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.
No comments:
Post a Comment