Dialogues
Seven Voices
Economy

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

Economy: What Went Wrong?

Christopher Lasch •

Neoclassical economic theory cannot explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempt to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Freud into the measurement of trivia. The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offers no miracle cures for social problems.

Thomas Berry •

Much of our trouble during these past two centuries has been caused by our limited, our microphase, modes of thought. We centred ourselves on the individual, on personal aggrandizement, on a competitive way of life, and on the nation, or the community of nations, as the guarantor of freedom to pursue these purposes. A sense of the planet Earth never entered into our minds. We paid little attention to the more comprehensive visions of reality. This was for the poets, the romanticists, the religious believers, the moral idealists. Now we begin to recognize that what is good in its microphase reality can be deadly in its macrophase development.

Hannah Arendt •

The frequent complaints we hear about the perversion of ends and means in modern society, about men becoming the servants of the machines they themselves invented and of being "adapted" to their requirements instead of using them as instruments for human needs and wants, have their roots in the factual situation of labouring.

In this situation, where production consists primarily in preparation for consumption, the very distinction between means and ends, so highly characteristic of the activities of homo faber, simply does not make sense, and the instruments which homo faber invented and with which he came to the help of the labour of the animal labourans therefore lose their instrumental character once they are used by it. Within the life process itself, of which labouring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have strength to labour or whether they labour in order to have the means of consumption.

Christopher Lasch •

The appearance in history of an escapist conception of "leisure" coincides with the organization of leisure as an extension of commodity production. The same forces that have organized the factory and the office have organized leisure as well, reducing it to an appendage of industry. Accordingly sport has come to be dominated not so much by an undue emphasis on winning as by the desperate urge to avoid defeat. Coaches, not quarterbacks, call the plays, and the managerial apparatus makes every effort to eliminate the risk and uncertainty that contribute so centrally to the ritual and dramatic success of any contest. When sports can no longer be played with appropriate abandon, they lose the capacity to raise the spirits of players and spectators, to transport them into a higher realm of existence. Prudence, caution, and calculation, so prominent in everyday life but so inimical to the spirit of games, come to shape sports as they shape everything else.

Thomas Berry •

Much of human folly is a consequence of neglecting this single bit of wisdom. A few hundred automobiles with good roads may be a great blessing. Yet when the number increases into the millions and hundreds of millions, the automobile is capable of destroying the higher forms of life on the entire planet. So with all human processes: undisciplined expansion and self-inflation lead only to destruction. Apart from the well-being of earth, no subordinate life system can survive. So it is with economics and politics: any particular activity must find its place within the larger pattern, or it will die and perhaps bring down the larger life system itself. This change of scale is one of the most significant aspects in the change of consciousness that is needed.

Christopher Lasch •

The American economy, having reached the point where its technology was capable of satisfying basic material needs, now relied on the creation of new consumer demands&emdash;on convincing people to buy goods for which they are unaware of any need until the "need" is forcibly brought to their attention by the mass media. Advertising, said Calvin Coolidge, "is the method by which the desire is created for better things." The attempt to "civilise" the masses has now given rise to a society dominated by appearances&emdash;the society of the spectacle.

In the period of primitive accumulation, capitalism subordinated being to having, the use value of commodities to their exchange value. Now it subordinates possession itself to appearance and measures exchange value as a commodity's capacity to confer prestige&emdash;the illusion of prosperity and well-being. "When economic necessity yields to the necessity for limitless economic development," writes Guy Debord, "the satisfaction of basic and generally recognized human needs gives way to an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs."

Hannah Arendt •

If we consider this loss of the faculty to distinguish clearly between means and ends in terms of human behaviour, we can say that the free disposition and use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the labouring body with its implement, the movement of labouring itself acting as the unifying force.

Labour but not work requires for best results a rhythmically ordered performance and, in so far as many labourers gang together, needs a rhythmic co-ordination of all individual movements. In this motion, the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred.

What dominates the labour process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of labouring is neither man's purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the labourers.

Labour implements are drawn into this rhythm until body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal labourans, it is no longer the body's movement that determines the implement's movement but the machine's movement which enforces the movements of the body.

The point is that nothing can be mechanized more easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the labour process, which in its turn corresponds to the equally automatic repetitive rhythm of the life process and its metabolism with nature. Precisely because the animal labourans does not use tools and instruments in order to build a world but in order to ease the labours of its own life process it has lived literally in a world of machines ever since the industrial revolution and the emancipation of labour replaced almost all hand tools with machines which in one way or another supplanted human labour power with the superior power of natural forces.

Thomas Berry •

The human sense of an all pervasive, numinous, or sacred power gave to life a deep security. It enabled us over a long period of time to establish ourselves within a realm of consciousness of high spiritual, social, and artistic development. This was the period when the divinities were born in human consciousness as expressions of those profound spiritual orientations that emerged from the earth process into our unconscious depths, then as symbols into our conscious mind, and finally into visible expression.

All that we have done since then has taken the same course. The divinities have been changed, the visible expression has been altered, but the ultimate source of power still remains hidden in the dynamics of the earth and in the obscure archetypal determinations in the unconscious depths of the human mind.

Christopher Lasch •

According to the myth of capitalist enterprise, thrift and industry held the key to material success and spiritual fulfilment...The self-made man, archetypical embodiment of the American dream, owed his advancement to habits of industry, sobriety, moderation, self discipline, and avoidance of debt. He lived for the future, shunning self-indulgence in favour of patient, painstaking accumulation and as long as the collective prospect looked on the whole so bright, he found in the deferral of gratification not only his principal gratification but an abundant source of profits. In an expanding economy, the value of investments could be expected to multiply with time, as the spokesman for self-help, for all their celebration of work as its own reward, seldom neglected to point out.

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