Come See us: 123 Main St

•

Find us on Social Media

After the Future

· · ·

The Spirit of Classical Liberalism

In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his…

In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and 'naturally' recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was 'naturally' possessed of life, liberty and the pursit of happiness, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, though the most logical liberal thinkers preferred not to put this in the language of 'natural rights'. In the course of pursuing this self-interest, each individual in this anarchy of equal competitors, found it advantageous or unavoidable to enter into certain relations with other individuals, and this complex of useful arrangements–which were often expressed in the frankly commercial terminology of 'contract'–constituted society and social or poltical groups. Of course such arrangements and associations implied some diminution of man's naturally unlimited liberty to do what he liked, one of the tasks of politics being to reduce such interference to the practicable minimum. . . . Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 235-36)

When seen in this stark description of its primitiveness, I don't think it's hard to understand why not only reactionaries have resisted the the spirit of the new age. Hobbes through Bentham and the whole tradition of classical economics and Neoliberal politics and political economy accepts this narrative or variations of it as the most accurate description of the human condition. From a Christian perspective it is a description of Hell, a nightmare world to be saved from. 

While a good part of me is revolted by the spirit of Liberalism, there's another part of me that accepts it as the inevitable–a kind of Noah's flood to wash away the inequities and corruptions of an ancien regime that lived past its usefulness. It would have been nice if another way could have been found, but humans being who they are, that was never likely.

If modernity can be likened to a flood, we can acknowledge its cleansing and fertilizing 'utility', but it does not have within it the resources for constructing something new. That something new will arise–I am certain of it–but it will come from Logos bearers and people who carry seeds of things that grew before the flood worth preserving and cultivating in a brave new, no-longer-modern, that is, no-longer-flooded world. The flood waters have not quite receded, but when they do, it will be time for planting. 

Comments

57 responses

  1. JP Avatar
    JP

    “From a Christian perspective it is a description of Hell, a nightmare world to be saved from.”
    Nope.
    Hell is much worse that this.

    Reply
  2. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    In fact the utilitarian minded bourgeois created a merciless 19th century hell described by Dickens and others, and since then socialists in Europe and Progressives and social gospel types in the US pushed back to make living in it a little more comfortable.
    But I think I’m making a different point, and that is that this understanding of the human as this atomistic, deracinated urge with no connections except those he enters into contractually when it serves his self interest is ‘hell on stilts’ to paraphrase Bentham.
    I’m inclined to think of hell as something that we create not something that God has as some punishment for not following the rules. If there is a literal final judgment, I imagine it as an encounter with the Godhead, and in that encounter everything dross, i.e. everything not ontologically substantive will be burned away, and if there is nothing substantive and only dross, then such beings will simply be annihilated.

    Reply
  3. JP Avatar
    JP

    “But I think I’m making a different point, and that is that this understanding of the human as this atomistic, deracinated urge with no connections except those he enters into contractually when it serves his self interest is ‘hell on stilts’ to paraphrase Bentham.”
    I think of that as Aspberger’s syndrome.
    Hell is much more actively sadistic, where seeking to produce suffering and pain are actively promoted as the ultimate good and inhumane slaughter abounds.
    Abu Gharib writ large.

    Reply
  4. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Why must “social” be synonymous with “governmental?” If anything, Christ’s distinction between the State and the Kingdom of God is a point in favor of a more humble model of governance. Even Aquinas thought the state ought to be concerned principally with matters of external justice. Virtue may be a social affair (as opposed to a private one), but it doesn’t follow that the government has to be involved in it.
    I’m sympathetic to a lot of classical liberalism, especially when you consider the diversity of opinion that entails. I like the Paine of AGRARIAN JUSTICE and, like most classical liberals, understand the state as a socially negotiated matrix of a bundle of conventional property rights, rooted in the real ontological and moral equality of humans. This is not an exhaustive account of human nature, but why should it be? That’s why we have civil society, and families, and Churches, and unions, and so on.

    Reply
  5. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Patrick–I think we differ on this pretty fundamentally.
    The social doesn’t equate to the governmental, but the government and the economy need to be a function of the social–if by that we mean the best approximation of a decent and just society. Now, both the government and the social are a function of the economy understood in classical liberal or neoliberal terms. That’s my definition of social hell.
    In the short run, it is what it is, and the task is to manage things as humanely as we can, and that requires a consensus to develop to use the government to subordinate the economy, at least is a few critical areas.

    Reply
  6. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    I’ll ask the question this way.
    Let’s imagine that we have a system of government that guarantees work at a living wage for everyone who is willing, and furthermore guarantees material comfort for those who are unable to work*.
    What more do you want the government to be involved in, besides enforcing matters of external justice and setting the conventional boundaries of property rights (which obviously includes regulation of commerce**)?
    Virtue cannot be coerced.
    *To me this is compatible with the kind of “big-tent” classical liberalism that includes Paine on one end and Friedman on the other, but no doubt many self-described classical liberals would disagree. They’re wrong, and I’m willing to defend that contention, but it doesn’t seem necessary for this conversation. The main point here is that many classical liberals are sloppy thinkers than end up carrying water for entrenched interests, but classical liberalism as a theory of the State is not so bad once you ditch the Enlightenment anthropology that it came packaged with.
    **As another aside, I think there’s a Konczal-esque argument here that applies even better to regulation than it does to the welfare state. Good regulations like the 1906 Food & Drug Act are heuristic remedies to the problem of an economic system that has outgrown reliance on tort/nuisance litigation (or whatever). For the sake of efficiency and the mutual benefit of all, national regulations approximate the net affect of that kind of accountability, when economic scale and complexity renders litigation impossible, unjust, impractical or inefficient in the aggregate.

    Reply
  7. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Net *E*ffect.

    Reply
  8. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Mark — I don’t understand the objection to debt-money, I guess because I don’t understand what the term is supposed to mean. Bonds and mortgages? Marx was more of a philosopher than an economist, which is why only humanities academics still read him. Also he’s 200 years old. Critiquing his critique isn’t going to get us far in 2014. I’m all for regulating the financial sector more rigorously, but I have yet to see a call for radical financial change made from a point of view that seems to understand the full intricacies of finance. I’m not claiming such understanding for myself. But I know enough to realize that one can’t just go around saying ‘get rid of debt-money’ like that’s a policy. Should we get rid of equities and derivatives, too? What financial instruments, exactly, are allowable, and on what grounds?
    Patrick — Virtue can’t be coerced, it’s true. But vice can be abetted and enabled. You write, “classical liberalism as a theory of the State is not so bad once you ditch the Enlightenment anthropology that it came packaged with.” But how is it possible to do that? I think this is Jack’s objection. Any theory of the State, like any economic theory, is necessarily going to imply a certain anthropology.
    MacIntyre and McCabe shred the social contract idea, as far as I’m concerned. People aren’t born monads, they’re born into pre-existing intersubjective communities. If it were not so we wouldn’t have language. We don’t invent society by entering into a ‘contract.’ We can’t even dream up something like a ‘contract’ unless we’re already living in a society. I suppose evolutionary psychology is the latest, and admittedly more nuanced instantiation of the social contract idea. It tries to get around the objections of linguistics and philosophy — not very convincingly to my mind. All the science in the world won’t solve Camus’ or Hamlet’s (or for that matter, Hobbes’) problem, namely why one isn’t better off dead.

