skirts, topless bars, Jane Fonda, the Intifada, Hollywood, grade inflation, AIDS, multiculturalism, drive-by shootings, and rap music, together with many other signs of real or alleged moral decay are lumped together under the label "liberalism" and associated with a loss of respect for authority that began in the 1960s. You hear about many (but not all) of these things if you go to fundamentalist churches and listen to the sermons, or if you tune in to right wing talk shows.
The conservative anti-permissiveness pro-discipline worldview gathers plausibility from the fact that the working class has in fact been losing ground economically since 1973, both in absolute terms and in comparison with the growing wealth of the wealthy. Moral and economic decline are observed to occur in the same time period and are attributed to the same cause.
The powerful political ideology produced by blending a conservative pro-discipline worldview with free market capitalism draws on a conceptual affinity. Both want order. The first wants order to curb vice in individual souls, in families, and in neighborhoods. The second wants order to curb labor militancy and keep wages down. Although the actual alliance of fervent religious faith and cold economic interest is crafted deliberately by right wing political strategists, the conceptual affinity of the two kinds of order is important. It gives the strategists a gold mine to exploit.
Wink's thesis that redemptive violence is the dominant myth of our times helps to explain why today's governing alliance is more militaristic than any economic or political logic could justify. What makes violence "redemptive" is its self-righteousness. Its mythology molds the gut feelings of the conservative masses into dramas of righteous wrath. Redemptive violence is about God against the devil. It is about cleanliness vs. filth.
Wink offers an alternative to right wing philippics against moral decay in America. It is an alternative that is, in part, a concession, an agreement, a search for common ground. Wink speaks for the ethical left, which agrees with the ethical right that higher standards are needed, but which disagrees about which higher moral standards are needed (or needed most).
Wink also offers another way to look at the moral authority of the Bible, the despising of which the right regards as the root cause of so many calamities. The authority of Jesus and the Judeo-Christian God comes down, for Wink, on the side of liberal values. To be obedient to God is to work for a domination-free social order. This implies, among other things, that Judeo-Christians should not dominate people of other faiths, or of no faith.
The moral authority of the Bible, or at least of the New Testament, derives, as I read Wink, from the truth of Jesus’ message, and not from a principle that anything Jesus says is true because He says it. Riane Eisler, working not as a Bible scholar but as a student of the history of patriarchy, also advocates a domination free social order. She calls it a partnership society. Wink cites her conclusions as if they were his own. Thus Wink implies that although Jesus’ good news is true, the same good news continues to be true when someone other than Jesus says it.
Wink grants to the right wing ideology that is currently dominant in America much of what it says it wants. He endorses reversing moral decay by insisting on higher ethical standards. He endorses the principal commandments of Jesus and the principal teachings of Paul. These concessions are not likely to move hardened right-wingers to change their minds. They may, however, persuade some who are less hardened or less right wing, and thus contribute to forming a less violent majority.
References: Three of Walter Wink’s books: Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, Engaging the Powers (Fortress Press)
According to my thesis, it is more important to understand the growth of markets, which made the European commercial system into a world commercial system, than it is to understand the Enlightenment philosophers. Their proto-materialism, near materialism and materialism were consequences of modernity more than they were its cause. Walter Wink’s focus, unlike mine, is more on the worldview of modern materialism than on the laws governing commerce. Wink writes:
"It is not my intent to defend the biblical worldview, for it is in many ways beyond being salvaged, limited as it was by the science, philosophy, and religion of its age. The very relativity of the biblical cosmology to its historical epoch led many theologians earlier in our century to discount cosmology as unimportant altogether, a husk to be stripped from the kernel and cast aside. We can now see, however, that such an approach simply meant acquiescing without struggle to the worldview of modern materialism." (Unmasking the Powers, p. 5)
Seeking to undo the damage done by modernity, Wink seeks to make intelligible again the spiritual vocabulary that modernity made unintelligible. "…a reassessment of these powers –angels, demons, gods, elements, the devil- allows us to reclaim, name, and comprehend types of experience that materialism renders mute and inexpressible. We have the experiences, but miss their meaning. Unable to name our experiences, we are simply constrained by them compulsively. They are never more powerful than when they are unconscious." (UP p. 7) My focus on what modernity did and on what about modernity needs to be cured is complementary to and different from Wink’s. Following Wallerstein, Polanyi, and Braudel, I believe that modernity began several centuries earlier than the philosophies that articulated its ideologies. It began with trade routes.
