The culture of Economism
! By Tony May, 2001 !
Culture is a complex phenomenon with many aspects, layers and levels, all producing diversity as well as unity. There is also an ambiguity to culture as well. In terms of theology it is good, fallen and redeemable. There are life giving and sustaining forces as well as unifying forces that lead to community and human flourishing. Then again the law of sin and death punctuates and stains culture, threatening to decay and disintegrate what is good. This ‘diabolic’, according to Collier and Esteban, manifests itself in culture as death, destruction, domination, exclusivity, intolerance, institutional oppression and injustice, and justification of the raw use of power. They also add to that list, exploitation of the poor, debasement of women, abuse of children, as well as, wasting the earth, penalising dissent, idealising the individual, banning dreams and dreamers, and stoning and crucifying prophets.
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Considering Western culture in particular you can deduce an initial feel for the culture as well as detect its ethos and characterise its configuration. Such a task would reveal that Western culture is characterised by three fingerprints. Collier &Esteban name these as elitism, divisiveness and imperialism. However the overriding perspective in the apparent complexity of Western culture is the cultural importance of the ‘economic’ and I would also add ‘technological’ as a complementary factor. According to Collier and Esteban:
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“It is the economic [and technological] aspect of our lives that more than any other shapes our understanding, our evaluations, and our aspirations, and hence conditions our actions. It is the economic that generates our culture’s rituals and defines our symbols. Our language conveys the depth of that influence; our cultural stories – our myths – are stories about wealth, success and power, and progress and prosperity. Our institutions, whether they are business corporations or hospitals or universities or charity foundations, are run on economic and technological criteria. Even our personal lives are shaped by calculations of value, of gain and cost, of sound investment and satisfaction of wants. Economic [and technological] issues prevail in the media; rewards for work are measured in monetary terms, virtue is defined in terms of economic [and technological] success; consumerism rules the pursuit of leisure. Western culture can thus be characterised as a ‘culture of economism’. Economism, says the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘imposes the primacy of economic causes or factors as the main source of cultural meanings and values’.”
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I included technology in the above quote because not only is it closely linked with economics, but it is also another significant determinant in our culture. Monsma highlights this essential interconnectedness.
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“Largely determined by a drive for power, for human mastery apart from the will of God, humankind has revolted against its Maker, has declared its independence from him and his will, and all too often drives ruthlessly for a salvation of material prosperity brought about by technological prowess.” And elsewhere, “The drive for mastery apart from God and his will manifests itself in technology in what we call technicism. Technicism reduces all things to the technological; it sees technology as the solution to all human problems and needs. Technology is a saviour, the means to make progress and gain mastery over modern, secularised cultural desires. Technology thus becomes its own reason for existing,” Monsma. 1986.
Technicism is a predominant philosophy making technology a major determining factor in society and thus in economic/ business success itself. Even in economics technology is a key variable and economists leave it out of their models with peril. As Hazel Henderson asserts ‘technology and knowledge, far from being “residual” factors in productivity are clearly driving forces’ (1999: 17). Another major value and determinant is the emphasis placed on money (the economic), which is closely related and almost synonymous to the claims of technicism. In fact Handy claims that society has made money the ultimate measure of all things. He argues that money is distorting our priorities such they we place much more emphasis on generating and obtaining greater wealth, meeting the bottom line or our budgets, and so on, through to measuring and/or league tabling the success of people, business and nations in terms of personal wealth, profit/ shareholder value and GNP. The value of power is also prevalent because it provides those people who have it with access to and means of controlling natural resources, people, money and technology in order to maximise their wealth and sense of importance that in turn provides them with more power…
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Another aspect that links the above values is that they purport to meet what in Africa they call the two hungers – one lesser and the other greater. Charles Handy explains that the ‘lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need’, and the greater hunger is for an ‘answer to the question ‘why?’. For some understanding of what that life is for’. However, Handy argues ‘in capitalist societies people have the assumption that they can best satisfy the greater hunger by appeasing the lesser hunger’. The latter in people’s minds is achievable, because they believe that government and business using the advances of economic and technological development can deliver on those things that meet the lesser hunger and therefore somehow also meet the greater hunger.