    Reply
  9. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Don’t know how that response to Mark got in this thread. I’ll re-post. Sorry.

    Reply
  10. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Jonathan,
    This isn’t the time or place for my full argument, but this may clarify where I’m coming from:
    1) Whatever is the genesis of the State, the legitimacy of the State needs to predicated on a theory of external justice that enumerates the conditions under which violence is legitimate.
    2) Aristotelian metaphysics gives us a framework for determining the conditions under which violence is legitimate. It does not make universal prescriptions, but rather implies a procedure for investigating the question. It gives us the method/language by which we might determine/discuss (for example) the appropriate bundle of property rights for the contingencies of a particular place and time.
    (1) is the core of classical liberalism, and I endorse it.
    (2)–which entails a radically different anthropology from that of Enlightenment thinkers–is what helps us understand and apply the implications of (1), and do so in a much more humane and appropriate manner.

    Reply
  11. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Patrick, thanks for the clear and succinct response. But let me just make it painfully clear for myself: the State, according to your understanding, is essentially organized and legitimated violence, albeit we conceive the word broadly. Property, in this case, is a more or less legitimate form of violence.
    That seems to me your underlying position. I recognize it, though not as Aristotelian.

    Reply
  12. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    I won’t have computer access until tomorrow. I’ll make my position clearer then. In the meantime I recommend Wrangham and Peterson’s DEMONIC MALES for a way to start thinking about these things in our Fallen context.

    Reply
  13. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Patrick–
    I had a response prepared to your four point comment on an earlier post that was going to draw on Rawls’ 1985 essay ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical.” But I didn’t post it because it was a murky belaboring of the obvious. Basically the point Rawls seems to be making is that all that Kantian prescriptive moral imperative stuff is pointless in the political sphere, especially in a pluralistic society like the one we’re living in. So you need to boil things down to basic things that most decent people can form a consensus around–like fairness. In other words it doesn’t matter what one’s first principles are if you can come to agreement on practical, sane policy.
    That’s where I am when it comes to politics–it’s a rhetorical/political/ pragmatic project, not a metaphysical one. The relative size of the state is a practical political problem, not a metaphysical one. I’d like to see it smaller in some places (national security, education) and larger in other areas (finance, energy, healthcare). I need to make arguments that appeal to people’s common sense and common decency to persuade.
    I have my own metaphysics worked out pretty much for myself, but I don’t expect anybody to agree with it, especially people I interact with in the political sphere. In the political sphere my task is not convince anybody about my metaphysics but rather make compelling arguments that, for instance, they should support a single payer healthcare system because it’s the fairest, cheapest, most practical way for a decent society to provide it.
    The relevancy of a theory of the state eludes me. I resist it because it has led me into ridiculous arguments with Libertarian types who refuse to do the practical, decent thing because it doesn’t comport with their theory of a limited state.
    So forgive me for not responding more directly to your two points, but the point of the original post is that all we can do now is manage a bad situation as best we can until a robust alternative to the bankruptcy of ‘metaphysical liberalism’ that Hobsbawm describes emerges around which consensus for building a more humane society can be built. I take it that’s where you disagree–that something decent can be built within the liberal frame by grounding it in an Aristotelian metaphysics.
    That seems to me to be a stretch, but have at it if you want to make your case. Or refer us to a place where maybe you’ve already made it. I am open to be persuaded.

    Reply
  14. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Stopping the practice of usury IS a question of “enforcing external justice,” Patrick.
    Basically, I think if the State carried out THAT basic role (which is really nothing other than preventing an elaborate form of theft)…it’s other “economic” roles would pretty much whither away naturally, and it really could just concentrate on “the basics,” although I think those include not just legitimized violence, but also taking care of anything that lots of people want but which paying for individually doesn’t make sense because everyone benefits whether they want to or not (ie, infrastructure).
    As an interesting point, I’ll mention that the “IEMP four-networks” theory of power would actually see the “military” power (ie, violence) and the political power as distinct (the political mode of power being based around the quality of granting legitimacy and Right, even when it cannot “enforce” those rights without cooperation from another network).

    Reply
  15. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    There are a few separate issues here, so I’m going to take the liberty of splitting them up into two or three responses.
    First, to Mark–
    You may be right. I don’t know. The Social Credit stuff is interesting, but my default assumption is that heterodox econ is usually heterodox for a reason. When I have time to devote to the issue, I’ll study it in further detail but at the moment all I have is a prejudice. That’s probably a frustrating response, but it’s honest.

    Reply
  16. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    It’s heterodox because the people in power have a vested interest in the current system.
    Social credit doesn’t question traditional economic analysis at all. It just proposes a different mechanism for the creation of money. But it analyzes the effects of that policy versus the effects of the current system in a totally “orthodox” way.
    It’s not proposing anything heterodox about the “how” of economics. It is making a value judgment about which financial practices are moral/ethical/unnatural and then using orthodox economics to predict what would happen with a different monetary mechanism in place.

    Reply
  17. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Jack,
    You raise the meta-issue (meta-meta-issue?) of the extent to which theory is relevant. The bottom line is that I don’t find Rawls’ position particularly coherent.
    I want to address first the side-issue of Kantianism. My argument is that Kantian/deontological/categorical ethics are exactly the problem with classical liberalism as it is typically expounded. I endorse none of these. I’ll get into this more in my next post, but the big idea is that (a) utility can comprise more than material benefit and (b) Aristotelian metaphysics implies a utility function that is distinct from classical or Rawlsian models, and happens to be true.
    Now to the substance.
    Kantian prescriptive moral imperative stuff is pointless in the political sphere, especially in a pluralistic society like the one we’re living in. So you need to boil things down to basic things that most decent people can form a consensus around–like fairness.
    This is question-begging, and has things exactly backwards. The fragmentation of society is undermining any kind of consensus about fairness and decency. Rick Santelli has his definition of fair and decent–one that’s shared, I might add, by a lot of people who are great company–and you have yours. Rawls is assuming precisely that which is being contested.
    In other words it doesn’t matter what one’s first principles are if you can come to agreement on practical, sane policy.
    When it comes down to material acts–voting for or against a particular person or policy, or materially influencing a matrix of incentives so that those votes are more likely to align with one’s preferences–this is trivial. So Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul voted together on foreign policy, and antiwar protests are filled with both leftists and libertarians. It already happens.
    The relevant question is, ceteris paribus, are we better off agreeing on a social utility function? Rawls himself developed one, and, since he didn’t keep it to himself one assumes that he wished to persuade others of its value in describing a certain normative end for policymaking.
    That’s where I am when it comes to politics–it’s a rhetorical/political/ pragmatic project, not a metaphysical one. The relative size of the state is a practical political problem, not a metaphysical one.
    Shared civic values are a precondition for political rhetoric. A successful rhetorical appeal to the pathos or ethos of Genghis Khan will not be successful when the audience is Mahatma Ghandi. You are taking for granted the decomposing vestiges of an erstwhile civic culture. If you think that will always be here, you’re wrong.
    There is no such thing as common sense and common decency. There are various common biological drives, each of which, by the confluence of material circumstances and individual will, may be directed toward either human flourishing or privation. So kin selection can be a foundation of altruism on one hand, or racism on the other. What seem to be “common sense and common decency” are in reality the dearly-purchased spoils of an ancient struggle to construct highly artificial material circumstances in which morally neutral biological drives are directed mostly toward morally good ends.
    More on this when I make my affirmative case.

