E. F. Schumacher on the Necessary Metaphysical Reconstruction of the Economy
Discussion
I’m a long-standing admirer of Herman Daly, so shall share this article. People are responding to his critique of economic growth. I would encourage people to read deeper. Reading Herman Daly makes it clear why E.F. Schumacher was right to make “metaphysical reconstruction” key to the resolution of environmental crises – these crises are the result of faulty relationships. Unless these are corrected, our technics will continue to misfire. Sadly, Schumacher felt that his key argument on the need to secure the basis of the moral ecology was missed, so had to write “A Guide for the Perplexed.” Daly’s “metaphysics and morals” are not ephemeral to his economics, they are its basis.
In the Foreword to Herman Daly and John Cobb’s “For the Common Good,” Paul Ekins writes:
“It is a bold, and some might say reckless, move to end a long book with much intricate economic argument with a chapter entitled 'The Religious Vision'. Both authors are Protestant Christians and are explicit that this determines the nature of the Vision in question as far as they are concerned. Many people, even among those sympathetic to the book's economics and to the 'biocentrism' of its environmental analysis, will find themselves with plenty to dispute in this chapter if they do not share the authors' religious perspective.
But to get hung up in disputation or theological detail would be to miss the point as to why this chapter is important, which is because it explicitly raises the question of moral values. Many writers on environmental economics, for instance, assume that the environmental crisis has been caused by an economic 'mistake' which can be rectified by better knowledge of ecological processes and the factoring of the appropriate coefficients into cost-benefit analyses. Daly and Cobb's insistence on spiritual reawakening locates the origin of the mistakes much deeper in the Western human spirit than can be moved by mere rationalism. It is, in a way, a more austere and much more challenging message than those of David Pearce or the Brundtland Report, demanding not only a revaluation or reorientation of the Western way of life, but a complete rethink of its very purpose. Why should the authors feel such a rethink to be remotely in prospect?
Their answer, which is the reason they give for writing the book in the first place, is humanity's impending catastrophic confrontation with what they call the 'wild facts' of environmental destruction and social disintegration to which its dominant worldview and resulting activities have given rise. These latter day Furies will not be appeased by technical, economic or technological sophistication. Only a recovery of close interpersonal relations in the context of community and of close human-nature relations in the context of a biocentric ethic would be sufficient to lay these Furies to rest. And such a twin recovery implies a revolution in values that can only stem from spiritual transformation. Whether or not the authors are right, only history will tell.”
Chapter 7 From Chrematistics to Oikonomia
The Discipline of Economics as Chrematistics
“Aristotle made a very important distinction between "oikonomia" and "chrematistics." The former, of course, is the root from which our word "economics" derives. Chrematistics is a word that these days is found mainly in unabridged dictionaries. It can be defined as the branch of political economy relating to the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short-term monetary exchange value to the owner. Oikonomia, by contrast, is the management of the household so as to increase its use value to all members of the household over the long run. If we expand the scope of household to include the larger community of the land, of shared values, resources, biomes, institutions, language, and history, then we have a good definition of "economics for community." It appears that in modern usage the academic discipline of economics is much closer to chrematistics than to oikonomia.”
Oikonomia differs from chrematistics in three ways. First, it takes the long-run rather than the short-run view. Second, it considers costs and benefits to the whole community, not just to the parties to the transaction. Third, it focuses on concrete use value and the limited accumulation thereof, rather than on abstract exchange value and its impetus toward unlimited accumulation. Use value is concrete: it has a physical dimension and a need that can be objectively satisfied. Together, these features limit both the desirability and the possibility of accumulating use values beyond limit. By contrast, exchange value is totally abstract: it has no physical dimension or any naturally satiable need to limit its accumulation. Unlimited accumulation is the goal of the chrematist and is evidence for Aristotle of the unnaturalness of the activity. True wealth is limited by the satisfaction of the concrete need for which it was designed. For oikonomia, there is such a thing as enough. For chrematistics, more is always better.”
Chapter 8 From Individualism to Person-in-Community
Human Beings as Social
“People are constituted by their relationships. We come into being in and through relationships and have no identity apart from them. Our dependence on others is not simply for goods and services. How we think and feel, what we want and dislike, our aspirations and fears—in short, who we are— all come into being socially. To say this does not deny that every person is something more than simply a social product. People also have some freedom to constitute themselves. Personal responsibility is based on that freedom. But this transcending of relationships does not introduce something separable from the social relationships. It can be only a partial transcending of just those relationships, and it is the quality of those relationships that makes real freedom possible. We are not only members of societies, but what more we are also depends on the character of these societies. The social character of human existence is primary. The classical Homo economicus is a radical abstraction from social reality. In the real world the self-contained individual does not exist.”
“we want to retain the word community. The unity we want in our towns, states, and nations is not merely a legal and contractual one. Such arrangements belong to the pattern of external relations that allows people to keep one another at a distance, indifferent to one another's fate. We want a term that suggests that people are bound up with one another, sharing, despite differences, a common identity. We want to emphasize that people participate together in shaping the larger grouping of which all are members. The word community seems to carry these connotations better than "society."
“To have a communal character in this usage does not entail intimacy among all the participants. It does entail that membership in the society contributes to self-identification. We accept this requirement and add three others.
A society should not be called a community unless
(1) there is extensive participation by its members in the decisions by which its life is governed,
(2) the society as a whole takes responsibility for the members, and
(3) this responsibility includes respect for the diverse individuality of these members.”
Chapter 20 The Religious Vision
As the Enlightenment proceeded even the immediacy of God disappeared. Human beings were immediate to themselves individually, and that was enough. "God" was no longer seen in and through the creatures but was viewed as standing outside them and above them, known to exist only by reason. The creatures functioned quite autonomously without God. Then "God" became redundant and disappeared. The human soul alone was sacred. The rest was atoms in a void. For some, the soul, too, was a part of this meaningless physical world; nothing was sacred.
We, the authors of this book, are heirs through Protestantism of the prophetic tradition and also of the Enlightenment. We understand deeply from within both their purifying and their annihilating power. We do not deny their truth. But we repent of the one-sidedness with which they have functioned. We would combine that truth with another one, the truth powerfully affirmed in the biblical origins of the prophetic tradition that we are persons-in-community, that there is no genuinely human life when community is destroyed. We would affirm that all community is to be celebrated, as our Catholic sisters and brothers have long known.
This message, we think, is now the one of greatest urgency for the world. Hence in our book the emphasis lies here. We celebrate all human community as it struggles against the atomization inherent in Enlightenment thought and modern practice, especially economic practice. We rejoice in the extension of community among those of our time who have come to reaffirm community with all peoples, with other animals, with all living things, and with the whole earth. But in this celebration of community we do not want to lose what is valid in the prophetic tradition: the warning against idolatry. This concern forces us to distinguish ourselves from the biocentric and geocentric forms of biospheric thinking.
But whatever else God is, God is also the inclusive whole. The diversity of the innerconnected parts of the biosphere gives richness to the whole that is the divine life. The extinction of species and simplification of the ecosystems impoverishes God even when it does not threaten the capacity of the biosphere to sustain ongoing human life. Hence the danger of collapse of the life-system is by no means the only reason to oppose the decimation of tropical forests! Some people who do not affirm theism still affirm both the value of individuals and that of the whole system. We are in alliance with them, and we believe that many people intuitively share our conviction that both are important. Our point is that this affirmation can best be grounded in the view that there is a unified whole sensitive to all that transpires within it. We affirm this inclusive unity as the God of the prophetic tradition, and that this prophetic theism can lead beyond some of the costly conflict among those seeking to break out of the anthropocentric heritage which continues to bind the culture.
A fourth reason for recommending theism is that it provides a basis for understanding our relation to the future. Chapter 7 discussed the problem of discounting the future that troubles economic theory. Robert Heilbroner, an economist with unusual breadth of philosophical interest, has written perceptively about this issue with respect to its implications for attitudes toward "the human prospect." Heilbroner is himself committed to the long-term preservation of human life on this planet, and he hopes that others will join him in readiness to make sacrifices to this end. But he does not believe that any argument can be given in favor of this commitment. The voice of rationality, he says, speaks through "a distinguished Professor of political economy" at the University of London: "Suppose that, as a result of using up all the world's resources, human life did come to an end. So what? What is so desirable about an indefinite continuation of the human species, religious convictions apart? It may well be that nearly everybody who is already here on earth would be reluctant to die, and that everybody has an instinctive fear of death. But one must not confuse this with the notion that, in any meaningful sense, generations who are yet unborn can be said to be better off if they are born than if they are not" (Heilbroner 1980, p. 180).
We agree that "religious convictions apart," this may be "rational." But that only points to the importance of religious convictions. Rationality, apart from belief in God, may indeed dictate indifference to the yet unborn. Since they do not now exist, they have no wants to be respected. But rationality that includes a rational belief in God has quite different consequences. God is everlasting, and future lives are as important to God as present lives. To serve God cannot call for sacrifice of future lives for the sake of satisfying the extravagant appetites of the present. Believers in God know that the community to which they belong extends through time. One cannot discount a future that will be immediate to God. Belief in God grounds the ethical course that Heilbroner favors but does not know how to justify.”
Herman Daly and John Cobb’s critique of Robert Heilbroner comes to the issue. It exposes the paradox of denying whilst still requiring, even invoking, transcendent standards of truth and justice. Nietzsche exposed the emptiness of modern moral theories and claims which advanced notions of equality, justice, and fairness, without realising that their metaphysical grounds had disappeared with “the death of God.” Daly and Cobb’s critique exposes the paradox of the human capacity to reject the substantive reality of truth and goodness on the one hand and the sheer human incapacity to think, act, or speak as if those things were not real. There's a glitch there that ought to incite deeper reflection but seldom does. Those who are prepared to look deeper and carry on in the spirit of Herman Daly's work as a whole are likely to find that what began as an interest in practical affairs will lead in time to the recognition, and ultimately the contemplation, of the divine transcendent.
Remove God, and reason and humanity will soon follow.
The phrase “incurvatus in se” was (perhaps) coined by St. Augustine of Hippo. Incurvatus in se is a Latin phrase that means to be "turned/curved inward on oneself," describing a life lived "inward" for oneself rather than "outward" for God and others.
There is a need for a greater ‘something’ that draws each self out of itself into communion with something greater than any of us are, either alone or even together, a transcendent standard that draws each and all into a communion of souls. That is precisely what the modern world has lost as the result of ‘the death of God.’ The effects are now with us with division, fragmentation, and diremption eating away the common ground from under our feet. In the process in which each has become his or her own god, choosing the good as they see fit, society has become a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism in which individuals are driven by a self-interested search for a purely private good, rejecting all reference to the common good provided by the social and moral order, and rejecting most of all the transcendent common good which is God Himself. I affirm transcendent standards of truth and justice. To add, I would insist on a critique of political economy, one that identifies specific social forms and relations, and avoids politically neutral technical definitions of organic and inorganic growth and ‘natural capital’ to examine systemic, accumulative imperatives, indicating how these may be supplanted by new – and viable – social forms. Let’s see this alternative economic system that is functional in terms of economic incentives and moral motives, ensuring that agents in the system of needs turn up and put a shift in, without being ordered from above."
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