Identifying modernity with its philosophies paves the way for interpreting the historical experience of the twentieth century as a refutation of modernity. Thus World War I, the Holocaust, the Pol Pot massacres, the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the Dirty War in Argentina, the Indonesian massacres…. etc. et al. are taken as evidence that The Enlightenment misled humanity into excessive optimism about human nature. Rejecting Enlightenment ideals, one turns to the Bible, or to Nietzsche, in order to correct in theory and in practice the mistakes humanity made by adopting a false optimism.
The ideas of historians like Wallerstein permit me to suggest a more prosaic view of the tragedies of the twentieth century. Its main historical events can be read as a series of anti-systemic struggles. The anti-systemic struggles were generated in various ways by a system of global commodity exchange that systematically excluded whole nations and classes from its benefits. At the close of the century all of the anti-systemic movements appeared to have been defeated. But, at the beginning of the twenty first century, while Fuk uyama and others were still celebrating the system’s triumph over all comers, anti-systemic resistance again came to the fore. The main task of scholars seeking to understand modernity is to understand how the system works, so that its defects can effectively be cured.
Seeking to cure a specific defect of modernity, its rejection of spirit and myth, Wink gives his readers a series of illuminating insights into the dynamics of domination and violence. Illuminated, we see that collective behavior is motivated more by collective dreams than by collective logic. Illuminated, we see that the pale sciences sponsored by positivism, materialism, and deconstruction do not move the masses, while the myth of redemptive violence. Illuminated, we see that peace requires "an energy field more intense than war" (Michael True’s title), and "the moral equivalent of war." (William James) Illuminated, we admire the nonviolent dramas staged by people who call what they do "prophetic witness." We admire them because with Wink’s help we learn to see their actions as justified by an epistemologically valid understanding of socially constructed reality.
For Wink, domination, violence, and the myths legitimating them go back long before modernity. They go back at least to Marduk and ancient Sumer. What happened when modern ideas prevailed –and what Wink seeks to correct—is not that either violence or nonviolence was invented, but rather that the vocabularies in which they had anciently been brought to language became unintelligible. The bright light of Wink’s illuminations makes them intelligible again.
The brilliance of Wink’s illuminations is, unfortunately, so bright that it can itself blind us to the need for specifically modern vocabularies to cope with specifically modern socially constructed realities. Blinded, we may fail to see how much solutions to the problems of poverty and economic justice require an understanding of the cold logic of investment and accumulation. Blinded, we may forget that when Paul crafted the spiritual vocabulary of powers in his epistles he did not consult Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, or any of the "worldly philosophers" (Robert Heilbroner) who define the options for modernity. Blinded we may regard the destruction of the biosphere as the consequence not of a society driven by markets, but as a consequence of the cosmology of a society driven by markets. Blinded, we may not notice that while little children are learning the myth of redemptive violence from comic books, young adults are learning accounting and mainstream economic theory from college textbooks.
As Braudel has shown, there is a discontinuity between modernity and what came before it. Nowhere is this truer than in warfare. Soldiers on the government’s payroll have replaced the warrior-aristocrats who conducted wars for millennia. ("Soldier" comes from "solde" the French word for "wage.") As Polanyi has shown, today economic relations are "disembedded" from social relations. Instead of being a subordinate part of social life, economic relations are powers unto themselves, which frame the rest of culture more than the rest of culture frames them. Consequently the ancient myths that constituted cultural cosmologies by defining the relationships between mortals and immortals (and consequently those between mortals and mortals) do not correctly describe economic relations. If you think of money as a god, you will not understand money. If you think of industrial capitalism as the strong crushing the weak (UP p. 139), you will not understand industrial capitalism. If you think of corporate globalization as an instance of the sin of greed, you will not understand corporate globalization.
