Capitalism has made us better people – morally better. That is the core claim of the thick (over 500 pages) book
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce
by the economist prof. Deirdre N. McCloskey.
And that is only the first of the planned four books, where she is going to prove that all the “left and right intelligentsia” are wrong to criticize capitalism for corruption, social alienation and anti-cultural consumerism.
At best, we have another academic exercise in advocating a particular system to the highest philosophical, and even moral, grounds. How successful is Prof. McCloskey? How different is she from Karl Marx, for example? At worst, this book signals a neo-neo-calvinistic ideology for emerging David Brooksian class of “supermoral” lords, where all morality is decided lonely by the size of the bank account, regardless how the money is earned or spent.
I do not pretend that I read the book, but I found a (presumably) characteristic excerpt from the book. The tone is vexingly persuasive. Perhaps I offer more pun than it deserves, but I almost feel like reading a Soviet textbook on something. I do not mean to reject the arguments instinctively. But I find it appropriate to recall ancient words of a Persian poet:
Out beyond the idea
Of right-doing and wrong-doing
There is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
As I understand from reviews, the book frequently gives quotations from philosophers, artists, economists and historians criticizing capitalism, and then goes on with rebutting them. It seems, the book tries hard to set in stone “Capitalism is good and virtuous” beyond any further discussion. That does not look like great science.
Where to start to disagree with Prof. McCloskey? First off, we may agree that capitalism is a highly functional social-economic system, evolving as well. Depending on definition, it is a (or the) driving force of human activity for the last 200 years, or maybe much longer. And here is the first conceptual problem: what do we attribute to capitalism? Writers like Charles Dickens wrote novels like Hard Times out of perception that the capitalist system supports and deepens certain injustices, and millions of readers acclaimed these novels and lived by the same perception. This understanding cannot be dismissed just by providing a caricature. On the other hand, observing that welfare, technology, education and leisure improved with time does not indisputably mean that these improvements should be attributed overwhelmingly to capitalism. It is not serious to excuse the greed of Kenneth Lays as “fallible human nature”, or by negative expectations from intelligentsia. The freedom to cheat and take dishonest advantages is being basically lobbied by capitalism apologists.
When it comes to ethics, I do not really see a basis for McCloskey’s thesis. My main objection is that capitalism does not really give consistent moral pressure on people. Capitalism does make people more prudent, and asks to understand each other’s needs – at some times stronger than at others. But capitalism does not force to follow the seven virtuesequally strongly and consistently. What about abstinence and humility for example? Capitalism does not really asks people help each other selflessly, does it? In contrary, the ideology is often literally so understood that individuals think about nothing but their own benefit, and explicitly ignore discomfort or even pain of others. Morality is based on not hurting the others, is it not?
As Prof. McCloskey clearly likes the Christian tradition, we should also recognize that capitalism does not put consistent pressure to avoid the seven cardinal sins as well. If you think about it, greed is one of the cardinal sins – yet the modern capitalism glorifies greed as universal driver for everything! That might be good for long.
McCloskey’s description of ethical standards “brought” by capitalism is not impressive. Is politeness of supermarket employers the best we can hope for? Too often she uses expressions like
Although McCloskey declares that “if we had gained a better material world, but had thereby lost our souls” she would have no praise for capitalism, her case is still more material than moral. Her most frequent arguments are about dollars earned a day throughout generations and in different parts of the world, or so. Yes, capitalism gave more scope to more people to pursue their purposes – but capitalism left a lot of unfairly wrecked lives and dead bodies as well, and it is continuing to do so in the US with increasing pace. (I mean the industries of credit, insurance, health care, for example. Or what about military industry?) These considerations plainly falsify any exceptional morality of capitalism. And the question “How better does capitalism make the people?” remains unaddressed, really. Most of the people pursuing their purposes “whatever it gets” are far from the best.
Comparison of capitalism to other systems does not prove much either. Even the comparisons are not very interesting. In many respects, socialism was “better than all previous systems” as well, while it was sustainable. The same caveat might apply to capitalism eventually as well – the concerns about limits of GDP growth are very reasonable. We may still trust resilience of capitalism, but here we only recognize that capitalism evolves – it learns from its own mistakes (some of them immoral), and it learns from mistakes of successes of “failed” systems as well. That is what it makes capitalism so vital – but that does not mean morality still. So what is capitalism? Is it the same system in the US and in Sweden? In the 1930’s and the 1990’s? What is the difference between “socialist” and “capitalist” Arab countries, for example? How do you decide, do you attribute a commonly good thing, or a brutality, to capitalism or not?
It is not even true that reversal of the course of globalization would necessarily harm the poor. Did capitalism really succeed in Africa, for example? Well, it is a sad mess there. Perhaps we do not have to push Africa to keep up with every tempo of civilization. It takes time to learn good benefits of democracy and free market. It takes much less time for a few to abuse these systems unfairly. Africa could be much better off without egomaniacal resource exploitation, imported industrial dumps, and without education by greed. It would have been much better off if the West had had less interest in “progressive” and “faithful” missions – with people still earning dollar cents a day, but just as happy and unhappy as centuries before.
What is wrong with globalization is that it destroys local economies. As McCloskey says, economy is not so much competition but cooperation. In a local economy, however developed or undeveloped, people work for each other. When globalization comes, people have no use of each other – most of them can only be “useful” to a global corporation. One of the differences between the haves and have-nots of this world is that the rich haves not only compete with each other, but they provide plenty of services to each other, while the have-nots… The world today looks like a conspiracy of the fortunate rich to shut away the rest of the world, while still making use of it. That is not a moral condition. That must be the primal challenge to capitalism.
In conclusion, we have to notice impressive progress of welfare and mass culture which went simultaneously with the development of capitalism. The system has positive sides, undoubtedly. But capitalism is a force that might work differently, depending on policies. It does not always work out most nicely, and it does not always make people ethically better. In the excerpt, McCloskey mentions “an unhappy reversal in the [equality] trend in the United States in the 1980s” – she should examine it more closely. Loose policies cause lousy capitalism, apparently. Some exercised pressure should not be bad at all for this monster guy Capitalism, especially if we want moral outcomes. I do not agree with the author that “we need to defend a defensible capitalism”. Does capitalism need to be defended now? It must be having too easy time then 🙂
[Crossposted at European Tribune and Daily Kos.]
