Howard Richards
Can the United States be Transformed? Hopeful Answers from Barack Obama and Riane Eisler
“Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” --St. Paul the Apostle, quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. (King 1981, p. 21)
Since it is a premise of my title that the United States needs to be transformed, I will have to explain what sort of transformation I have in mind and why I think one is needed. “Transformation” is in any case a relative matter; there can be more or less of it and more and less need for it. While I do not deny that the nation might continue to exist without transforming itself, I believe that none of its principal problems will be solved unless there is a sea-change, or culture-shift (to use two terms I take to be equivalent to “transformation.”) To employ yet a third equivalent: more than new policies we need new “paradigms.” I call the paradigms we need “ethical” and sometimes “posteconomic.” Neither rebates for taxpayers, stricter auto emission standards, government backing for new green industries, crackdowns on tax loopholes and havens, aid to save homeowners from foreclosure, withdrawal from Iraq, nor any number of other separate measures will turn the tide. The “tide” (another term I will explain) can only be turned with guidance from more comprehensive and open-minded thinking, from thinking at a higher stage of collective moral development (Habermas 1995) (to use fourth and fifth equivalents to “transformed”). To say what I take to be the same thing in yet a sixth way: The basic problems of the United States and the world are structural. They can only be solved by transforming the basic structure to produce a more functional structure.
These are heavy words, freighted with long and controversial histories, capable of many uses and abuses, and even though I will try as hard as I can to make myself understood, I am not confident as I combine words to make sentences and paragraphs that I will succeed in making my ideas clear. I wish it were the case that as an American I were a member of a linguistic community which shares a set of meanings empowering us to communicate with one another, and through communication to cooperate with one another to solve our common problems, and to sympathize with each other to help solve each other’s problems; as our distant ancestors the first humans communicated, cooperated, and sympathized even before there were properly articulated languages, using sounds to signal each other in hunts and flights, and thereby winning through culture an ecological niche in which we could survive as a species among other animals physically stronger than ourselves. Unfortunately, it is not the case. Language has long been a battleground in which words, and truth itself as well as all other ideals, have been weapons used to conquer, humiliate, deceive, confuse, and divide. (Barthes 1971, Foucault 1971) We are a fragmented nation in a fragmented world, and most of us, to some extent all of us, are fragmented personalities. I do not expect to be understood. On the other hand, Barack Obama´s successful campaign for the Democratic nomination, and probably successful campaign for the presidency; and Riane Eisler´s best-selling new book The Real Wealth of Nations following earlier successful books including The Chalice and the Blade show that they are being understood. I find myself asking myself whether I can contribute to a transformation that is already underway, taking place in many minds in many cities and towns and rural districts, finding evidence for believing there might be a transformation under way not just in the fact that these two inspiring individuals give speeches and write books, but in the fact that they are reaching audiences apparently ready and eager to hear them.
This is an exercise in discernment. Clearly Barack has attracted votes and donations, while Riane has written books people read. It is unfortunately also all to clear that one of them can be regarded not as a thinker with important ideas but as just another smooth-talking politician who has already sold out to the Israel lobby and who will over time break all his promises one by one: while the other of them can be written off as a naïve idealist. I propose first to specify at considerable length what exactly the “tide” is that needs to be turned before examining the thinking of Barack and Riane. I am encouraged by Barack´s campaign and Riane´s book because they are evidence that certain transformative ideas may now be mainstream or capable of becoming mainstream, including ideas that might eventually change the dynamics that drive American militarism. I am aware that Barack is advocating expanding the war in Afghanistan, and I do not want to make excuses for that stand or any other, nor do I want to convince anybody to vote for him, nor do I deny that there are good reasons not to vote for him. I am interested in his campaign as evidence that some of the ideas the American public is ready to hear are growth points. If transformation is possible at all, it will be made possible by finding positive ideas and practices to build on. It will not be accomplished simply by electing Barack, if indeed electing Barack is desirable at all, and (if I may engage in a small fantasy) by Barack naming Riane as his White House chief of staff. It will require the best efforts of all of us. (See Richards and Swanger forthcoming) I single out Barack and Riane as two cultural creatives I know or know about, among hundreds of others I also know or know about, and among thousands which surely exist unknown to me, also for another reason: because they are sponsoring conversations anybody can easily join. (www.barackobama.com and www.partnershipway.org)
“Tide” as an Image for Cause
I have used the word “tide” and the expression “turn the tide” to evoke an image of a strong underlying force that asserts itself as a general trend in the midst of innumerable events. The waves go in and out. Many other movements of water, wind, and sand come and go. It is not immediately obvious to someone standing on the beach gazing at the water that there is a general trend produced by a strong underlying force. Yet in a sense one sees the tide coming in or going out even though it may take some time and some understanding to see it as a tide.