    Reply
  18. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    I’m with Patrick. Ditto what he just said viz. Aristotle, decomposing civil society, common sense, etc.
    About the economics question, I think we’re revolving around what Mark means by “usury.” It’s not about metrics so much as the moral paradigm being deployed to define what constitutes usurious lending. I assume this is elaborated in the Social Credit literature I haven’t read, but at the moment I’m not clear on what usury is supposed to be here. I wonder if we’re in a way just talking about market capitalization of intangible assets in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. It’s a bigger problem than people give it credit (no pun intended) for being.
    But to my point: try to fit the Social Credit platform, with its specific definition of usury, into the consensus-vacuum that the Aristotelian analysis lays bare, and we begin to see how “reforming Wall St.” is a lot harder than simply agreeing it’s disgusting how rich bankers are

    Reply
  19. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Judging by Jonathan’s comment, I may have overestimated the extent to which my theory needs exposition; it might be emerging from the comments here. Still, what follows is a quick pass at some quasi-systematic thinking. I know all of you are familiar with a lot of this, but it’s necessary to say a few elementary things insofar as they have less obvious implications.
    “Big tent” classical metaphysics
    I follow Lloyd Gerson in taking Aristotle to be a certain kind of Platonist. So this could be called Platonic metaphysics or any number of other names, but Aristotelian is simply a shorthand for recognizing that reality is composed of matter and form. Moreover, in the realm of ethics, form is relevant in the sense that actualizing essential potentialities is the very definition of Good, and so “is” does, in fact, imply “ought.”
    Nature and biology: Man as (a certain kind of) rational animal
    We are, of course, concerned with humans, who are primates of the species homo sapiens, and have all of the corresponding biological and genetic traits associated with that species. However, on classical metaphysics, human biology is not an exhaustive account of human nature, which–in the case of Intellect-bearing Man–is defined by our rational animality.
    So human biology is not human nature, but rather the most important part of the set of material circumstances that facilitate or constrain the realization of human nature.
    Happiness is Utility
    On an Aristotelian framework, happiness–or human flourishing–describes the actualization of the potentialities inherent to our rational faculties.
    In economic language, what we’re describing as “happiness” is actually utility. Since any utility function is to maximize utility, an Aristotelian’s utility function is to maximize the extent to which he can realize his end qua rational being. Since this happens to be the Aristotelian’s very definition of Good, there is no need for any distinction between “utility-maximizing” and “ethical” behavior; utility is virtue.
    A note on natural law
    So that Aristotelian utility function gives us a decision rule for ethical behavior. But, with very few exceptions, it gives us little in the way of categorical prescriptions or proscriptions. In different material circumstances, metaphysical happiness will require different physical actions.
    Sometimes, physical actions that are unethical in the abstract are ethical in the concrete. In the case of defending one’s children against a murderer, for example, the right thing to do might be to kill the man if he cannot be otherwise stopped. In most circumstances, killing anyone would deprive the killer of happiness (objective happiness described on Aristotelian terms, not subjective happiness described circularly by the killer’s own desires). But there are material circumstances in which human flourishing requires killing.
    And so it is with virtually all ethical decisions. The material circumstances of most actions determine their rightness or wrongness. Yes, material circumstances include the biology of our species, but they include much else.
    Now, in many (if not most) sets of circumstances, life is complex enough that it’s practically impossible to calculate the net effect on human flourishing, so it’s useful to employ heuristics like natural law. Natural law, then, serves as a set of as normative presumptions in favor of certain actions and against certain others. My problem with the RCC is that they want to make it categorical, when that’s not actually justified by the metaphysics, or the religion. Jesus spit (frustrated the natural digestive faculty of saliva) in order to heal a blind man, and admonished his followers to pluck out an offending eye (another natural end frustrated!). The point is that morality is contextual, and that we need to look at net effects, where the net effect is defined in secular terms by Aristotelian virtue ethics, or (as the case may be) in Christian terms by sacrificial love. Since we’re talking about the basis of public policy, my principle concern here is the former.
    This is already longer than I thought it would be, so I’ll do a separate reply on what this means for Social and Political theory.

    Reply
  20. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    On second thought, most of that digression on natural law and the RCC is unnecessary and I withdraw it.
    The takeaway should be that on my reading of Aristotelian metaphysics, (1) there is an objective right and wrong, but (2) Kantian/categorical/deontological ethics don’t exist as such, (3) given our cognitive limitations and the complexity of human life, normative ethics (like natural law) are at least useful, but (4) they need to be confined to appropriate boundaries.
    More later.

    Reply
  21. JP Avatar
    JP

    “The point is that morality is contextual, and that we need to look at net effects, where the net effect is defined in secular terms by Aristotelian virtue ethics, or (as the case may be) in Christian terms by sacrificial love. Since we’re talking about the basis of public policy, my principle concern here is the former.”
    I thought the goal was to make sacrificial love the basis of public policy, otherwise the public policy is not oriented in the correct direction and becomes purely secular.

    Reply
  22. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Quick reply to JP:
    Ontologically, metaphysics describes in different language the same end as Christian revelation; there is no real distinction between the two. In the political realm, however, we ought to use the secular language, since not all have access to Christian revelation.

    Reply
  23. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    No time to respond today.
    Great discussion, though. Keep it going. I’ll join in later when I can.

