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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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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/Morgan16.htm
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