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Economy and the Future
A Crisis of Faith
By Jean-Pierre Dupuy, M. B. DeBevoise Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-033-5
CHAPTER 1
Economy and the Problem of Evil
Evil is never "radical," it is only extreme; it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is "thought-defying," because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality."
—Hannah Arendt, letter to Gershom Scholem, 20 July 1963
There is no better way to understand how Economy has come to take up an unreasonably large place in our lives than to begin by considering the sense in which it constitutes a solution to the problem of evil. Just as the history of modern philosophy can be interpreted as a succession of replies given to this problem, so too the history of modern economic thought can be regarded as having followed a parallel course.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when human beings believed that death, sickness, and accidental injury are rightfully inflicted by God on all who sin against Him, in accordance with the principle of the summum bonum, or the highest good, which God's perfection obliges him to bring about. On this view, God is the cause of physical evil. The question arose, then, whether He is also the cause of sin and of moral evil; and, if so, how He could have invented the very thing that corrupts His creation. The attempt to vindicate God's will was called theodicy in Greek, and it is this term that is traditionally used to refer to all human attempts to justify the existence of evil in a world that has been perfectly made.
Theodicies Old and New
Saint Augustine's answer to the question is well known: God did not wish for moral evil to be; but He could not have done otherwise than to permit it, for, in creating man in His image, He created him free, and therefore free to choose evil. This argument was widely attacked. The most formidable assault came from the Calvinist philosopher and theologian Pierre Bayle, author of a monumental Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695–97). If I wish to make a gift to my enemies, Bayle mockingly retorted, nothing is easier than to give them something that will bring about their downfall. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz undertook to defend Augustine against Bayle in a pair of works that form the twin pillars of his metaphysics: the first, published in French in 1710, was a volume of essays on the goodness of God, the freedom of man, and the origin of evil titled Theodicy; the second, theMonadology, followed four years later.
Leibniz argued that God's understanding comprehends an infinity of possible worlds. In deciding which one of these to bring into existence, He was prevented from choosing arbitrarily by the principle of sufficient reason, which requires that every effect have a cause. What is more, God could only choose the best world, again by virtue of the principle of the summum bonum, from which it follows that only that which displays the greatest possible degree of perfection can exist. Does this principle of the best, as it is also known, mean that God could not have chosen otherwise? No, for the necessity that guided his decision was only moral, and not metaphysical; in other words, there would not have been any logical contradiction in God's choosing another world than the best one. Yet in order to bring about the best of all possible worlds, God was obliged to leave some measure of evil in it; without this residuum our world would have been less perfect overall, since in that case it could be improved in one way only on pain of making it still worse in some other way. Everything that appears as evil from the finite point of view of the individual monad is, from the point of view of the totality of all sentient beings, a necessary sacrifice for the greatest good of the totality. Evil is therefore only an illusion, a mere perspectival effect. Leibniz's theodicy is the source of utilitarianism in moral philosophy, and his monadology the source of Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand.
The doctrine of metaphysical optimism, as this version of theodicy is also known (where "optimism" has its classical sense, referring to the best possible state of affairs rather than a hopeful attitude toward the future), was shattered on 1 November 1755 by an earthquake of scarcely less great magnitude than that of the Sumatra earthquake 250 years later. The raging fires that came after, in Lisbon and elsewhere, were extinguished finally by a gigantic tsunami that unleashed waves fifteen meters high as far away as the shores of Morocco. The Portuguese capital was annihilated. From this catastrophe there issued two views of evil, which came to be associated with the names of Voltaire and Rousseau, respectively. In March 1756, Voltaire published a philosophical essay in verse, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, to which Rousseau replied with a Letter to Monsieur de Voltaire, dated 18 August of the same year.
Voltaire, adopting a position it is tempting in hindsight to call "postmodern," asked his readers to accept the pure contingency of events and to admit that the chain of causes and effects can never fully be explained. Rousseau, for his part, denied that God punishes men for their sins, and argued that a human, quasi-scientific explanation could be found for such catastrophes. Seven years afterward, in Émile (1762), he drew the lesson of the Lisbon disaster: "Man, seek the author of evil no longer. It is yourself. No evil exists other than that which you do or suffer, and both come to you from yourself."