I am using “the tide” as an image of a big effect with a big cause. I take what is called a “critical realist” view of social science, according to which it is possible to speak of causes of social phenomena and of their general trends. While the tide image is an imperfect stand-in for the abstract concept, “causes of major social trends,” it has the advantage that it taps the widespread belief (and/or feeling) that there is a growing and somewhat overwhelming crisis—a financial crisis, an energy crisis, increasingly a food crisis, as well as several other crises; and at the same time there is a decline in the power of the United States to bend the rest of the world to its will. By lumping these things all together in one watery image, it suggests, correctly in my opinion, that this multifaceted growing crisis and this accelerating decline have something to do with each other. It also suggests that all of this might be scientifically understood, if one could find the formula for it, as Newton found the formula for the tides.
The general cause I want to introduce using the tide image as its introduction is the polysemic (many-meaninged) and indispensable entity (an entity that is both an idea and a reality that justifies having the idea) called “culture.” Culture is the ecological niche of the human species. When we speak of “cultures” we are speaking of the upbringing of children, of the way a human group adapts to and more or less succeeds in coping with its environment, and of patterns of social relationships. Cultural structures produce and reproduce social structures (Jürgen Habermas writes of “symbolic structures.”) They (the cultures and the societies –here I do not draw a sharp line between the two, as if culture were one thing and society another, but rather use one term or the other as seems suited to the context) are to some considerable extent constituted by authoritative standards for guiding conduct, briefly named as “rules” or “norms;” which will always be found, sometimes found on the surface and sometimes found after a little digging, to rely for their efficacy on respect for the sacred.
(I hope the reader is not trying to parse the entire above paragraph in terms of analogies with tides. When I try to mix “ecological niche” and “norms” with tides all I get is confusion. I hope the image of “tide” served its purpose and can be laid down as one lays down a hammer or a saw when one is done with it and is ready to use another tool, although I will be picking up “tide” again in a few minutes.)
I am saying together with other social scientists and philosophers more or less associated with critical realism that social rules, functioning not in isolation but together with physical facts and as elements of interconnected cultural structures, are causes. They can be used to explain human behavior and historical trends.
Among the rules some can be called “basic.” The basic cultural structures (“basic rules” to be brief and to omit some nuances) govern meeting the basic necessities of life, such as food. This way of talking fits in with the way anthropologists talk when they describe a culture as, for example, “pastoral,” meaning that the people meet their basic needs by herding animals. Other cultures might do “fishing” or “slash and burn agriculture,” or like the Hopis do settled agriculture depending mostly on maize. Once one knows how people meet their basic needs, one has a clue for understanding and explaining other aspects of their way of life.