One might say, taking a cue from Wink, that in addition to carrying forward the ancient myth of redemptive violence, modern economic society also has a mythic structure of its own. (Similarly, Robert Bellah et al in Habits of the Heart suggest that while the language of business is the dominant language of America, other languages survive and coexist with it.) However, since the economists, accountants, jurists, and liberal ethical philosophers who articulate the normative framework of commerce make it a point not to talk about gods or supernatural beings, it would be better to say that modern economic society has not a mythic structure of its own but a cultural structure of its own.
How to Make Another World Possible
Martin Heidegger, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Walter Wink put modern institutions in
context by offering perspectives on how they arose. My comments on them have served as vehicles for
articulating my own views, which are in accord with those of Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel,
and Karl Polanyi. (I also agree with Nancy Hartsock that the emergence from preceding cultural
structures of a global society structured by commodity exchange can be seen--in a longer historical
context--as a phase in the history of patriarchy.)
I have summarized my conclusions (without asking the permission of the people I say I am in accord with)
in the thesis, "the cause of modernity is markets; the cure of its defects is ethics."
In three final e mail messages I propose: In #34 (this one) to sketch a practical consequence of seeing
the establishment and expansion of markets as the key modernity-making process; in #35 to clarify the
epistemological status of my thesis; and in #36 to discuss the methodology of ethics.
In sketching a practical consequence, I assume the following goals: The many human societies of the world
should be a mosaic of culturally appropriate social democracies; characterized by reliable expectations of
peaceful change; mixed economies; efficient markets; vital and efficient public sectors; reliable and adequate
social safety nets; democratic freedoms; effective and independent civil society organizations, including large
nonprofit and cooperative sectors; opportunities for lifelong learning; cultural diversity; high and equitably
distributed personal income; sustainability, and harmony with the environment; nonviolent conflict resolution;
and respect for majority and minority identities. Societies should provide encouraging settings for
neighborhoods and bonded families and communities where people know each other; where nobody feels excluded,
ignored, stifled, or unappreciated.
My sketch of practical goals is not idiosyncratic. It is pretty much a synthesis of civil, social, and
economic rights guaranteed by international conventions ratified by most nations. If you like, you may
cross out my list of goals, and substitute for it, "implementation of the human rights agreed upon by the
world's peoples through their authorized representatives in the United Nations and other world bodies, and
given the force of law through ratification by a sufficient number of signatory nations."
The practical problem is not in achieving widespread consensus on goals.
The practical problem is how to get from here to there.
Suppose we accept my thesis that the main way we got here was through the growth of markets (where "we"
means humanity and "here" means living in the modern institutions that prevail today.) Then we are likely
to see the reform of markets, and the supplementation of markets with non-market or quasi-market institutions
for mobilizing resources to meet needs as the way to get from here to there (where "there" means achievement
of the goals sketched above).
Ever since modernity began, progressive political and social movements have tried to do just that, i.e. to reform
and supplement markets. Their approach has mainly been to do work for progressive public laws and policies.
For two among many examples, public laws have reformed markets by breaking up monopolies; and by creating
markets (and the property rights that go with markets) in toxic waste emission reduction (in order to create
incentives for the use of green technologies).
For two among many examples, public laws have supplemented markets with universal health care, making doctors
and hospitals available to all citizens regardless of ability to pay; and by funding community development
programs, which animate volunteering and mutual aid at the grassroots level.
On the whole, using public law to reform modernity has failed as much as it has succeeded. Seeing markets
as causing and constituting modernity helps make visible the structural obstacles, which produce recurrent failure.
The market as dominant institution imposes systemic imperatives, which frustrate people's efforts to control their lives.
The systemic imperatives also frustrate collective efforts to pursue the public good.
