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Social Being as a
Problem for an Ethical Economics
Jamie Morgan (The Open University,
UK)
© Copyright 2002
Jamie Morgan
Introduction
Orthodox economics conspicuously lacks a
satisfying account of social being and is thus unable to provide a
practical starting point in addressing many of the problems of being that
humanity now confronts. It is theoretically impoverished and practically
bereft. As PAE and previous forums have shown,
the current orthodoxy of economics is neither explanatorily powerful nor
is it genuinely scientific. One way of showing this is to explore how its
science, its method and its power are founded on a series, a cascade, of
inversions of dimensions of realisms that corrupt science and method in
the name of that power. Those inversions include issues of:
- The relation between economy and being
- Synchronous behaviour
- The ill of being
- The alienated economist
- Alienated method
My starting point or primary organising principle is
that economics as an explanatorily powerful (and thus scientific)
discipline should account for what we live for, but that it is not
economics for which we live.
What are we living for?
Orthodoxy colludes in the commodification and fetishism of capitalism. Its
primary inversion is that for the orthodox economist, we live for the
economy - its motors (as they are represented by the orthodox economist)
are our motors, a stochastic ordering process that reflects our
most basic “natural” behaviours and motivations. This homo economicus ergo sum extracts its account of the
economy from the social whole and subjugates human being to it. The
economy we are told we live for is the economy of the orthodox economist,
a best of all possible worlds, in so far as we are told that it is the
only world there is and we’d better get used to it. It is a world we apparently make
but one that escapes us. For
orthodoxy, the knowledge that has previously eluded us is not a path to
emancipation but rather the tracing of our prison walls. Its invisible hand offers a
seductive material utopia that arrives as a clenched fist, demanding that
we conform and be disciplined by its own inevitability.
The Paradox of Synchronicity
For the orthodox economist, our behaviour,
founded though it might be in a deep-seated “nature” of accumulation,
desire and competition, will never quite be our own. Our behaviour
is externalised, becoming behavioural, an imperative. Our choice in
this arid world of orthodoxy is no choice at all lest it be
non-being, an ultimate sanction of capitalism or death. One
synchronises with the system in order to survive. Indeed, synchronicity
is the system (just as it is the non-beating heart of homeostatic
equilibrating method). It is the system in so far as it denies the
existence of any significant and causally efficacious rules, institutions
or interventions other than this primeval behavioural imperative. Being is
thus no more or less than persistence. One persists in a system that
somehow claims to subordinate the self to its self. As a consequence, the
utopia at the heart of that orthodoxy is simultaneously pragmatic and
deterministic, avaricious and pessimistic, human yet all too holohedral. It is a charitable cruelty that affords
us, each and every one, participation, a cruelty that whispers of merit,
hard work, returns, and opportunity in the name of the ever-present
possibility that we may succeed and that others may fail. Failure is the
collateral damage of utopia – the poor, the disenfranchised, the
oppressed, and marginalized. Their failure defines success. Their
failure is an illustration that some forms of the subjugated being of
orthodoxy are more abject than others. The morality of this most “hard-headed” of
disciplines is, therefore, Nietszchean. In it,
“blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all “good things”.” Of it,
morality is transvaluated in a becoming that is
amoral in its methodological indifference to morality, and immoral in
terms of the consequences of such amorality.
Frozen Being
One cannot understand an advanced capitalist
economy without understanding the constitution and consequences of the
transitive values that the organisation of its production produces. The absence of moral
investigation within orthodoxy is thus symptomatic of the economy’s
contributions to the ill of social being. Orthodox economics is part of
the (il)liberating problem of technologies whose
social relationality it blithely ignores. It is
in this sense that if we do not (should not, cannot, will not) live for
economics, the economist should at least be asking what it is we are
living for (and what consequences this has for how others live and die
across the world, now and in the future). This is a moral as well as a
practical question. As a practical question it is, all too easily,
debilitated by the deterministic undercurrents of orthodox pragmatism.