Notice that I am outlining a “feminine,” approach to social science, which emphasizes the nurturing of life, the upbringing of children, the cultivation of crops, the raising of animals, etc.; as opposed to the “neocon” approaches of thinkers like Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt who emphasize the role of military violence in history. My version of realism can also be contrasted with the cultural relativism of thinkers like Samuel Huntington (a relativism which for Huntington leads to “clash”) who hold that cultures are self-justifying, acknowledging no authority higher than whatever the social norms happen to be. (Huntington 1996) In contrast, John Dewey and I and many others who agree with us think it legitimate to evaluate the performance of cultures in terms of how well (I think Riane would add “how gracefully”) they meet human needs in harmony with the natural environment. (Westbrook 19919
If one knows what the basic rules of a culture are, and how they organize making life possible: then one can combine deductions from what one would expect given that the cultural structures are what they are with inductions from observation to produce a social science. This is what the authors of the classic texts of the social sciences have mainly done. (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, John Maynard Keynes, Ludwig von Mises, Claude Levi-Strauss, even Pierre Bourdieu when he is not writing about Algerian peasants, Karl Popper, Milton Friedman, and now Anthony Giddens and Thomas Friedman, among many others.) Bernard Lonergan and Joseph Schumpeter have shown how deduction and induction interact in the construction of a science, rather like a pair of scissors in which both the upper blade (deduction) and the lower blade (induction) are necessary to cut. Lonergan illustrates this interaction in detail in the history of physics, while Schumpeter illustrates it in detail in the history of economics. (Lonergan 1957, Schumpeter 1954) What I am suggesting is that in the social sciences for the most part the upper blade (deduction) has not been human nature as it is discovered by anthropology and biology, but rather the juridical subject as it has been socially constructed by a particular cultural tradition.
Most social science outside of anthropology has been about one culture. Most of the classics have been written by European men in the 19th and early 20th centuries. What they have mostly tried to describe and explain, sometimes by contrast with other times and places, has been their own culture, which is still for the most part our culture. It is a culture whose basic rules take the form of what Immanuel Kant called Rechtslehre, that is to say ethics, formal legal codes, and the moral intuitions of everyday life tightly combined. (Kant 1797) It is the culture of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the modern world-system. (Wallerstein goes on to fault the social sciences for being part and parcel of the system and its defects.) (Wallerstein 1995) Fernand Braudel and many others call the system “capitalism” (in a sense of the term broader than Marx’s, which emphasizes modern market relationships more than any particular relations of production). It is a system in which people meet basic needs by grocery shopping.
In order to identify some “tides” of the times we live in, which shape our everyday realities and which are reflected in the social sciences that study them, as a preface to elaborating some meanings of “transformation;” and as a preface to appreciating some contributions to transformation made by Barack Obama and Riane Eisler I will sketch at considerable length an outline of the history of a particular culture, ours. It is a particular culture which has now become, as Immanuel Wallerstein with pardonable exaggeration, the one and only object of study of the social sciences, the global economy.
A Sketch of the History of the Cultural Structures that Dominate Us
One can do history in many ways, depending partly on where one locates the causal powers that move events. One can write of the rising and falling of empires and nations. One can write a Whig history of the gradual but sure triumph of liberal institutions. One can write an intellectual history of scientific discoveries and inventions. One can write of the daily life of the toiling masses. One can recount battles and wars. One can write a history of consciousness, which will turn out to be in large part a history of religion. Like Jared Diamond one can write eco-history, relating physical facts to social facts. One can like R.R, Palmer write an administrative history explaining how some nations succeed in administering such large territories that they become able to dominate smaller nations. Like Arnold Toynbee one could (perhaps updating what he has already done) write a history of challenge and response. Like Wallerstein and Braudel one could write of long-distance trade. One could like Michel Foucault write histories of creeping normalization. One could write a history of gender and of patriarchy, which would to a large extent be a history of violence and submission. Like Rosa Luxembourg one could write a history of capital accumulation, or like Maria Mies one could combine such a history with gender history….
True to my attribution of causal powers to rules, and especially attributing causal powers to those rules that constitute basic structures, I will do history by sketching the origins of the basic cultural structures of the modern world. Of the rules of our world. Of the rules that constitute markets. I will distinguish four key moments of the ethical construction of the legal and ethical framework we now live in: early Rome about 750-350 BC when our legal tradition began; under the Empire after about 100 AD when it was simplified and generalized to create the jus gentium, the basis of the modern laws of commerce; early modern times about 1400-1800 AD when in the phrase of Karl Polanyi economic relations were “disembedded” from social relations generally and became an independent dominating force (Polanyi 1944); and in our own times about 1970-1980 AD when the rise of social democracy after World War II and the effervescence of the 1960s ended and were replaced by today´s neoliberal tide. (Fredric Jameson dates the end of the 1960s and the beginning of neoliberalism precisely on September 11, 1973, the day when General Augusto Pinochet backed by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon destroyed Chilean democracy in a bloody coup d ´etat.)