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The consequence of that thinking is that both economic activity and technology (as both a means and an end product) become one of the main determining factors in contemporary society. Yet we are never satisfied with our lot, and there are always new problems to solve, so we assume that what is needed is even more wealth and technology. Integral to this progress is the advancement of capitalism and the philosophy of the market, because people believe, as Handy puts it, “the more competitive we can make things, the better things we will have at a better price, the richer we all will be, and the richer the more content we should be.” Furthermore, the richer we are, as a result of competition, the more technological development we can have in order to solve ours and the world’s needs and problems. By this we should all become much happier. Thus in our capitalist societies [Western culture] we live in a technically and economically obsessed world bereft of answers to questions of meaning and purpose, and one that destructively believes that by appeasing the lesser hunger you can best satisfy the greater hunger,” Tony May (1999).
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It is interesting to analyse what connects these two overriding cultural aspects. One way of seeing the complexity of culture is, in the words of Collier and Esteban, “to think of the various aspects of culture as layered, rather like and onion.” At the core they explain are the presuppositions, often unconsciously held, that lie at the root of all our thinking. These presuppositions, they go on to describe represent our worldview, our ‘cosmology’, or what Newbegin calls our ‘tradition of rationality’, and Berger calls our ‘plausibility structures’. All of these they argue are grounded in the cultural belief in science. In this respect a number of authors have dubbed the dominant worldview in the West as being Mechanistic, Newtonian or Cartesian.1 The scientific worldview also has a number of distinctive characteristics. The scientific worldview perceives and understands the cosmos as a giant machine.2 It also holds a fact-values distinction.3 The root of this perspective is derived from the prevalence of relativism and pluralism that came out of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. The scientific worldview can also be said to be anthropocentric with a masculine bias. Another aspect of the scientific worldview is that it is human secularist in nature, where God is dead and humanity reigns supreme as the pinnacle of evolution so far. Finally, it also believes that man through science can not only change the world but also that progress is possible. Collier and Esteban suggest that this is, "our core cultural myth; it enables us to trust in our own power to control our destiny; it represents our insurance and our psychological security in the face of mounting evidence of our own powerlessness.” However, all of this is pursued on the basis of a belief in domination - a
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This again is a complex area to describe and understand, and beyond the scope of these notes.
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The scientific worldview and its neoclassical economic perspective resemble the Newtonian paradigm in physics, which sees the cosmos and world as a giant machine. Adam Smith’s perception of our famous market is mechanistic, for an example he talks about the market mechanism, self-regulating markets, and market equilibrium. His analogy and approach has lent itself to mathematical and science like formulations and calculations. Of course economics deals with unpredictable human behaviour, which is not the same as dealing with unchanging realities and laws of nature, but this has seemed to escape neoclassical economists. To over come this they maintain the fact-value distinction, expressed as ‘positive’ and ‘normative’ economics, between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’ in economic terms, (Collier and Esteban). The former cannot be challenged, as it is scientific and true, whereas normative economics is ‘soft’, and in turn is to be treated more lightly as one is only dealing with opinions. Collier and Esteban argue that, "the image of the market as the self-regulating mechanism that allocates scarce resources to their optimal use remains as metaphor and as ruling paradigm in the discipline today.” Moreover, they add, “it is also the basis of the ideological status of economics.” Needless to say the assumptions behind the market does not hold true in practice, but this has yet to knock the market ideology off its pedestal. ! 3
The scientific worldview creates a dichotomy between facts and values, where only facts can be ‘true’ and ‘objective’, and values are only ‘subjective’. This also manifests itself in the idea that what can be seen can be believed and only what is proved as fact can be true. Thus biblical stories and myths along with normative values and ethics are worthless because they are nonrational. This has resulted in values being excluded from traditional economics and questions of technology. Of course this is untrue in practice because both economics and technology are not value free, but the fact-values distinction blinds its adherents from seeing this when they practice their profession. For scientists believe they are there to measure facts that are true and objective whereas values are but opinions and subjective and not in the scope of scientific rationalism and objectivity. Furthermore, because science can establish what is fact and thus true, it has created a myth that “truth can be not only sought but also actually obtained.”