Proof of Rousseau's triumph is to be found in the world's reaction to two of the greatest natural disasters in recent memory: the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in August of the following year. For it was precisely their status as natural catastrophes that contemporary accounts rejected. The New York Times reported news of the hurricane under the headline "A Man-Made Disaster." The same thing had already been said about the tsunami, and with good reason: had Thailand's coral reefs and coastal mangroves not been severely eroded by urbanization, tourism, aquaculture, and climate change, they would have slowed the advance of the deadly tidal wave and significantly reduced the scope of the disaster. In New Orleans, as it turned out, the levees constructed to protect the city had not been properly maintained for many years, and troops of the Louisiana National Guard who might have helped after the storm were unavailable because they had been called up for duty in Iraq. The same people who later questioned the wisdom of building a city on marshland next to the sea now wonder why the Japanese should have thought they could safely develop civilian nuclear power, since geography condemned them to do this in seismic zones vulnerable to massive flooding. The lesson, they say, is plain: humanity, and only humanity, is responsible (if not also to blame) for the misfortunes that beset it.
This human evil Rousseau called amour-propre, which he contrasted with amour de soi. I have shown elsewhere that Adam Smith's concept of "self-love" is to be interpreted in exactly the sense of Rousseau's amour-propre, and not as what Rousseau meant by amour de soi. In the Dialogues, the most revealing work that he left us concerning amour-propre (also known as Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, a sequel to the Confessions, in effect, published in 1776), Rousseau wrote:
The primitive passions, which all tend directly toward our happiness, focus us only on objects that relate to it, and having only amour de soi as a principle, are all loving and gentle in their essence. But when, being deflected from their object by obstacles, they focus on removing the obstacle rather than on reaching the object; then they change nature and become irascible and hateful. And that is how amour de soi, which is a good and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, which is to say a relative feeling by which one makes comparisons; the latter feeling demands preferences, and its enjoyment is purely negative, as it no longer seeks satisfaction in our own benefit but solely in the harm of another.
Amour-propre is a destructive force, the malign offspring of amour de soi: it is when personal interests collide ("cross each other," Rousseau says), that amour de soi changes into amourpropre. The transformation occurs when one person's gaze crosses another's, giving rise in turn to the sidelong glance—the invidious look (Latin invidia, from the verbal form meaning "to cast an evil eye upon"). It is by means of envy, then, that amour de soi is converted into jealousy and resentment, creating a spirit of animosity whose blind determination to overcome everything that stands in its way causes it to relinquish all claim to rationality.
The great moral horrors of the twentieth century brought into existence a new order of evil that was the exact opposite of the one Rousseau had described. Vladimir Jankélévitch called Rousseau's conception an "anthropodicy," which is to say a theodicy in which man is substituted for God. In the new conception, the primacy of God (or "nature") was restored, to the point that it now became possible to speak of thenaturalization of evil.
In 1958, the German philosopher Günther Anders traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to take part in the Fourth World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs. After many conversations with survivors of the catastrophe, he noted in his diary: "Their steadfast resolve not to speak of those who were to blame, not to say that the event had been caused by human beings; not to harbor the least resentment, even though they were the victims of the greatest of crimes—this really is too much for me, it passes all understanding." And he added: "They constantly speak of the catastrophe as if it were an earthquake or a tidal wave. They use the Japanese word, tsunami "
Anders succeeded in identifying this new regime of evil at about the same time as Hannah Arendt (a fellow student at Marburg, and also his first wife). Arendt spoke of Auschwitz, Anders of Hiroshima. Whereas Arendt diagnosed Eichmann's psychological disability as a "lack of imagination," Anders showed that this is not the weakness of any one person in particular; it is the weakness of every person when mankind's capacity for invention, and for destruction, becomes disproportionately enlarged in relation to the human condition. In that case evil acquires an autonomy of its own in relation to the intentions of those who commit it. Anders and Arendt each drew attention to a scandalous paradox, namely, that immense harm may be caused without the least malevolence; that unimaginable guilt may go hand in hand with an utter absence of malice. Once our moral categories have been robbed of their power to describe and judge evil, when evil exceeds our powers of comprehension, when it becomes inconceivable, one must be prepared to say, with the jurist Yosal Rogat, that "a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore; that a wronged collectivity owes a duty to the moral order to punish the criminal." That European Jews should have replaced "holocaust" with the Hebrew word shoah, which signifies a natural catastrophe (in particular, a flood or tidal wave), tells us how strong the temptation to naturalize evil can be when human beings find themselves incapable of grasping the horror of the very thing they have done or had done to them.