Such pragmatism lends itself to a utilitarian pleasure principle that is
at once too narrow and too broad, providing limited descriptions without
explanations; rendering the historical eternal. This is yet another
dimension of orthodox synchronicity and also another element in the
inversions of orthodoxy. The dynamism of the lived life of social being is
frozen. Homo economicus is statuesque, ignorant
and selfish.
Nowhere is this lack of engagement with the dynamics
of social relations of economy clearer than in the home economy of the
alienated and commodified self. At the same time
as technology has divorced many of the centres of advanced capitalism from
hard physical labour, it has produced new forms of oppressive social
relations where humans have, ironically, become once more subject to
subsistence agriculture’s long hours of labour (for technology is now
pervasive and its relations invasive); concomitantly, reduced non-working
time has increasingly become an arena of instrumental activity within the
emergent leisure economy, one dominated by consumption on three fronts:
food, home refurbishment, and shopping.
The relations of economy of all three subject the
human at the centres of advanced capitalism to accelerated rhythms and
his/her marginalized counterparts in the majority world to greater
burdens. Food has become an oral fixation, a primary sensory pleasure, a
lifestyle choice, and a source of fear. Affluent over-consumption,
knowledge of the mortality implications of the foods of choice, and
obesity, channel us to the clinic, the diet book and the gym where hours
of over-consumption of the world’s resources are converted into joules of
isolated exertion on yet more machines that are in turn the conversion
point of food into further profit. Similarly, home refurbishment has
become a micro-economy of perpetual investment in the reconstruction of
living space whose demands rob us of what little living time we have
within it. Shopping meanwhile, is the master category of the home economy,
a centre of gravity, a principle source of leisure, status and
self-esteem. It is a preoccupation, a form of activity that has attuned
the human to a numbing receptivity to acquisition divorced from
attainment; the introduction of lifestyle obsolescence has quickened its
pace at the same time as new forms of credit have softened its short-term
pressures whilst all but guaranteeing a hard landing. Shopping has become
the bull market of the soul. Here, orthodoxy is denied even the defence
that scarcity is a purely allocative
problem.
The Alienated Economist
Yet one cannot simply define a problem like
human social being out of existence. The very claim is a category
mistake. One is defining it out of theory. Such an act of power
within orthodoxy simply commits the error of burying one’s head in the
sand. Ringfencing narrow and problematic
fundamental assumptions about humanity with forbidding formulae that
produce neat and tidy mathematical outputs (that in another inversion,
that of theoretical linearity, all but select their inputs) impoverishes
the theoretician as it bastardises the theoretical process. There is
something deeply atavistic and yet all too modern in the way that the
orthodox economist has become a tool of his tools. The orthodox economist
is both the high priest of capitalism and another instance of its victim.
A source of cant and superstition, of such linguistic abuses as “the needs of the market,” and
“human capital downsizing.” A master who is by his own dialectic truly a
technician-slave; his thought counts the cost of production but not the
value of being. Yet he knows the value of differential calculus, of
indices, simultaneous equations, and regression. One must ask why it is
that, alone amongst the social sciences, orthodox economics has so
assiduously pursued the Chicago School dictum of 1926, “When you cannot
measure your knowledge becomes meagre and unsatisfactory.”
The orthodox economist’s disdain for reality is
captured by the (only half joking) injunction, “But does it work in
theory?” In lauding unreality orthodoxy commits itself to a trajectory
that parodies itself. A profession whose hierarchy places the mathematical
economist at its airless summit, far removed from practical
considerations, may provide an economist with a clear path to maximising
his own exchange value but does so by crushing his use-value. Ironically,
competence is divested from its etymological relation to the socially
productive. Rather it is diverted into computation; competence becomes a
technical facility rather than a contribution to society. Orthodox
economics thereby becomes one of the few social realms where rational
expectations genuinely apply; orthodox economics becomes a profession of
calculating calculators.