I agree with those who hold that the genealogy of the laws of commerce that now govern the global economy begins in ancient Rome, finding that the distinctive contributions of the British common law and other smaller legal traditions either are themselves currents within the Roman Law mainstream or are eddies which make no substantial difference to it.
In early Rome, at the beginning of its first four centuries (approximately 750-350 B.C.), land was “…divided among heads of families according to the necessities of the agricultural economy.” (Iglesias 1958 p. 42). The Roman city-state was composed of gentes (whose further evolution produced the classical 35 tribes of Rome) , each of which was a grouping together of familiae. (Id. p. 12) The chief and sovereign of a familia was a paterfamilias, who was expected to rule its persons and things not for personal gain but as a patrimony to be maintained intact and passed on to the next generation. (Id. p. 247) “The paterfamilias is diligent, that is to say religiosus. There exists a kind of religio which the paterfamilias scrupulously complies with. It is in this religio that there operates the wise and sacred will of the maiores [elders], transmitted from generation to generation.” (Id. p. 533) The chief of a gens was a pater gentis. Whatever their disadvantages –and they were many when compared to modern institutions and when compared to the still older patterns of human life believed to have existed before patriarchy (Eisler 1987) -- the most ancient Roman mores had the advantage of prescribing that everybody was included. There could be no class of landless laborers because each individual was part of a family and each family had access to land. This feature of Rome’s most ancient customs was not, of course, peculiar to Rome, but rather typical of indigenous peoples the world over. (e.g. Tonnies 1887) Already, however, at the beginning of the Republic (510 B.C.) exclusions had begun which would fuel the social struggles that wracked Rome for nearly a thousand years until its fall: there appeared plebeians (people who belonged to no gens) and proletarians (people who had no property). (Id. pp. 15-16)
“Paterfamilias appelatur qui in domo dominium habet.” (Digest, book 50: 16, 195, 2). (“The one who has dominion over the house is called the paterfamilias.”) This is a definition of paterfamilias. ”That which defines the familia, the familia proprio iure, is the submission of all of its members to the same authority –manus, potestas--, the same chief, who is the lord and sovereign of the family, and not the ‘father of the family.’” (Iglesias 1958 pp. 529-30) Similarly, Max Műller writes, “In ancient times, when most wars were carried on, not to maintain the political equilibrium of Asia or Europe, but to take possession of good pasture, or to appropriate large herds of cattle, the hurdles grew naturally into the walls of fortresses, the hedges became strongholds, and those who lived behind the same walls were called a gotra, a family, a tribe, a race.” (Műller 1909, p. 37). The head of the family was the lord, the strong protector. (Id. p. 49) It was not until late in its evolution that Roman Law defined a familia as people related by blood. Originally the familia was what the paterfamilias ruled. It included persons and things: women, slaves, animals, and land. The “family” was a household that was to a large extent economically self-sufficient. (This fact is reflected in the etymology of “economics,” which is derived from the Greek oikos nomos, “the rule of the household.”) The Digest’s definition of paterfamilias sheds light on that Roman concept of property which has become our concept; that has become our social structure; that came to be the prevailing concept in pre-modern Europe and then came to be the prevailing concept of how persons relate to things on a global scale as the European world-system became the modern world-system. It was dominium. It is dominium. The idea of “property” was in early Rome and under the Republic expressed as “dominus.” It was what the paterfamilias dominated. Originally the most legitimate dominium was acquired by seizing things from the enemy in war. (Iglesias 1958 p. 266 citing Vogel 1948) (The Latin source of our word “property” i.e. proprietas, did not come into general use until the beginning of the Empire, that is to say until the reign of Augustus beginning in 27 B.C.; and when proprietas did come into general use it was defined in terms of dominus. (Iglesias 1958, p. 249))
A word with a meaning similar to dominium was mancipium, from manus, the Latin word for hand. All the persons in the household were under the hand of its paterfamilias. (Iglesias 1958 p. 247) They were also said to be in potestas, under his power. Only the paterfamilias was a juridical subject capable of having legal rights recognized by public magistrates. Custom and religion organized human life within the household, but the for the most part law was not about that. Only occasionally did law concern itself with religious matters. In its early days and decreasingly under the Republic it did draw on custom as a source of authority, until under the Empire the decrees of the Emperor eclipsed custom as a source of public law, while commercial pacts known as stipulatio increasingly became a source of private law. In its beginnings Roman Law was not about relationships within households but about relationships between one household and another. It was about what the magistrate (frequently the praetor) would enforce with the backing of public arms when one paterfamilias complained of another. It was about peace in a limited sense of the word. It was about avoiding mini-warfare between the mini-king of one mini-state and another mini-king of another mini-state. It was about settling disputes without civil wars that would have divided Rome against itself, and therefore made it vulnerable to enemy attack. What a paterfamilias did with his children, his slaves, and his women; as well as what he did with his animals and his other possessions within his own household; was governed by social norms and expectations, but not by law.