    Reply
  24. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Let’s talk about rights. The following discussion concerns what I take to be the two different expressions (natural and conventional) of the two different kinds of rights (self-ownership and property ownership). I’m using a pretty libertarian taxonomy here, because I think that taxonomy is good, even though it is so often poisoned by bad anthropology.
    Natural rights
    These exist, but not in the Lockean/Enlightenment sense. Natural rights are in fact those rights which, given the metaphysical nature and physical biology of Man, are normally conducive to his flourishing.
    The natural right to self-ownership
    On the framework I’m proposing, the natural right to self-ownership is simply the idea that an increase in human flourishing is normally associated with freedom of conscience, worship, and speech, as well as physical autonomy.
    The natural right to own property
    Similarly, the natural right to own property assumes that an increase in human flourishing is normally associated with the ability to hold for oneself some portion of the material world. In other words, given the nature of a human, it is normally good for him or her to own property.
    Conventional Rights
    Conventional rights are the specific, contingent contracts which instantiate natural rights in the material world. It may be helpful to think of natural rights as Platonic ideals, and conventional rights as more or less faithful approximations of those ideals for a particular set of material circumstances.
    Conventional rights are instituted by violence and the restraint/thereof. No natural right is instantiated in the material world until an agreement exists that that right be respected. In fact, any conventional right derives its existence from my ability (or the ability of others on my behalf) to visit violence upon those who do not respect that right.
    The Origin of the State
    Now, because natural rights are metaphysically predicated on the shared nature of humans, they apply to all humans, whether or not those humans have individually or collectively the violent power to enforce their own rights against the violent power of other agents. The State is therefore, in Jonathan’s words a nexus of “organized and legitimated violence” which instantiates in convention the natural rights of all humans within its jurisdiction. Contra Nozick, the state needs no justification in terms of natural rights, because instantiating those rights is an impossibility in the absence of a state. The upshot of all this is that, in Aristotelian terms, the State is natural, just like the family is natural.
    The limits of natural rights
    Natural rights only exist insofar as they normally facilitate human flourishing, and the consequence of this fact is that they are limited by the extent to which they do so.
    So I have a natural right to own property, but my natural property rights only extend to the point of zero marginal Aristotelian utility, where my owning an additional unit of property increases human flourishing by zero. Whether that point is likely to come when I buy my second car or when I buy my fifth yacht is a matter for argument, but the point here is to give us a language for having that argument (and that, on Aristotelian grounds I may have no natural right whatsoever to that fifth yacht). Again, the problem isn’t liberalism per se–it’s bad metaphysics.
    The role of the State
    The role of the State is first to set just conventional boundaries for those rights and to maximize utility (Aristotelian happiness) for all of its subjects.
    Establishing just conventional boundaries
    To the best of its ability, the State must approximate in statute the scope and boundaries of natural rights as they exist in the particular material circumstances concerning that State. This means, in a necessarily limited and fallible way, striving to enforce external justice (making sure one person does not violate another person’s natural rights).
    Promoting the Common Good
    Now, as a metaphysical matter, if I don’t own my fifth yacht, then who does? No one, until someone lawfully appropriates it. That body which may lawfully appropriate is that same body which may employ organized, legitimated violence–the State! And the State may justly appropriate it on the condition that doing so finances a net benefit to the flourishing of its subjects.
    That’s my best sketch of the framework at this point. The point is to give us a common language and common values for adjudicating these policy disputes. We’ll probably have different ideas of what policy will add or subtract marginal utility from our utility function, but that’s something we can actually argue about, and understand each other. The Progressives were right to want a science of government, and I think something along these lines could be a starting point for such a thing.
    TL;DR There is no classical liberal problem with taxation, or general welfare spending, or almost anything else libertarians hate. There’s only an Enlightenment anthropology problem.

    Reply
  25. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Mark,
    Do I have this right?
    1) You want 100% reserve banking, and
    2) You want any growth in the money supply to be distributed democratically.

    Reply
  26. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    And where would growth in the money supply come from if there were worldwide (including central banks) full-reserve banking?

    Reply
  27. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Basically.
    It’s a little more complicated than that. I want the gap between costs and prices generated each year to not be closed in the form of private debt, but in the form of freely distributed purchasing power.
    Social credit proposes two mechanisms for this: one is a “social dividend” that every person receives equally. That’s actually not the main mechanism as it is equivalent to “adding the same thing to the both sides of the equation,” but it works to ensure something like a UBI that is NOT tax-and-redistribute.
    The main mechanism is actually a “price rebate” wherein consumers are enabled to buy all valuable products (products that are not desired are not considered valuable) produced in the past year without any collective debt. Individual consumers might go into debt (say, by taking a mortgage, at 100% reserve from our collective pooled savings in banks; but then you usually buy a house only once or twice in a lifetime) in a given year to close the gap between individual means and the product desired. But collectively the structural gap between prices and costs is closed AT THE POINT OF PURCHASE by a set ratio rebate that allows sellers to recover the full price (by getting new money), while not requiring consumers to borrow to close the gap.
    There is always a gap. If we collectively spend $3 million dollars in a given year (on wages and raw materials, etc) to produce that year’s set of products…surely those products are going to be worth MORE than $3 million, because that’s the whole point: you make stuff to get a profit. Yet this means, collectively, we do not distribute enough purchasing power to buy back everything we produce. This is similar to Marx’s analysis: we pay $4000 in wages and buying raw materials to create a product, but then on the market (supply and demand) it is worth $5000 (we wouldn’t make it if we didn’t expect it to be valued at more than what we spent to make it).
    So there is a difference between cost and price. But then how can there ever be enough purchasing power to make up for the gap? Yes money circulates, the same dollar can be spent more than once, etc etc…but the fact is, there is always a purchasing-power gap, which is why credit cards exist and why we have to collectively go into debt each year to buy our own produce. The rebate would say, “Well, if we spent $3 million in a given year to produce $4 million worth of value”…then consumers would only pay 3 out of every 4 dollars, and the seller would get the fourth dollar from the national credit office. With electronic cards, this could just happen automatically. Money would be born not as loans, but at at the point of purchase, which is where value really exists (in the determination that someone wants something and thinks that such-and-such is a fair price).
    I believe the concept of “living beyond our means” is absurd. If we can produce the products, they obviously aren’t “beyond our means”!! The only thing we don’t have enough of, is purchasing power distributed.
    But Social Credit’s motto is “What is physically possible should be made financially possible.” If there are products, and there is demand FOR those products…there is no reason for their to be any structural debt (collectively) in order to make “consumption meet production.” If there are products, and people want them, why should there ever be collective indebtment to bankers to make the existent products meet the existent demand?
    When you allow this, you get an irresolvable remainder, and the people who are monetizing the credit get more and more money in the form of the interest on purchasing power they simply declared into existence. Yet for the “service” of declaring the purchasing power into existence, they expect a cut. That is a recipe for unnatural wealth-concentration.

    Reply
  28. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Basically, though the mechanism is a little more complicated than that.

    Reply
  29. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    A national credit office. It would be distributed debt free as the social dividend and the price rebate. It would not be loaned into existence at-interest.

    Reply
  30. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    http://michaeljournal.org/juvdm/enseignements/10lcs/10lsc_fichiers/image105.jpg
    This chart is good, although I think there may be supposed to be another arrow in which industry pays back the loans made to it.

    Reply
  31. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    All of this hinges on an empirical question concerning the nature of inflation–is that fair to say? If A+B is not accurate, Social Credit makes no sense, right? I have no expertise here; I’m just trying to figure out what to read.