For one example among many, with respect to using tax laws to discourage industry from leaving France to
relocate where wages are lower and workers have less security, M. Sarkozy, the Minister of Economy, Finance,
and Industry recently said, "…that will not accomplish anything. They will leave anyway. In matters of defense,
as in matters of economics, Maginot lines do not work." (Le Monde, July 12, 2004, p. 6)
(One might object that in this example it is not the market that is dominating the French state and French
workers, but the factory owners. But as Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, among others, have pointed out,
the factory owners too must obey the imperatives of the market if they want to stay in business.) Here is
my main point.
Understanding the modern world as a product produced by the establishment of market institutions helps make
visible the cure for market domination. The systemic imperatives which seem (to those who think inside the box)
to be forces that frustrate laws, are themselves established by law. One must dig several layers down to find
their legal foundations. They are not found in the comparatively recent layers of public law. They are not
found in constitutional law. They are found in the principles of property and contract derived from ancient
Roman jurisprudence (with some variations in the common law jurisdictions). They were imposed on the entire
world by the European colonizing powers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. They are often called "private law."
The so-called "economic forces" which frustrate laws are themselves the consequences of particular legal
institutions. As Amartya Sen has written, "…market forces can be seen as operating through a system of legal
relations (ownership rights, contractual relations, legal exchanges etc.) The law stands between food
availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance."
(Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. p. 106)
The practical consequence is that getting from here to there requires a higher form of pragmatism.
Pragmatism has a bad name because the term is used (for example by M. Sarkozy) to justify surrendering
to the systemic imperatives of the global market economy. Taming markets so that they serve useful
purposes in achieving personal and social goals-without being implacable dominators of humanity-requires
a willingness to revisit and revise the constitutive rules of markets. The constitutive rules are the
principles of private law, together with the cultural norms in which they are embedded. Such a willingness
characterizes real pragmatism.Back to Top
(To learn more about how systemic imperatives can--and cannot--be de-fanged, visit Dilemmas of Social Democracies
by H. Richards and J. Swanger at www.howardri.org.)
Part 35 #35. ON THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL STATUS OF MY THESISFormally my thesis is necessarily true. Like the periodic table of the elements in
chemistry, and like the concept of evolution in biology, it cannot be refuted by
producing a counterexample or by conducting a crucial experiment. Nevertheless, it
could be refuted, or rather rejected; by showing that the conceptual lens it
proposes makes no sense, is out of touch with reality, or is not useful.
First I will explain why my thesis is formally necessarily true. Then I will
explain why nevertheless someone might have good reasons for believing it to be wrong.
With respect to the formal issue, let us start by considering someone who does not
believe that the growth of markets was the cause of modernity. Take Anthony
Giddens for example. He acknowledges that the growth of markets was a cause of
modernity. But for him it was not the cause. There were others. There was, for one,
a series of revolutions in science including the Copernican revolution. Science
succeeded in building a secular worldview independent of theology. He says
scientific progress was a cause of modernity.I do not deny the facts cited by Giddens. I do not deny any facts at all. But I
do not count the rise of science as refuting my thesis. I just mean by "modernity"
a world structured by commodity exchange. If all the 17th century scientific
discoveries had been made, but there had been no expansion of commerce, then I
would
not call such a scientifically advanced but economically backward world
modern. The product of ever expanding and ever more pervasive markets just is
modernity. At least it is modernity as I see it and as I propose that others see it.
It also follows from the way I think about markets that the cure for their defects
is ethics. Buying and selling constitute markets. This social activity, buying
and selling, was aptly described by Karl Marx, in a famous passage which I
follow here, as "a very Eden of the innate rights of man." * Rights are cultural norms.
The first right constituting market behavior is property. Without property
ownership there can be no buying and selling. This logical requirement of market
exchange is evident today in the patenting of the germ plasm of hybrid seeds. Seed
companies lobby for laws declaring genetic codes to be intellectual property, so
that they can own them and sell them. No property, no market.