fundamental presupposition underlying western culture.4 Furthermore, the scientific worldview espouses individualism at the expense of community5. Christians give these entire aspects one simple name, idolatry. Both neoclassical economics and technology relies heavily on this scientific worldview, and the cultural thought-forms of economism are drawn heavily from and articulated by that discipline. The significance of all this according to Collier & Esteban can be simply stated:
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“The thought forms of ‘scientism’ and of neoclassical economics shape our cultural worldview, as they were themselves shaped by the worldviews of their time. They give us dominant images of reality that crowd out all alternative images. We are culturally conditioned to believe in our ability to know, to manipulate and control, to solve our own problems, to believe that facts are more important than values, that material matters more than the spiritual, that material success is the measure of the ‘good life’ and that competition and acquisition are the ways to achieve it. We also have a profound faith in the ability of technological change to create progress, growth, and prosperity by providing new possibilities for economic expansion…"
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In addition, they also argue:
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“The bias of Western economism against diversity, against nature, and against women has destroyed traditional complementarities of male and female work roles, and led to a maldevelopment that 'violates the integrity of organic, interconnected and interdependent systems, that sets in motion a process of exploitation, inequality, injustice and violence' (Shiva 1989)… The masculine, aggressive approach to reality is at the root of the violence that we have identified as existing at every level or our world system. It is also the root of another aspect of the negative consequences of the culture of economism - the ruthless and shortsighted exploitation of the earth's resources for short-term profit. This system is unsustainable for two reasons: first because of the spiralling costs of the structural violence needed to keep the oppressed in their place; and second because the rapid destruction of nonrenewable resources and of the resource base itself is endangering the future viability of the human race. It is a measure of the 'masculine' arrogance of the culture that we blind ourselves to these facts."
Another fundamental value of economism is economic growth, and growth that is unlimited. This given the emphasis on science seems at first odd. Scientists have discovered many limitations, for an example nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In tandem with this thinking is the idea that resources are unlimited. Yes, economists talk about scarcity of products, but they assume that such scarcity can be overcome by having more capital so that the product can be purchased further afield or by purchasing other resources to substitute in its place. Thus if capital is sufficient then there are no shortages. Daly & Cobb demonstrate this in their example of firewood, and then highlight this dogma in practice by quoting from the magazine Science concerning their story on the World Bank and its environmental policy, which reported, "Economists at the meeting rejected the idea that resources could be finite. One said, “The notion that there are limits that can't be taken care of by capital has to be rejected.” For Western culture economic growth (as measured by GDP) is paramount to gaining the wealth necessary to sustain the way of life they have developed for themselves, especially the rich elite. This desire for growth is endemic in business with their need for profit maximisation and financial markets need for substantial increased return on investment or shareholder value obtained through businesses and banks continuing need for increased profits.
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Domination manifests itself in many of our social and economic structures and uses of technology, which by their very nature are inherently anti-ecological, Capra (1997). However, another facet of domination, is that it has made it a great virtue to value power and greed, and this has expressed itself in our modern age by the unique value we ascribed to money and how modern capitalism has made wealth the highest value. This is to such an extent that Walter Wink (1992) exclaims, "our entire social system has become an 'economy'"; whereby profit has become the highest social good. ! 5
Individualism is a main characteristic of the scientific worldview, as Collier & Esteban points out that, “market ideology is firmly rooted in individualism as the functional principle of the mechanistic economic universe.” Furthermore they add that, “Individual action is seen as being based on two guiding principles – self-interest and rationality.” It is assumed that through rational thought people will act in ways to serve their own interest and ‘maximise their utility’. Thus rationalism becomes the prerequisite for adequate human functioning, pursued in one’s own interest. According to C & E this has led to an impoverished and reductionistic view of the human person associated with the culture of economism. Furthermore, the focus of individualism has been at the expense of community. In fact according to Daly & Cobb the absence of acknowledgement of community in economic theory has led to the destruction of human community in economic practice, (1990, 190).
However, today many are realising that the reigning tradition of rationality is not working, and more importantly is not sustainable.