    Reply
  32. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Response to Patrick:
    My point about Rawls was not to embrace his deontology, but to point out that he gave up on it later, at least insofar as it was a project to persuade anybody that accepting it had practical consequences in the political sphere. I’m sure it continued to shape his own thinking, and anybody who would want to understand why he supported this or that political program could be referred to his book.
    Because I contend that politics remains fundamentally a pragmatic or rhetorical task does not in any way diminish the importance of you, me, Rawls, or anybody having that rhetorical task grounded in a metaphysics–Aristotelian, Christian, or some form of watered-down eschatological Marxism, which is what secular progressivism is these days. I may or may not share common ground with your or his or her metaphysics, but it’s not something I really care about in the political sphere. I care about whether we can agree to support, for instance, the effort to improve the affordability and accessibility of health care. The policies I support will have to be consistent with my own metaphysics, but I don’t need your metaphysics to align with mine if we an agree on practical policy goals.
    So my point is pretty simple, and I’d be surprised if you disagree with it, which is that when one goes into the political sphere, one’s metaphysics ought to remain in the background; indeed, too often it becomes an obstacle for doing effective politics when it comes too much into the foreground.
    So all I’m saying is that politics is about building coalitions; it’s about getting stuff done. It’s about the Apaches and the Comanches putting aside their differences to fight a common threat or achieve a common goal that servers both parties’ interests. So in the political sphere, I have no problem making arguments that appeal to people’s interests, and, yes, in some cases whatever residuum of common decency has survived the ‘flood’.
    The people I associate with everyday are mostly self-interested, but there is a core of decency in most of them that I know I can appeal to so long as it doesn’t cost them too much. Monsters are the exception, not the rule, and I think it’s common sense to assume that basic self-interest and common decency understood in this way is something you can build political consensus around.
    I’m not arguing that this is ideal; I’m arguing that this is what’s possible until the flood subsides. I look forward to a day when there is a broadly shared metaphysics that grounds a politics of human flourishing. For sure, Aristotle and the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, and any number of other sources are the seeds from which such a thing might grow. But there’s no ground ready yet to receive them.
    My point in this post is that I don’t see Classical Liberalism providing that ground. Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote above at 4/2, 1:151 pm. I thought you objected to my rejection of Classical Liberalism and wanted to make an argument that it could be. And that was the argument I was expecting you to make, but I don’t see that in what you wrote so far.

    Reply
  33. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    BTW–appropos of the other thread going on here about credit, ec. there’s an interesting post about Distributism over at TAC: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/pope-francis-needs-distributism/

    Reply
  34. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    The post to which you refer is clumsily suggesting that–if you will–my Aristotelian social utility function may be better realized in many cases by cultivating private/voluntary virtue rather than having the State occupy that space. It should be obvious on my framework that this is not an all-or-nothing proposition, and that what takes priority is everyone being able to secure for themselves some level of basic material security. I’m saying that a normative presumption in favor of private/voluntary action should obtain once that “basic material security” standard is met. But it’s only a presumption, and it can be argued with–classical liberalism as a practical default in the absence of compelling evidence for policy intervention.
    The affirmative metaphysical case I laid out is more or less improvised from a few things that have been circulating in my mind for a little while. It’s a starting point, but I laid it out there because it felt right that I should “put up or shut up.”
    My argument against your position [4/3@0954] still seems to be the crux of the issue. What I’m saying is that “common decency” is a misleading term, and more importantly that the “residuum of common decency” is decaying rapidly. If our model of politics depends on it, we’re in big trouble. Honest questions: do you think our politics is getting more or less fragmented? Do you think, on balance, that political activity is motivated more or less by the common good? As wonderful as some pockets of this country are, as a nation we have common decency the way the Greeks have the Parthenon.

    Reply
  35. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    And I should append to that that I’m not talking about Monsters. I know good people, who give charitably, who volunteer, who would be first on my list to call if I were in a bind, who essentially endorse the Rick Santelli political argument. This is a dispute over shared civic values and whether or not people ought to share a basic understanding of what the State is for.

    Reply
  36. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Patrick–An afterthought on Rawls: His veil of ignorance can be deployed rhetorically, but not deontologically, for instance. I can use it despite my finding Rawls’s Liberal assumptions uncongenial.
    But it can work rhetorically only if there is something in your audience that is receptive to a fairness argument. Don’t you think most Americans believe in fairness whether or not they understand how its grounded in an implicit metaphysics?
    I do, and that’s the kind of thing you work with in the political sphere. Fairness is an American commonplace, and commonplaces are the coin of the realm when it comes to persuasion in the political sphere. You can talk metaphysics in church or over a drink with friends, or on a blog like this one.

    Reply
  37. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Most Americans believe in “fairness,” but if you were to ask them what that meant, you would find that they were describing different things.
    That difference of opinion reflects a difference of core metaphysical convictions, whether those are articulated, absorbed or assumed.
    For many Americans, fairness means, “That guy worked hard in order to buy his fifth yacht–why should the government take more of his hard-earned money?”

    Reply
  38. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    I don’t know if the A+B formulation is essential, but it does hinge on the idea that there is a chronic shortage of purchasing power and that in charging a fee (usury) for lending new money into existence (which doesn’t take any real risk or skill since they’re just creating out of nothing, or rather as the debt itself) they’re basically getting something from nothing and hence the unnatural concentration of wealth.
    Douglas himself discusses the possibility of deflation. If we simply didn’t increase the money supply at all, then the gap in purchasing power would be made up by deflation. You pay $400 to make a good, and instead of being worth $500 on the market it would be worth $400 BUT a $400 that was more valuable than last year’s $400 (taking into account the added value of production). However, CH Douglas thought, and I agree, that’s its desirable to keep prices as stable and equivalent as possible from year to year by increasing the money supply to represent the new value and facilitate the same ratios in exchange etc etc. the question then becomes how to increase the money supply and who gets the new money.
    Social credit would propose first of all, that whatever the mechanism, it should not involve a debt. Society shouldn’t have to give bankers this huge cut merely to authorize the new money that represents the value WE created and which already exists. Society should not have to collectively “pawn” its own production in order to financially enable the consumption of said production.
    Second, it would propose that if we’re creating new money debt-free anyway, at that point at least one of the mechanisms should be as a universal income (that at this point in history, an age of abundance, would almost certainly be enough to subsist on, though that is not essentially guaranteed as the value of the dividend is effected by total production, obviously; money can only represent as many goods as actually exist. You can give everyone $20000 but how much 20000 is worth in goods will depend on the total supply of goods and how much total money is out there).

    Reply
  39. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Distributism is the goal, social credit is the means. The social credit dividend “makes us all capitalists” inasmuch as it recognizes us all as equal shareholders in the enormous collective capital which is society and civilization itself. There is no doubt private ownership, including of means of production. But there are many many factors of production (time, rain, sunshine, the collective accumulation of knowledge, the social network itself) to which we are all equally co-heirs. Our monetary/ financial mechanism should have a recognition of this built into it.
    Basically, I’m uninterested in arguing this or that minor policy point treating the symptoms until we address the root systematic cause (which emerges from the internal logic of usury): end wage slavery, the folly of “full employment,” and enforced false scarcity…and the political/cultural/social transformation would be amazing.

    Reply
  40. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Why should the government? Tax-and-redistribute is wicked, at best a “chemotherapy” treating a symptom of the usurious cancer that has already infected society.
    People SHOULD get the market value of their work and investments. It’s just that our current financial system (specifically, the mechanism of credit/money creation) creates a “false vacuum” leading to a wildly inaccurate market valuation of labor. Don’t blame the free market, a free market is just; the problem is our market isn’t really free because people are under the duress of false scarcity and the evil bootstrapping of share-in-distribution to participation-in-production (ie, wage slavery).
    It is unnatural to treat money itself as a commodity. Risk and opportunity might be abstract goods, but not money-creation itself, that’s no skill.
    The way the current system works is this: ten men are on an island, they have each made a surplus of a good (fruit, clothing, tools, timber, fish, etc) that others want, but it is too hard to barter. So a slick silver-tongued eleventh man comes along, and says “look, I’ve invented money. Give me ten-percent of your goods and I’ll loan you money to represent the value of the rest. Then you can all trade using the money, and at the end once everything is sold, you can pay me back the loan.”
    Of course, this is absurd. He didn’t DO anything but print up some money, so why should he get the 10% cut?? Money is there to enable trade, and so society should issue it for free as collectively beneficial.
    It gets more absurd if you consider the logical result of the bankers scheme: he has his 10% cut, more than he can consume on his own, so he offers it for sale. “But we paid you back, we don’t have any money again “oh that’s ok, just give me another cut, and I’ll loan you some more money.” Of course at that point the banker himself has become a seller too (obviously many financiers have a hand in companies that sell real goods) so he sells the goods for the money he just created. But then he’s still owed that same money “again” as a loan, so he can ask for yet ANOTHER cut to create new money to pay off the old loan. Ah, but then how do they pay back THAT loan? It becomes a cycle which carried to its logical conclusion winds up with the banker having 100% ownership of all the goods.