In the same famous passage Marx describes the bargaining process which culminates
in a contract of sale. Each looks to his own self-interest. When there is a
meeting of the minds a deal is struck. (I still remember my law school contracts
professor, Harold Shepard, author of Shepard on Contracts, who, when lecturing on the
details of negotiation would mark the exact moment when a contract came into
existence by grasping his two hands together like a winning boxer and shouting
CONTRACT!) The contract is the legal expression of the common will of the contracting
parties. No contracts, no market.
Market behavior is governed by a certain set of cultural norms, namely the laws and
customs that govern property and contracts, and the laws and customs that grant
and govern the freedom to do business within that framework. Formally,
there is only one possible way to improve market behavior, and, for that matter,
non-market behavior. It is to improve the norms. It is to govern them by a
different and better set of cultural norms. The process of continually improving and
continually supplementing the existing rules of the game is by definition
ethical progress. Ethical progress substitutes for the existing ethic (the existing
set of norms) a new better one which replaces the old not-as-good one.
One might object at this point that I have built for myself a private conceptual
sandbox. In my sandbox markets will always be seen as the causes of modernity and
ethics will always be seen as the cure of modernity's defects. I can play there
as long as I like talking to myself in my own idiosyncratic vocabulary, because the
way I have defined my terms nobody can possibly refute me.
On the contrary, I believe that my thesis could be refuted, or rather rejected, by
people who might adduce good reasons why it, or part of it, is mistaken.
One sort of good reason for rejecting my thesis would be that it does not make any
sense. I am not entitled to stretch the meaning of a word of ordinary or technical
language so far that my terminology becomes unintelligible. One might
argue, for example, that I have fallen into unintelligibility by identifying markets
and modernity so closely that it is not logically possible for one of them
to be the cause of the other.Another sort of good reason for rejecting my thesis would say that as a capsule
summary of the innumerable facts of early modern history it selects the wrong theme.
Suppose that in fact the main causes of the emergence of modern nations were power
struggles that were more military/political and religious than economic.
Then, even if formally I have made my thesis true by definition, in the light of an
informed view of a great many historical facts, one could find good reasons for
believing that my thesis results in a distorted view of what really happened. Even if
a single counterexample would not refute my thesis, reading books like Giddens'
A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism or Weber's The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism might provide good reasons for rejecting it.
A third sort of reason for rejecting my thesis would be that it does not conform to
some canon of scientific method one has good reasons for accepting. One might,
for example, be an inductivist, for whom no claim at such a high level of
generalization can possibly be acceptable, or a Popperian who only counts as scientific
propositions those propositions that are stated in the form of testable
hypotheses.A fourth sort of reason for rejecting my thesis would be to hold on pragmatic
grounds that it is not useful, or that it is harmful, either to articulate theses at
such a high level of generality, or, in particular, to assert the particular thesis
I have asserted. One might include here (or put in a separate category)
the attacks on "totalizing" theories on the grounds that they are "disempowering."
I find it comforting to think that I might be wrong. It assures me that I am
saying something. In the preceding 34 e-mail messages I have given reasons for
accepting my thesis, in site of the plausible reasons for rejecting it that might be
advanced. I will not add to them here.
* Karl Marx, Capital volume 50 of Great Books of the Western World, pp.83-84.
Marx, however, thought that the language-game being played by the buyers and sellers
was an illusion beautified by rights-talk, which could only be demystified and
scientifically understood by going to the deeper level of production relations and at
that deep level deploying the labor theory of value. My view, following the late
Wittgenstein as I understand him, is that there is no deeper level. What you see
is what you get.Back to Top
Part 36 Modernity, Its Cause and Cure #36On the Methodology of Ethics
There are economists like Lionel Robbins who claim that economics makes no value
judgments. The claim is not believable, for -as has often been observed-economics
is at the apogee of its political and moral influence precisely when it poses as a
value free science staffed by technocrats. More believable is an apparently (but
only apparently) opposite claim: Over a wide domain of practical moral issues,
economics purports to be the right way to make value judgments. Old fashioned
philosophical and religious teachings on politics and ethics are a series of wrong
ways.The economist Abba Lerner once said to me, "Economics is the study of values
insofar as values have been quantified. Philosophy is the study of values insofar
as values have not been quantified yet."He said that to me in 1964. Many more values have been quantified since then.
Wherever one looks there are cost benefit analyses, cost effectiveness ratios,
environmental impact studies, business proposals, project feasibility reports, audits,
needs assessments, policy studies, program budgeting, plans, and evaluations.
Most if not all of them use statistical and economic concepts to make value judgments.
Although nobody doubts that where decisions require data analysis, quantitative
methodologies of some kind must be used, the merits and defects of many of the most
common kinds will appear in different lights, depending on how one is accustomed to
thinking about the origins and causes of modernity.
If one emphasizes the intellectual elements of a Weberian account of the origins of
modernity; regarding traditional societies as "customary" and "enchanted," and
modern societies as "instrumentally rational," "scientific," and "disenchanted;"
then one is likely to view quantitative methodologies in ethics much as Kenneth Arrow
viewed them in Social Choice and Individual Values. * "In a capitalist democracy," Arrow wrote,
"there are essentially two methods by which social choices
can be made: voting, typically used to make 'political' decisions, and the market
mechanism, typically used to make 'economic' decisions." (p. 1) Arrow disparages
traditional rules and customary norms as typical of a less enlightened past; and he
distrusts them as likely to lead to dictatorship (since someone must interpret the
rules). Tradition is out; choice is in. Consumer preference reigns supreme.
Anyone who tries to justify social choices by reference to what consumers or voters
should want,
as distinct from what they do want, is disparaged as an "idealist."
(pp. 81-86) Even the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb is treated as an "idealist"
in this sense. (p. 87) In Arrow's book, "…the distinction between voting and the market
mechanism will be disregarded, both being regarded as special cases of the moreIn such books -there are thousands of them-choice, choice in general, tends to
become the measure of value. In applied ethics, benefits are measured by market
prices, by GNP, by growth of GNP, and by other indicators that measure, in the end,
what consumers will pay to acquire something. Where there is no market, the
researcher will invent a market analog, in order to have a method for assigning
numerical values to the alternatives being considered in the decision-making process.
The distinction between a values-driven society and a profit-driven society tends
to disappear because profits (being ultimately derived from consumer choices) are,
by definition, values.But if, instead, the origins and causes of the emergence of a global society
organized by commodity exchange are conceived in Wallersteinian terms as the expansion
of the European world-system; or in terms of Paulo Freire's philosophy of cultural
action as the modification of pre-existing cultural structures by humans in their
never-ending creative efforts to reshape the world to meet their needs; then it
will be seen that customary norms have not been left as far behind as Arrow and others
think. We do not live in a world structured by choice. It is for the most part
the other way around. Systemic imperatives imposed by cultural structures
constrain the choices.
A critical social scientist will notice that the choices made in markets are
purchases and sales. They presuppose distinctions between having and not having
defined by property law. Choices in markets result in contracts. They lead to
certain kinds of human relationships, the kinds defined by contract law. Only where
certain customary norms have been imposed by law do most people find it necessary
in order to acquire a certain kind of property --their daily bread-to find
someone who chooses to enter into a certain kind of contract with them -a contract to
exchange services for wages. As my friend Catherine Hoppers of Pretoria
University says, "Europeans never remember that the rules of the global economy were
imposed on Africa by force. Africans never forget."
The methodology of an ethics aware that the causal powers that mostly determine
the fates of human beings (and of the biosphere) are cultural structures,
will be a transformative methodology. Instead of making property and contract norms
invisible, it will study how to improve them.
THIS IS THE LAST OF THE MODERNITY ITS CAUSE AND CURE SERIES. YOU MAY READ ALL OF THE
INSTALLMENTS TOGETHER ON MY WEBSITE WWW.HOWARDRI.ORG
*Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values New York: John Wiley, 1951.
Obviously, I am concerned here with Arrow's general worldview, not with the specific
results that made this book famous.###