The ideological value of “facts”
Orthodoxy abstracts from fantasy to construct
knowledge. Unreal assumptions conducive to the simplification of complex
mathematical problems dictate what is and what is not economically
significant. Thus abstraction is conjoined to abacus and absolved from its
relation to appropriation from the world in order to return with knowledge
of the world. Here one shifts to a further double returning, both
to “But does it work in theory?” and to that realm where one is a tool of
tools. Perfect knowledge and instantaneously equilibrating and
spontaneously clearing markets make neat mathematics but require a neat
world, not the untidy one that we actually inhabit.
Here wider inversions of “to be scientific” become
clear. The rejection of use-value in the maximisation of the exchange
value of the orthodox economist, that is inherent in the debasing of
competence, is itself a sub-set of the behavioural imperative from which
its theoretical core derives. In affirming a deep-seated “nature” where we
accumulate, desire and compete, orthodoxy overwrites the needs inhering in
species being – food, sleep, shelter, warmth, dignity, security
etc. A set of descriptive nouns become ascriptive verbs whose claim to represent the same
territory, a baseline from which the cultural, the social and the human
begins, takes the form of disguise.
Such ascriptive verbs are
values of means from species-being beginnings, and thus one
trajectory delimiting one possible (impoverished) end. Disguising then,
takes the form of overwriting species being with values claimed as basic
facts. Once the behavioural imperative is installed as fact, the
possibility that things could be otherwise, as species being is pursued
within the social whole (and in the constitution of social being), is
sublimated. The construction of orthodox “fact” begins from disguised
value. That construction is, therefore, ideological, a necessary
myth. It is ideological both
in its function within the secret logic of orthodoxy and within
orthodoxy’s relationship to the unrelenting inevitability of capitalism.
The interface between the two secretes the statement that we are (this)
nature all the way up – an insight as meaningless as that we are (that)
nurture all the way down. As a consequence, unreality takes yet another
guise in terms of orthodoxy’s claim to authority. As a theory it inverts
any commitment to the overcoming of ideology in the pursuit of truth. Its
truths are ideological and its science is ideological.
Likewise, its concept of “To do science” is also
ideological. Installing the behavioural imperative as fact is not only the
first step in tracing the prison walls of systemic synchronicity, it is
also an act within the philosophy of method. The many dynamics by which
things cannot be otherwise within orthodoxy speak to a knowledge that is
ultimately waiting to be found. Since things cannot be otherwise, that
“found” is not simply a beginning in both the fallible process of
knowledge of the world and the work of transforming that world, it is
simply what the world is – a true reflection, founded in a debased form of
materialism that knows that what it observes is, has been, and will always
be. Orthodoxy is, therefore, a special kind of Empiricism; a form of Humeanism without the latter’s scepticism towards the
possibilities inherent in the act of knowledge. Its “To do science” makes
a God of the scientist and an idiot of man. Science finds a society that
is a machine of perpetual motion, a set of wheels and gears executing the
same operations in an undeviating endless closed cycle, without history,
without consequences, and for all intents and purposes, without meaning.
In their absence it is a science without the human, and this is surely the
nadir of ideology in a social science.
Conclusion
Such then are the inversions
of dimensions of realisms that corrupt science and method in the name of
the power that is orthodox economics. They are inversions of realisms
because they raise the standard of unrealism. Their paradox is that they
raise that standard precisely in the name of realism – of science and of
method. In doing so a claim is made on common sense action within the
world that ephemeralises heterodoxy, as “softer”
social theory that may be disparaged as (once more playing out the nadir
of ideology in a social science) “sociological”.
Ironically, it requires the terminology of another form of
unrealism, the post-modern, to appreciate this. Orthodoxy wears its
exclusions, its constructed “Other” by which it defines itself, upon its
sleeve. Its philosophical
defence of its own lack of realism shows precisely this. Its
instrumentalism, the claim that heuristically convenient simplifications
(that are actually methodological fictions rather than abstractions) are
explanatorily powerful, its contraction of method to mathematical
technique, and its reduction of evidence to quantifiable data (when
pressed for such), all bear this out. That orthodox economics has managed
such a sleight of hand – claiming to be the disciplinary proponent of all
that is practical and useful in economics, offering itself as a first port
of call for policy advice and justification, claiming to represent “how
things really are”, whilst also being a site of fundamental and often
celebrated forms of unrealism – is itself a sociological conundrum. An
exploration of that conundrum may say much about how more prosaic, yet
more valid, heterodox approaches have been excluded from a ready audience
for their own realist claims.