    Reply
  41. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Okay, Mark, I’m going to bite. You write, “the political/cultural/social transformation would be amazing.”
    How exactly?

    Reply
  42. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Patrick–I’d say that it’s not that ‘fairness’ means different things so much as that it has a mushy meaning, and it’s malleable depending on who makes the most robust effort to define its meaning. That’s a rhetorical task.
    I don’t think that the right-to-buy-a ‘fifth yacht’ definition of fairness is a hardened view, except among the five yacht crowd and their wannabes. Others–i.e,, the vast majority of the rest of us who don’t even own one yacht–can be persuaded that there is a better, more expansive definition of fairness, and that it serves their interests as well as most everyone else’s.
    Most people don’t have hardened ideological views or views that are well thought out. Within the political sphere, I’m not interested in persuading people who have hardened views, but rather the people in the mushy middle who make political decisions not by basing them on some well thought out principles, but on what sounds right and fair to them. I think there’s a lot of flex there to work with, and that there’s a middle to be captured. That’s how it looks from where I stand anyway.

    Reply
  43. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Mark–Are you familiar with David Graeber’s book “Debt: The First 5000 Years”? He’s an academic, but also one of the anarchists behind OWS. Wondering what you think about his arguments. I found his history and anthropology interesting, but not his prescriptions for a cure. It’s very, you know, OWS.
    I think that where I stand on this right now is that I know what to say NO to, but haven’t quite developed my thinking about what to say YES to. In the short run it’s more about what’s possible to do now to keep things from getting more out of control.
    I’m glad people are working on alternative ways of thinking about the economy, and there’s a lot about some of your ideas and what the Distributists say that I find congenial, but it’s not at all clear how we get from here to there. it just seems so remote from ever being taken seriously by the people who currently control the economy.
    I see it as one of the seeds that might be planted and cultivated when the conditions are right for it, but we are so far from that now. But I am open to be persuaded otherwise. My thinking on it is pretty mushy at the moment.
    BTW–if you’ve got some time on your hands, Graeber gets into it with some of the Crooked Timber grandees about his argument that the world economy is now a tribute system for the American Empire. Pretty entertaining.
    http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/02/seminar-on-debt-the-first-5000-years-reply/#more-23912

    Reply
  44. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Well, I hope you’re right.
    I don’t think the center can hold; there isn’t much in the culture or the material structure of American society to nourish the decency you’re talking about, so I suspect we’re running on fumes at this point. I see civil society continuing to splinter into various interest groups who won’t even pay lip service to the commonweal.
    The recent firing of the Mozilla guy certainly does not portend well for any kind of liberal [=open] public discourse. I think we need an aggressive, “Hail Mary” attempt to rebuild a civic culture, but maybe we can muddle through without one.
    We’ll see.
    [Don’t get me wrong, life is effing great–I just worry about the country sometimes.]

    Reply
  45. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Well, because I’m highly sympathetic with Marx’s idea that ideology is an emanation from the material base.
    Jack speaks of “there being no ground to plant” seeds in. What he is referring to is the political/cultural/social malaise we find ourselves in. I would agree we are in a malaise, I just don’t believe that culture is a CAUSE in this malaise, as if somehow we just THOUGHT ourselves into a corner, as if mere ideas really have that sort of power on their own. No, ideas become more or less popular throughout history on account of changes in the relations of production. It’s not as if there are just randomly different distributions of personalities through history that cause different ideas to appeal to the populace at different times. If there are different distributions of personalities that cause different philosophies to wax and wane, it is because of how social relations (based largely on economic structure) are forming personalities.
    The current malaise is caused by the ridiculously unjust system we live under, whose very structure correlates with all the individualist neoliberal crap that Jack is calling out. I just think we need to cut to the chase: fix the system structurally, and the bad ideological manifestation with wither up and die on its own. Replace it with a just system, and a correspondingly just philosophical order will emerge to reflect it.
    People are spiritually alienated because of how value is being economically alienated by bankers. Again, I think Marx got the mechanism wrong: it’s not the fact that anyone works for wages that alienates value, it’s the usury of the bankers. This fundamental difference changes much of what follows from it in Marx (for example, his error here leads to all his crap about atheism etc). But the alienation is economic.
    Money represents value, goods (and, thus, good-ness). As such, it is a powerful symbolic mediator of desire, socially. If money’s structure is unjust and corrupt, then the symbolic and social network of the culture of general will become correspondingly deformed, because the economic relations of value are what come to “shape” the metaphysical vision of value and good-ness that emerges socially.
    Social Credit’s model of money…is a model based on the free universal distribution of Grace, on everyone’s status as an equal heir to everything we collectively inherit from God and from the collective heritage of mankind and civilization.
    The whole market would readjust if false-scarcity were eliminated. There would be a total readjustment, thus, of what things are valued and which aren’t (much of which is now rooted in a false consciousness on account of the hidden theft in the market). People’s decision making would be radically altered by basic income, and in the face of greater equality a difference conception of merit and worthiness would emerge.

    Reply
  46. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Jack, see my comment to Jonathan above: I don’t believe that Social Credit is the “seed” that needs to be planted in some future “fertile ground.” I believe it is the fertile ground itself that needs to be fought for, from which better ideology/philosophy and psychology/spirituality will emerge. I am absolutely convinced that the material/economic order IS the “ground” and that culture is the plant/fruit that grows FROM that ground, not the other way around.
    Yes, Social Credit is obviously remote from the interests of the crowd of usurious bankers and their crony capitalist allies who control the economy. That’s the whole problem! If you expect this whole thing to go away top-down, it won’t happen. What would have to happen is that the wool would have to be pulled off the eyes of the populace, their false-consciousness would have to be dispelled, and they would have to rise up and demand a new system (peacefully or otherwise).
    You speak as if these people just have power and that there’s nothing we can do. Yes, it is a bit of a catch-22 because the current system that concentrates wealth thus, also, tends to concentrate power. The alienation that makes people wage-slaves also disenfranchises them in terms of collective-action and being able to build political will. Bread and circuses keep everyone too comfortable for revolution or activism, and the kulturkampf keeps people divided from their material self-interest (which, for the vast majority of people, would be united against the current elite).
    Something has to give, but that something will be economic. There’s only so much inequality a political order can bear. Yes, what we’re living in as a Babylon more extensive and resilient than anything mankind has ever dealt with before. A shame given that, from an objective perspective, technology means we are really in an age of objective abundance, no longer plagued by the real scarcity that was the source of much of war and greed and human debasement throughout history.
    But I can’t believe it’s impossible to do something. Some strategically placed voices could start dispelling the false consciousness and revealing to people the problems with credit and the current monetary system on populist terms. As you say, that resentment of finance is there, people just don’t know how exactly to articulate it, they know something’s off but they don’t quite understand the mechanism. So we need to reveal the mechanism to them. If someone like Pope Francis who had a bully pulpit and a populist started explicitly calling for it, or if a movie (perhaps similar to Gore’s about climate change), or a series of easily digestible youtube spots…you might see a groundswell of support (though, of course, people invested in the current system would try to discredit the whole thing and say it wouldn’t work).
    It might not change anything yet, but there will no doubt within the next 20 years be more big financial crises and crashes like in 2008, and people are getting pretty impatient with it. People are willing to accept wage-slavery to the point that they can “still have their cable TV and their bass boat” (as my dad often says), but the more slum-like conditions people are asked to live in as their purchasing power is debased…the less they’ll be willing to put up with it.

