Person-centred economics

 The word economy is etymologically related to the word Oeconomia in the Orthodox Church.  Oeconomia refers to the Church avoiding legalism out of love.  It is an allowance without compromising dogma.  Such an approach is very much in line with how Christ would school the Pharisees and Sadducees against their rigid legalism.  It seems strange then that this word should be related to the "dismal science" of economics, as Carlyle described it,  in the sense of theory about the wealth of nations.

What has happened to economics as a theory, all the way back to Adam Smith and Ricardo, was that it became about the generation of material wealth rather than the management of the household of the nation in which the person was placed at the centre.  In England and the rest of Great Britain industrialisation, free trade, division of labour did indeed lead to increasing wealth, but a diminished existence for many human beings.  While technology and wealth improved living standards in material terms, the spiritual life of the nation's families were much diminished.  

Theoretically the Marxist revolutions in the Russian and Chinese Empires were a reaction against capitalist industrialisation, but these countries' economies were only beginning down that road as they remained largely agrarian.  Marx's positivist dialectical materialism was proved false.  Nonetheless the Communist regimes were just as much about industrialisation and economic growth as capitalism.  

A crisis of capitalism occurred with the Wall Street crash in 1929  and the Great Depression of the thirties.  An alternative economics emerged with the so-called "Third Way", led in political terms by former Marxist Mussolini.  This was about freeing countries from the power of the banking sector and promoting the national interests rather than the interests of global capital.  With the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust this alternative was seriously tarnished.  The Post-War Bretton Woods settlement saw the re-emergence of the power of the international banking sector, but tempered to allow a level of socialist mitigation of the full force of the market.  This system itself led to government debt causing inflation that soon seemed unsustainable,  A return to the economic orthodoxies of liberalism in the West re-emerged with President Reagan and Mrs Thatcher - paying off government debt, selling off state industries, free trade and de-regulated stock markets.

The neoliberal revolution led to a global economics, the strengthening of global corporations over sovereign nations, and open borders in terms of both trade and free movement of peoples.  An alternative form of liberal capitalism, aiming to ensure its long term survival emerged with the Clintons, Blair and the global institutions of the post war years and a newly invigorated World Economic Forum with the concept of stakeholder capitalism.  In domestic politics New Labour even adopted the name of the Fascists' economics - the Third Way,

Along with open borders, nudge manipulation, the political monitoring via ever-more sophisticated technology, a deep suspicion has emerged on the eclectic politics of the so-called Right, from libertarians to traditionalists.  This led to the election of Trump in the States and the vote by the UK to leave the European Union.  The vote from the people was for a more communitarian politics that protected national sovereignty, identity, culture and traditions.  In Britain the neoliberal Right has seized control of the meaning of Brexit as the UK becoming a Singapore of the West, with open borders, no national identity. and uprooting of community -  Britannia not a rescued maiden, but a whore open to all-comers.

In a sense we are no further on than we were with the Industrial Revolution and the end of the agrarian culture of our country.  There is a very simple reason for this - it is that economics for centuries has been centred on ideas other than the human person.  Economics has been about free trade, individualism, industrialisation, class conflict, economic growth; never has it considered the human person and his flourishing to be the key goal of economics.  Instead the person must be sacrificed for the cause of economic growth, whether in the free economy or the command economy.

Today as a result, we find people are replaced by artificial intelligence, economic demands cause brain drains in poor countries and the dilution and loss of cultural identity in first world countries through mass economic migration.  Everything follows the principle of economic growth, compound growth in fact.  As a result the person gets lost.

The person is not the same as an individual.  From the Latin for indivisible the individual is the unit of liberal economics and rational choice theory.  The person is by contrast relational and embedded and spiritual. Compound growth and open borders take no account of the meaning of what it is to be a person.  Industries disappear destabilising communities.  And most of all the all-pervasive focus on filthy lucre kills spirituality and rooted community.