We are now in a position to consider Economy in its relation to the problem of evil. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his last major work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), took credit for a result that the anthropology of his time had made virtually a commonplace: "I have established that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, have religious origins. This is true of magic as well, and of the various techniques derived from it. On the other hand, it has long been known that until a relatively advanced period in evolution, the rules of morality and law were indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In short, then, it can be said that nearly all great social institutions are born of religion." This "nearly all" comes as a surprise. A footnote explains its meaning:
Only one form of social activity has not yet been explicitly linked to religion: namely, economic activity. However, techniques derived from magic are found, by that very fact, to have indirectly religious origins. Moreover, economic value is a kind of power, of efficacy, and we know the religious origins of the idea of power. Wealth can confer mana; this is how it comes to have it. In this way, we see that the idea of economic value and that of religious value cannot be unrelated. But the nature of these relationships has not yet been studied.
My work over the past thirty years in social and political philosophy has been guided by the conviction not only that Economy cannot be explained without reference to religion, but that Economy occupies the place emptied out by the desacralization the world, itself an eminently religious phenomenon. The recent economic crisis must therefore be placed in the long perspective of modernity, beginning in the seventeenth century.
Economic Violence
Media commentary about the sudden collapse of the global economy that began with the panic of August 2007 often uses words like "earthquake" or "tsunami"—so often, in fact, that no one even notices. There is nevertheless something shocking and profoundly true about likening a moral catastrophe of this scope to a natural catastrophe. We would do well to think about it with some care.
When a great wave rises up suddenly from the depths of the sea and radiates with lightning speed until it crashes against sleeping shores with unimaginable force, it chooses neither those whom it carries away nor those whom it spares. One thinks of Voltaire's famous lines, heaping scorn on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake in 1755:
Leibniz can't tell me from what secret cause
In a world governed by the wisest laws,
Lasting disorders, woes that never end
With our vain pleasures real sufferings blend;
Why ill the virtuous with the vicious shares?
Why neither good nor bad misfortune spares?
Today, some of the worst swindlers have paid for their crimes, or will pay one day, but organizations devoted to the public good whose only mistake was to place their confidence in them have had to pay as well. Other crooks are sure to emerge from the crisis unscathed, however, whereas well-managed and once flourishing companies will have gone under. The evil that strikes the world is blind and without purpose, as we are forced to admit—joining Voltaire in acknowledging, too, that we are at a loss to understand why:
I can't conceive that "what is, ought to be,"
In this each doctor knows as much as me.
Voltaire's courage and lucidity, both, are lacking among the two classes of experts who comment most prominently on the crisis: those who cling, pigheadedly, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, to the doctrine of efficient markets; and those at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, equally incapable of regarding capitalism as anything other than omniscient and omnipotent, who imagine it to be a conspiracy by the powerful to further enrich themselves while continuing to exploit the poor. In searching for an explanation where none is to be found, both sides desperately seek to reassure themselves that all is well.
Not the least of the things that the crisis destroyed is the notion that human behavior is shaped by incentives, long one of the pillars of neoclassical economic theory. Few free-market theorists believe that the decisions of the market are fair; most of them, beginning with John Rawls, hold that they are neither just nor unjust, that these predicates are meaningless. The valuations arrived at by the market are indifferent to merit, indifferent to moral worth, indifferent to human needs. Consider the case of a hardworking doctor who is honest, poor, and less skilled than other doctors. Is it unjust that he will be put out of business by his competitors? Justice has nothing to do with it: the rules are the same for everyone; the process is anonymous, bereft of intention, undirected by any personal will. The same theorists generally accept, however, that there is a discernible connection between individual actions and the decisions of the market that encourages each agent to make reasonable choices, which, in the aggregate, will tend to promote the common good. Thus the incompetent physician, forced to change his profession, will discover his true calling and put his talents to better use. It is this link, between what a person does and how the market responds, that the present crisis has destroyed—or, still worse, has shown to be illusory. It is as though economic agents are no more than marionettes, at the mercy of the whims of hidden divinities. The present crisis is therefore, at bottom, a crisis of meaning. The confusion it has caused is total.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Economy and the Future by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, M. B. DeBevoise. Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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