    Reply
  47. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Pragmatic applicability of Social Credit aside, I see it comes down to whether or not one embraces historical materialism. I don’t. I think that fundamentally most Americans don’t, which may be part of what makes us so suspicious of systematic fixes. However, there’s no question the intellectual classes, despite the Postmodernist projects of deconstruction, remain swayed by metanarratives and determinism, usually these days of a harder science kind.

    Reply
  48. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    It’s unclear what you mean by “comes down to.”
    I’m not sure I’m a historical materialist. But I certainly don’t understand how any model other than what I’ve described explains why ideology changes and evolves throughout history, nor why the big ideological revolutions seem to just coincidentally happen at the exact same historical moments when big economic restructuring a happen.
    Why was Luther’s generation suddenly “ripe” to embrace heresy when a thousand years of medievals hadn’t been (as a demographic trend)? What it because of some random psychological mutation? Doubtful. Was it because somehow a timer beeped and various ideas that had been incubating finally “came out of the microwave”? I think that’s silly, as there is no particular reason to propose such “waiting periods” for ideas.
    In fact, I don’t think I’m a materialist. I think Id say I believe in “theistic memetic evolution” similar to how I (and recent popes, I’ll point out) believe in theistic genetic evolution. “Mutations” occur in the form of “random” inspiration (which may actually be providential) but whether or not this or that mutation survives depends on whether it is favored to reproduce by the economic environment at the time.
    I don’t think believing this is materialism or determinism anymore than believing in biological evolution is determinism. Because though the general trends may follow general patterns (if you flood a continent, swimming creatures will develop) there are so many degrees of freedom “in the details” that I don’t think it can be called deterministic. Which ideas occur when, and the specific details or idiosyncrasies of those ideas admits of much variation, as does the vicissitudes of day-to-day happenings in a sort of butterfly effect (ie, what if Luther had been struck by lightening? I’m convinced something would have emerged nonetheless, maybe even still in Germany, but the specific content of history would still have been radically altered! Just like if the ancestor of fish had been gobbled up before reproducing; we’d almost certainly have some sort of fish, but they’d be very different because a minor change in trajectory in the past can lead to a great divergence in the present: see Chaos Theory in mathematics).
    I believe these degrees of freedom in history can be called Providence. I don’t think I’m a materialist or determinist. Nevertheless, on account of the progress of technology and civilizational productive capacity and complexity, as well as what financial system is accepted (all of which are not inevitable either, although there is a general pathway inasmuch as technological knowledge is cumulative), it is also true that the economic environment is, from a systematic perspective, the major “pressure” driving the “selection” of personalities and ideologies and cultural trends in any given age.

    Reply
  49. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    But I’ll add Jonathan that you don’t need to support this vision of historical causation or the relation of culture/ideology to the economic base to support social credit. Most crediteers probably don’t! (I met the Michael Journal folk once, at their meeting in Toronto, and they were most hilariously crazy conspiracy theorists, sadly…)
    As you say “practical applicability aside” and I hope you mean that. As long as you support greater equality, the end of wage slavery, people having a right to their basic needs, and reject the “they deserve it for not working hard enough” view of poverty…then Social Credit is for you. Whatever your view of historical causation, the PRACTICAL economic order of social credit simply shares all these goals.
    Furthermore, it also makes a MORAL argument quite aside from any idea of the effects it would have on culture/ideology: usury is unethical because it is theft. It is taking something for doing nothing of real value. It is, in its most basic definition, “Treating credit as private, even though it is inherently a social good.” This has taken many forms throughout history (including, yes, any lending at interest in the middle ages when “opportunity costs” in investment were not yet significant enough to justify that; but today in the form of our fractional reserve debt-money system), and the great philosophical and moral traditions always knew it was unnatural to act as if money itself was a commodity or that money-creation was a service that private individuals could offer or benefit from. Even if social credit were a horrible practical failure for some reason, the fact remains that the ends do not justify the means and that some things like usury are unethical regardless of what positive effect some would say they have. Luckily, however, I believe that reality is internally consistent, and so I do not believe that “justice” and “prosperity” are mutually incompatible as if we have to admit of the injustice of usury for the sake of prosperity. In reality, social credit offers a method for bringing prosperity and equality exactly BECAUSE its monetary “root” is Just.
    So there are reasons to support this other than a vision of how it would transform culture. I believe that is inevitable in broad strokes (though the specific content admits of great degrees of freedom, as I said). You apparently don’t (though I don’t know what other model of causation in history you propose). But on this point we would just have to wait and see. Maybe we could make a bet. We both fight for the equality and end to wage slavery and economic justice that social credit and abolishing usury would bring…and then when the new order is established…well, we just wait a few decades to see what sort of cultural/social/political order emerges. My bet is that almost certainly it will reflect the premises “built in” to social credit’s economic presumptions. You think that maybe it could be totally independent and that horrible cultural and social and political trends could still propagate in spite of the economic restructuring. Well…we’d have to wait and see!

    Reply
  50. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    This is Jack’s point, yes? Of course I could team up with someone who wants to work for the same goal even though I don’t share his metaphysics, as we were calling it earlier. We don’t even have to agree on what usury is. And of course idea and matter mutually interpenetrate. But that’s just why a grand model of causation seems dangerous to me. I guess I’m trying to see Jack’s position here about practical rhetoric. Why do we need such a model? These things are two-edged swords in the rhetorically super-charged public square. I asked what you thought the cultural upshot of Social Credit would be because I think that even though it’s hard to see in some areas, we still debate policy in terms of competing ideas of the good, along the lines of the Aristotelianism that Patrick’s been talking about.
    About historical materialism (I was simply using the technical term for Marx’s theory of ideological change). . . In any decent model there’s going to be room for nuance and very fine degrees of specificity and unpredictability. But just because a model allows for unpredictability doesn’t mean it’s not deterministic. I do worry that determinism has a blood-thinning effect on a culture over time. I’ve never read a utopia, including the first book by that title, that wasn’t really a dystopia. This is a mystery (perhaps for me it is a central mystery) that the social sciences can’t account for, even though it seems to me that they try to nonetheless. And I admit that can perturb me. Like I said, though, it doesn’t stop me from cooperating with others for justice.