Yet beyond an organising principle that economics
should account for what we live for but that it is not economics for which
we live, the exploration of the inversions of orthodoxy suggest not so
much what heterodoxy should be but what it should not be and what its many
forms should take seriously in order to avoid being what it should
not be. In the very process of not being orthodoxy, the possibility
of explanatorily powerful and scientific economics emerges out of a
plurality that is the very antithesis of orthodox conformity. The
heterodox challenge is therefore to convert inversions.
Thus
methodology should not dominate its object. Economics should be empirical
and relational, investigating all aspects of economies, their organisation
and consequences. As such it cannot but deal with the historical, the
non-universal, it cannot but be social and sociological, political and
politicised. As such it cannot but be moral yet need not be pejoratively
moralising, in the sense that it confronts and explores the
economic problems of conflicted forms of social being – what are the human
consequences of technology, what has affluence meant for social being,
local and global, is poverty a derivative of affluence, what is economic
growth (for)? These are issues of the human in a material and conceptual
world where we must look at ourselves from the outside in and the inside
out, as constitutive of economic processes, as makers of social structures
and institutions, of rules, and also as agents conforming, confronting,
contesting and thinking in terms of those structures, institutions and
rules; as above all carriers of values and makers of value judgements.
Economics as an engagement with a transitive social
reality can therefore be scientific in a non-ideological way precisely
because the political and the social are part of the historically specific
economy and a science of the human must acknowledge this and construct its
research and methods on that basis. Science is about the appropriate
investigation of objects, explaining their processes, thinking about what
causes events, with the ever-present possibility that such knowledge
provides that they may be manipulated. In a human science explanation
provides the understanding that is the first step in changing a
conceptual social world. That is the moral dynamic of
non-ideological human science. This can only be acknowledged when
synchronicity and the behavioural imperative are abandoned, when the
economist starts to take his use-value seriously, when his competence is
more than computational. Only then will the contingency of social being be
more than an expectations augmented exercise in modelling, only then will
species being become a realistic problem of what the economist can
contribute to society.
And this is not a problem of mathematics or any
particular tool or technique but rather our relationship to our tools and
techniques. They should be ours; we should not be theirs. We should decide
where they are appropriate rather than appropriate what is
appropriate to them. Above all, if methodology is not to dominate its
object, economics must be returned to the social whole. Yet such a
returning is not to demand that economics must be the science of
society in all its aspects; rational expectations has already taken
orthodoxy down that blind alley of economic imperialism. No science can be
the new metaphysics. A social whole cannot be theoretically totalised. No
discipline can discipline society, bringing it to heel. To argue so
entails three axes, the acknowledgement of which is also a hallmark of a
genuinely social science:
1.
Though economic theories, like any other
branch of social theory, thrive on the articulation of their own
coherence, they subsist in terms of their own contingence. Knowledge is
always and everywhere fallible.
2.
A social whole can be cut across in many
ways, by an economics of aspects of economy that grasp elements of the
diversity of the socio-economic experience and its processes, and by other
forms of social theory that take as their remit and object some other
problematic.
3.
A social whole is open-ended and thus
incomplete, no economic theory can totalise what is not total. Its object,
the economy, is human, historical, conditional and transitive.
The challenge for heterodoxy can be located in terms of
these axes. Metaphorically speaking they constitute a commitment within
which heterodoxy can be grid-referenced as an ensemble of theories bridged
by a family resemblance that leaves open the possibility of corrigible
dialogue and commensuration. This too is a hallmark of a social
scientific method, for what else is progress to be in economics?
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SUGGESTED
CITATION:
Jamie Morgan, “Social Being as a Problem for an Ethical
Economics”, post-autistic economics review, issue no. 16,
September 16, 2002, article
4. .
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue16/16.htm
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