 In 2016 both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, ironically capitalists through and through, seemed to touch on this.  Trump recognised that jobs flowing abroad and migrants flowing in was destabilising the identity of the nation necessary for the embeddedness of the human person.  Nigel Farage raised immigration frequently in the Brexit referendum because as he made clear identity is about more than economic growth.

Nonetheless, without the intellectual tradition you can only expect political leaders to go so far.  Yes Steve Bannon read Evola and Guenon, but there is a deeper and more Christian "Third Way".  It can be found in the writings of an economist like E F Schumacher, with his "Small is Beautiful" and " A Guide for the Perplexed" and even in the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII "Rerum Novarum" -1891.  It can also be found in the writings of G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who worked out the implications of the Papal encyclical.

Distributism was the theory and it was based around the idea of private ownership of small property, of a large enough size to ensure self reliance and independence.  Such an idea would terrify the banks and the capitalists of course, just as much as those socialists wanting to abolish private property and make everyone equal i.e. the same.

The point here is that, not being financed by big money, a good idea went to waste.  Distributism might not be the total answer, but the point was that it proposed making the human person, made in the image of God the centre of the economy, rather than growth, capital or even the proletariat.  

The idea did not fail because it was tried and failed, it was never tried, to misquote Chesterton himself.  The powerful banking interests in the West did not want such an idea to develop and had it ever reached Soviet Russia it would have been squashed.  That is because for all their superficial differences, Capitalism and Communism are creatures of the Enlightenment and they have forgotten that Man is made in the image of God and that Man not some other concept should be at the centre.

The Enlightenment itself was a project of vested interest.  Its hatred of the ancien regime was largely because the wealth on which the new thinkers lived was stolen from the Church during the Reformation.  There was a guilt that required them to destroy the ancien regime altogether and paint what had come before as benighted and savage.  Hence the name Enlightenment of course.

The core intellectual goal of the Enlightenment was to break Man down and disconnect him from his God.  Man became a unit for the liberal order that the Enlightenment led to.  For all its talk of the sanctity of the individual, he was an atomised thing and was to become the very victim of anomie that   Durkheim described.  When we lost our sense of the person as the image of God, we lost a sense of Man as relational, embedded with roots and looking up to the heavenly realm.  Without roots or telos men became mere workers, mere consumers, living under the enslavement not only of the boss or the bureaucrat, but his passions that the economic system fosters.

There is much talk of re-enchantment currently.  Hand in hand with that, if it succeeds, must come a new understanding of the economy as a person-centred system, not waylaid by other targets that diminish the human being who is a person and is made in the image of God.   

      

Diversity is our Decay

 "Diversity is our strength" is a shibboleth parroted by our careerist and pusillanimous politicians and enforced by human resources departments throughout the West.  A whole legal framework of human rights, not so much codifying inherited civic rights as enforcing an ideology of diversity has binding power throughout the West.   Diversity and its corollary, inclusivity were cited as the justification for perpetuating the war in the Donbas (despite the key diverse idols of homosexuality and abortion being legal in the Russian Federation).  

In terms of the Post-War paradigm being predicated on anti-authoritarianism and imposed unity, this obsession with diversity makes some sense.  Of course, the contradiction is diversity of opinion is not permitted, because then the natural perspective embodied throughout the rest of the world and throughout the history of the whole world including the West, would contradict today's mantras of wokeism.

Indeed, the modern West's obsession with individualistic diversity is exceptional in the sense of being an aberration, with no historical equivalent.  It is contingent upon our Christian culture, while being a perversion and twisting of that inheritance.  For most of mankind's existence the question has not been how to enable and protect diversity, but how to return to holistic unity.  From Plato to Eastern spirituality, we have understood diversity and idiosyncrasy to be a fracturing of a holy unity to which we strive to return as the telos of Mankind.

The Russian philosopher who finally became an Orthodox monk, Konstantin Leontiev, known as the Christian Nietzsche provided a powerful symbol of the body politick's progress towards individual diversity as being akin to the decay of a corpse that fragments and breaks up into individual pieces.  This fragmentation can be contrasted with the ideal put forward by French Integralist Charles Maurras for whom a return to the Catholic Church and the Monarchy would re-integrate French society unifying it and overcoming the disintegration set in train by the Jacobin revolution.