    Reply
  51. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Jonathan, if we don’t have some model of causation then I don’t really see why anyone would have a motivation to act at all. I mean if it’s all “just happening” in an utterly inscrutable and random way, and there’s no logic to the causation then why would our own choices have any sort of effect on things? At the very least they wouldn’t have a predictable effect, and at that point why would we act at all? The “ideas have power” model leaves one, it seems, merely trying to proselytize the ideas one favors. The problem being that if people aren’t receptive to said ideas then one is merely left in what I see as Jack’s despair: throwing up ones hands, saying “guess the ground isn’t fertile enough yet,” and just…waiting, apparently, with no notion that things could be done to MAKE the ground fertile. This is the problem with all efforts at change which think the primary mechanism is changing minds first. Lots of minds won’t change, different eras or populaces are more or less receptive to different ideas, and models which think ideas themselves have the causal power can’t explain why. One is left concluding the bulk of mankind is stupid, or in bad faith, or that one simply has to twiddle ones thumbs and wait for the winds to change randomly (or, more often, simply that the popular ideas are the true ones). An economic view of causation, however, has the advantage of explaining WHY minds are more or less receptive to certain ideas at this or that point in history or in this or that context, and hence implies concrete ACTS we could take (or at least concrete material goals we can act TOWARDS) that consist of something more than endless debate and attempts at persuading “one person at a time” to change their values, as if the triumph of an ideology was ever accomplished by sheer persuasion independent of the idea’s fitness in given socio-economic circumstances.

    Reply
  52. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    “An economic view of causation, however, has the advantage of explaining WHY minds are more or less receptive to certain ideas at this or that point in history or in this or that context”
    So you say, but I don’t see that at all, and neither do a lot of people whose areas of expertise are — unsurprisingly — not economics. Correlation is not causation. Some of the most brilliant periods of cultural vitality have coincided with political chaos and material deprivation. That’s a historical fact, one that I call neither good nor bad but mysterious. I’m suspicious of systems, because systems want everything to line up. Both the hard and the social sciences overreach because they command the dominant discourse. (This is kind of getting back to Jack’s original post.) We don’t need to get into it, though, because as I’ve already said, I’m coming over to Jack’s side, at least provisionally, in saying that political cooperation does not require alignment of metaphysics.

    Reply
  53. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Jonathan, I never said that political chaos and material deprivation couldn’t line up with great spiritual or cultural achievement. Indeed, I’m much more inclined to see the economic causation in how the financial relations are structured rather than in some simplistic idea that prosperity = good culture. However, I’m not just talking about great art or literature of the sort that can come exactly from alienation and suffering. I’m talking about a civic culture as a whole which is virtuous, which indeed tends to line up with eras when there is relative equality and stability and right economic relations. To me, there is no doubt a connection between a) communism and atheism, or b) late-capitalism of the usury variety and secularism, etc etc
    To me, even your concession that we don’t need shared metaphysics to cooperate politically is part-and-parcel of my point: it is much easier to convince people to DO something (of a political nature) by appealing to their economic self-interests…than to get people to BELIEVE this or that ideology in spite of it. The nation isn’t going to be converted back to Christianity by mere apologetics, for example, as if all someone who wanted that would have to do is expose people to better arguments about the logical differences between contraception and NFP of (in more nuanced fantasies) make liturgy more beautiful. Changing the tone ala Pope Francis might help stymie the flow of loss a bit, but only inasmuch as it is interpreted as a concession to modern values. No, if someone really wanted to achieve that ideological end, they’d start through the indirect method of getting people organized around economic conditions which would facilitate the reemergence of that metaphysic. And that’s the beauty of it: organizing people around a politico-economic plan is easier because agreement on a metaphysic is not a pre-condition. And the secret is: they may well find that, in spite of their old selves and old false consciousness, when they’ve achieved economic restructuring with you, their ideology also starts to change. Yet if you had tried to change their ideology first or “directly,” you would have accomplished nothing.

    Reply
  54. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    The reply function isn’t working for me, so I’ll just keep posting at the end of the thread for now.
    I think I want to respond to both Patrick and Mark here, because I agree with the fundamental thrust of what you are both saying, but maybe I’m too stuck in my own preoccupations to appreciate what you are trying to say.
    Because it seems to me that history is history, and we ride the wave, and we do what we can to help those who are drowning and to put a check on those who want hoard all the lifeboats and supplies. It’s really hard to do because the hoarders are kind of crazy; they’re kind of sociopathic. And they will do and say anything to make sure that they are the winners and to hell with everyone else. And so they do everything they can to get control of the levers of power–they are obsessed with it to a degree that normal people don’t understand, and so normal people are easily fooled by the bs justifications they come up with to justify their obsession.
    That’s what we’re up against. The old New Deal style social democracy, as cumbersome and limited as it was, at least did a decent job–not even close to ideal–keeping these predators in cages, but now they are running the zoo. And so the main question I have, and for me it renders everything else we’ve been discussing here secondary, not unimportant, but secondary: how do we get these predators back in their cages. After that we can talk about social credit and other innovations that might lead to a system that is fairer and less vulnerable to abuse than our current system. Right now I see just getting the predators under control as an enormously difficult, perhaps impossible task given the level of misinformation, complacency, and tribalism that has rendered any potential opposition to them impotent.
    So this is where I share Patrick’s concerns. If there’s a center to hold, there isn’t much strength or energy there. Mark’s right–it’s the malaise, and the malaise is in this infinitely self-reinforcing feedback loop, and test there are a few people–many of them readers here–who are struggling to break out of that loop, that we need something outside the loop to grab onto to lift us out of it. And many of us have learned that it’s possible because there is something that reaches to us from outside of that loop, which is grace, and that in our taking hold of that helping hand we learn to trust that God keeps his impossible promises.
    So there is no possibility of giving up–we have to be Frodo-like in our persistence even if it is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. But we must also accept that our first task is to chain the beast and then to domesticate it. Then will come planting season–a season where we can harvest without fear of predators stealing it.
    So that’s a partial response to Mark, but also to Patrick and Jonathan because I think we all agree that the best society has a center that is grounded in a teleological metaphysics–Aristotelian or some other–which provides a trellis upon which the soul can grow and flourish But we don’t have that–we never had it, and until we do we wander in the wilderness, and all we have is grace and a trust that somewhere in each human we encounter resides the Logos–whether sleeping or awake. We are each of us Logos bearers, carriers of the image in which we were created. And because I believe in the innateness of the Logos, I feel justified in trusting to the common sense and common decency of human beings, even the wolves of Wall Street.

    Reply
  55. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    Mark,
    From your perspective, if we were to institute full reserve banking–without any of the additional Social Credit proposals–would that be better or worse than the status quo?

    Reply
  56. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    [I’m thinking along the lines (but not specifically) of the Chicago Plan, which, was not always out-of-the-mainstream, and got some renewed attention during the financial meltdown.]

    Reply
  57. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    No, I wouldn’t support full reserve banking without some other mechanism for increasing the money supply. That just causes deflation, which only benefits those who already hold money.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *