The Ethics of the Dust
by Chris on Jul.01, 2009, under economics, philosophy, politics, religion, society
Since this blog was first posted the news has had it that the government is discussing the value of the natural world in the UK (open spaces, parkland, meadows, forests, all the countryside one assumes) in directly monetary terms. How much is having a field near your house worth? £3,000? £12,000? Clearly we still need to recall what Ruskin had to say about this ‘economic’ mentality. If our measure of value is as crudely quantitative as this, the spirit of nihilism is well and truly with us. (June 2011)
I’ve been re-reading some Ruskin this week, while I perspired on the tube to work: Unto This Last. Quite a book for its day (1860), and for our day too, given his polemic against the idiocy of the classical economists, their assumptions about ‘rational man’, and the supposed primacy of narrow self interest in the market and in society generally (=‘greed is good’). It was a controversial work, and not at all well received by some of his target audience – the Victorian Bourgeoisie. (For a bit more on what Ruskin has to say in this book , see the post I re-blogged from Jonathan Glancy on Unto this Last). Reading Ruskin again, I was impressed by another aspect of his polemic.
I was struck again by the sense that with Ruskin there is an assumption that his audience shares with him a grounding in Christian teaching, particularly the New Testament. Its language and imagery pervades the book (including the title). Of course it’s a Victorian, protestant version and not one that everyone, even at that date, was taking literally. Ruskin certainly wasn’t: he had moved well away by then from the evangelical creed in which he had been raised. This was due to a number of reasons, but Darwin’s Origin of Species and the accumulating evidence of the great age of the earth played a large part in making the religion of his parents unacceptably simple minded and narrow. Still, when Ruskin wants to talk about justice, or love, or even the dismal science of economics, he turns to the Bible.
Which leaves me with this thought. What shared language do we have now, when we want to talk about such matters? I’m very far from thinking that no God = no morality, and I’m also alive to the evil Christians have sometimes done. I just wonder whether, when you erase a tradition and a shared discourse in which love and justice find a natural place, you find much left standing. What’s left? economics? evolutionary psychology?
Nietzsche makes a remark somewhere, apropos George Eliot, that the English, having killed their God, were still proceeding as if nothing had changed, that nothing would change in their moral universe. I think he added that they would wake up to what had been lost ‘sometime in the next century’ (i.e. the 20th century). Into the moral vacuum of the late 20th century rushed the promotion of private advantage over the public good. It spoke the language of Gordon Gekko and Milton Friedman and it colonised almost every area of public life. Now we live with the results.
This seems to me to be a political and social question, not just one for private moral reflection. Do Darwin, Dennet and Dawkins lead to market fundamentalism? I ask this because it’s a naive piece of liberal ideology to hold that ‘morality’ is somehow just for the private life, with a neutral state acting as a policeman and the market ensuring the efficient impersonal distribution of goods. The state, for them, has a greater or lesser role in supplying a safety net for the injured, or acting as an equal opportunities enabler for the less fortunate; it has no substantive vision of the good life that would go beyond this. That’s the point of liberalism.
But if the only driver for social change lies in capitalism itself, then only the self interest of persons (increasingly imagined as consumers) will stand against the worst that the market can do to jobs, families, and lives. Liberals were keen to finish off socialism (with its Judeo-Christian and Marxist heritage); keen to launch into culture wars against all that would stand against the logic of the individual and the market. But what have they got to show in its stead? The selfish gene?
We need to recover the language, and practice of public justice, and social solidarity. The promotion of the Good Life that lies beyond the horizons of the dismal science of economics. This is a public thing: the res publica . And it’s a matter for all of us, as citizens, not mere consumers. So perhaps we need more, not less, of the wisdom of Solomon, the ethic of the New Testament, the polemics of Ruskin and the analysis of Marx. Otherwise what’s left? Sir Alan Sugar? Sir Fred Goodwin? I’m reminded of another of Ruskin’s titles: The Ethics of the Dust
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July 19th, 2009 on 11:32 am
Chris, thanks for this great post. Our current dire economic climate highlights the stark dangers of rampant liberal economics rupturing any sense of another venerable and somewhat forgotten term commonwealth. The irony being that the grotesque inequality that has emerged between the majority and our new “masters of the universe” is defended as being an inevitable result of encouraging and retaining “talent” in the banking and business worlds. As I was told recently; what’s the alternative to offering impressive incentives and rewards? State control, socialism and the denial of the right to private property? All of this reminded me of G.K Chesterton’s words written during an Edwardian epoch that we seem to be replicating in all its most malign aspects, where he discusses the danger of monopoly capitalism to our commonwealth “One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property because they are enemies of their own limitations. They do not want their own land; but other people’s. . . It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.”
Chesterton, G. K. (1910) What’s wrong with the World? p48. Available from: http://books.google.com/
Accessed 17.07.09
August 2nd, 2009 on 9:11 am
Good points, Mark! thanks for the comment. Have you read GKC’s ‘Orthodoxy’? it’s quite a book.