Nonetheless, there is a connection between the disintegration into atomised individualism, where people celebrate their idiosyncratic enslavement to their passions and the Church.  It is though a connection between Orthodoxy and a derivative heresy.  Christian theology of the person and liberal individualism are linked in the same way as Orthodox teaching on the Word made flesh is to Arianism.

Diversity as an idea stems from  liberal individualism, itself a heretical derivative from Man as the image of God, the Imago Dei.  We must understand here that the Christian faith answered the dilemma of Greek philosophy - how to solve the problem of the One and the Many.  For most schools of classical thought the break up from unity into diverse particulars was seen as a fall and a disintegration.  The Church Fathers, in particular Saint Maximus the Confessor were able to provide the answer to this age-old dilemma and the answer lay in Christ.

In His Incarnation Christ joins the transcendent and the immanent, the universal and the particular, the One and the Many, God and Man.  As Saint Athanasius and Saint Irenaeus put it - God became man that Men might become gods.  This intertwining without loss of identity between Christ's two natures - divine and human - was further elucidated by Saint Gregory of Palamas's distinction between Divine Energies and Essence.  The essence of the divine and the human are not confused, but distinct for we are being joined in energies not substance or essence.  Thus identity is retained as in love and sexual union.

Furthermore, the Church revealed that God was not an impersonal One as the Neoplatonists held into which we would be absorbed and dissolved, losing out identity.  God is rather Three Persons in One God, three hypostases and one substance.  This then is the solution to the Greek problem of the One and the Many and it is found in personhood.  We are not simply reabsorbed into a Platonic One, but retain our identities in relationship with the Triune God.

That personhood is expressed through relationship, just as the Trinity is three divine Persons in One.  It is not the degraded atomisation into individualism. And that personhood in Man has a telos, to participate in the Divine, growing into the full stature of Christ.

The sanctity of personhood and freedom have been developed by contemporary Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Christos Yannaras.  Our telos is Christ, but it is manifested in our irreplaceability and importantly this irreplaceability of our personhood is expressed through freedom from the passions.

Yes it rests on freedom, because we can only authentically grow into Christ if we choose that path - but it is not freedom to be enslaved to the passions.  This is why Western churches have gone so awry - in their emphasis on inclusivity they say we accept you as you are, whatever passions have enslaved you.  God wants the best for us and will not leave us trapped in our passions.  True identity is unique and irreplaceable, but it is in the fulfilment of our telos to attain the likeness of the divine.  We all start as the imago Dei but having lost the likeness, but our fallen state is put right by attaining likeness though theosis or sanctification.  This is full freedom, not falling short through sin into enslavement to the passions, be that avarice and greed or promiscuity or homosexuality, so promoted by the Western elites.  

The modern West by contrast misunderstands freedom as licence and acquisition of wealth.  Avarice and sexual perversions that distort the image of God in us are celebrated as freedom.   

The Western idea of freedom and rights is a distorted degradation of Christian freedom and personhood.  Unlike the Church Fathers modern ideas are not derived from a high metaphysical principle such as the Trinity and the hypostases.  Enlightenment philosophers simply exaggerated the idea beyond what was justified by metaphysics.  Freedom and the sanctity of the person are indeed sacred principles, but there is no case for putting forward atomised individualism, enslavement to passions or diversity as principles.  They are heretical claims based on nothing more than thin air.  The Church made clear personhood was contingent on the Trinity and that personality could be retained in returning to our Creator as established through Christ's two natures.  The only reason these ideas were developed further into a fragmentary individualism was because of the development of a profound nihilism that ignored the transcendent justification for what we hold dear about mankind.    

And so we must rediscover that the true meaning of freedom is not in what is really the enslavement of "sodomy and usury" celebrated by our corrupt elites, but in the freedom to grow into the "full stature of Christ" through our unique irreplaceability when we are freed from the passions and sin.