Subjectivity, Laws and Ethics
My worthy opponent over at Thoughts and Ideas, hoping to reconcile free market capitalism with his Catholic libertarianism, tells us that "...the laws of economics are comprehensible to man through the use of his reason alone...The nature of economics then, is such that it is not concerned with ethics." He means you don't need Holy Ghosts keeping things mysterious, you are endowed by ( neutral) God with Reason.
One can find few examples which better demonstrate the logic of capitalism and its ability to reproduce its own ideology. Brute power, violence and greed are transubstantiated (sorry, I have been looking for an excuse to use this word, especially arguing with a Catholic! :to change into another substance : the change in the eucharistic elements at their consecration in the mass from bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ) into Enlightenment Ideals such as "laws" and "reason". This has taken centuries to drill into human consciousness, through media,myth, education and culture more generally. We have all heard of these "laws of economics", natural, immutable things which govern the processes of exchange and here we learn that through the application of reason and rationality we can deduce their pragmatic workings. How wonderful.
But there is more. This "dismal science" also has a nature, fixed attributes and attitudes independent of Man ( in this case casually dismissive as concerns our general welfare ). Which brings to mind a great line from Brechts St. Joan of the Stockyards:
No one to blame for crises!
Over us, changeless and inscrutable, rule
the laws of economics,
and natural catastrophies recur
in dreadful cycles.
Within capitalist logic, The Invisible Hand, like Nero, simply points thumb up or thumb down, but unlike the Great Emperor, it is done divorced of all emotion, it is simply a rational, natural ( Animal Spirits) and amoral judgement of the Cosmos. Blameless and Pure.
It is the ethico-political challenge of the Left to destroy this form of idolatry. Young Libertarian-Austrian-Objectivists feel high on "free thinking" as they are injected with this poison, courageously fighting the State and Totalitarianism and all sorts of Evil on the road to Free (dom) Markets!
Meeting this challenge means demonstrating that we are all "excuded" (Hardt-Negri) ,that our solitude is debilitating, and that it is not just a struggle of proletarians "who have nothing to lose but their chains". It is a struggle for all of us , who have everything to lose, our subjectivity, our commons, our livable planet. Because the relation between historical circumstances and the production of this subjectivity keeps changing, the capitalists "immutable laws" are funk, bunk,junk science and have no chance against our indignation, refusal and rebellion. Their ethics-free universe has no claim on our dignity.
"For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man."
Franz Fannon from Wretched of the earth
posted by troutsky @ 7:26 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Troutsky
The only problem with the statement that the "laws of economics are comprehensible to man through his reason alone", is that man is not simply a rational being. In fact, reason is only a very small and recently specialized fragment of what man is in total. Man is also, and originally, instinctual; he is raw desire. Those who believe that man's best 'ends' are those that can be rationally and mathematially deduced are deluding themselves and cutting off from themselves what is most fundamentally human... our very 'wanting', our primal desire.
On the other hand, 'ethics' as well is really nothing more than a rational, scientific pursuit of human purpose -- in fact ethics, as the rationalization of religion and revelation is nothing other than the twin sister of scientific reasoning, the other half of the enlightenment equation; although both mathematics and religion were born millenia before the Enlightenment...with the birth of urbanization and the division of labor.
Seemingly locked in an eternal mythological struggle, modern science and religion are enemies in posture only - mutually dependent, sibling rivals emerging at the dawn of civilization. They were both apparently necessary, but neither of them alone a sufficient condition in the full articulation of an embryonic historical, objectivizing consciousness. Quite simply, they staked out two complementary views on one and the same 'objective' reality appearing in the breach from prehistory to history.
Once humanity took those first fateful steps, finding ourselves locked within the hourglass of unidirectional time, we were destined to live on the recently fashioned treadmill of historical progress. Our newfound obligation within civilization was to create history, embrace it, and make it our own. In this historicizing process, reason and revelation became the foundation stones of modern culture, the post-Neolithic tools without which we could not long survive within this new world order.
Having lost our initial footing, our principal and instinctual domicile in nature, these two pillars, science and religion, emerged as twin civilizing engines upon which we would rely in successfully navigating through this new historical reality. At the same time, these two foundation posts themselves could not survive independently, the one without the other.
Reason (science) could provide us with the impetus and skill for making historical progress, but it could give us no guidance about the ultimate purpose of historical life, or insight into the meaningful "end" of history. Revelation (religion/ethics), on the other hand, offered us a vision of the ultimate goal, the telos of history, but it needed reason (science) to supply the concrete force, the means forward in the unfolding drama of historical consciousness. Together they succeeded in focusing civilization on what appeared to be the appropriate direction of historical progress, the future - and on achieving the proper 'ends' of life.
These two cultural and symbolic forces were equal partners, both accessories before and after the fact, in the crimes that would constitute the establishment and expansion of civilizing objectives. It is impossible to censure the one, without disparaging the other. And it is necessary to confess the value of both reason and revelation if one admits to the guidance of either. They are but the two poles, perhaps antipodes, between which both history and civilization rest, and in which life on our planet now hangs in the balance.
A very well constructed argument kultur,I am reminded of St.Augustines attempt to reconcile reason and revelation or the modern New Age attempt to marry spirituality and rationality.
What I am wondering about is the role of cognitive evolution, that is, how we as a species are now different from the instinctual being of pre-history. Recognizing a transcendent concept such as justice seems to me a dialectical process so that our mind is developing alongside history.
The problem with "raw desire" is that it is far to mean a way to exist. Leaving the jungle is purpose of both religion and politics, unfortunately capitalism reinforces the "each against all" instinct. Other systems will both generate "new instincts" and the "new man".
Their ethics-free universe has no claim on our dignity.
As always, I'm terribly sorry that I'm so sluggish at responding to your critiques. The essential point is that the universe is not ethics-free; no Catholic could ever think that. Instead, the economist as an economist is unable to make ethical judgments.
I find it deeply troubling that you interpret capitalism as a source of conflict. It is nothing of the sort. Free exchange on the unhampered market is always mutually beneficial. If it were not, the exchange would not be made.
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