To become a juridical subject, a person under the mancipium of a paterfamilias had to be emancipated. This Roman origin of western traditions has influenced the shape of successive movements for emancipation. It has given concrete meaning to ideals of liberty and freedom. To be emancipated is to become, like a paterfamilias, a sovereign individual who is not someone else’s property but who is instead capable of being an owner of property. It is to have rights and to be able to appeal to the law for the enforcement of one’s rights. The tendency over the centuries has been for first adult male children, and then slaves, and then women to become emancipated. Today there is a tendency for even minor children to become emancipated, as public agencies intervene in families to protect children’s rights. Generally in western countries children are emancipated at the age of eighteen. (Over time Roman Law itself came to recognize as free of mancipium and having the status of a paterfamilias a male who in fact had no household, but who was legally eligible to establish one if he should choose to do so. It also came to recognize intermediate stages in which an adult son, and in some respects a woman, could, without being a complete legal subject nonetheless enjoy certain legal capacities.) (e.g. Iglesias 1958, pp. 137-157)
It is a remarkable fact that Roman Law became a system. Moreover, after its revival and “reception” in modern Europe to serve the needs of nascent capitalism; from the 17th century forward; it gave rise to what purported and still purports today to be a “science” of law. Customs, agreements, the deliberations of popular assemblies (such as the concilium plebis), the decisions of the Roman Senate, the edicts of magistrates, and the decrees of Emperors, all were brought together in such a way that posterity inherited form Rome a coherent legal framework, which could serve, and has served, as the historical predecessor of the normative structure of what Immanuel Wallerstein names as the modern world-system. The agents who welded the sources together were neither the governors nor the governed. Roman Law became a system not because of the work of Rome’s officials and rulers, the governors; and not because of the collective action of its citizens and inhabitants, the governed; but instead because of the activity of a specialized educated class, the iuris prudentes. (Iglesias 1958 pp. 54-58). It is true that when the classical age of Rome was already history, the Byzantine emperor at Constantinople, Justinian, ordered the compilation of the Institutes (533 A.D.), the Digest, and the other books that later came to be regarded as comprising the Corpus Juris Civilis. But Justinian did not decree the law. Justinian decreed that a group of jurists would compile and codify the law. The jurists were iuris prudentes who took as their sources the books that had been written by earlier iuris prudentes. The iuris prudens is an interpreter of the law, an expert on legal matters. During the classical period when the principles of Roman Law were formulated (27 B.C. to 235 A.D.) providing legal counsel was a private liberal profession, practiced by experts who without holding public office advised litigants and others who wanted to know what the law was.
I would offer the history of Roman Law as evidence that cultural structures are active forces in history. It nuances Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous assertion that the law is 9/10 history and 1/10 logic. Roman Law’s history is logic. This is not to say that there is only one logic, or only one standard of rationality; it is to say that clearly defined concepts knitted together to form a coherent system tend to flourish over time partly –in any given case certainly not entirely—just because they are clear and are coherently systematized. Logical organization makes legal norms more useful. It makes them easier to teach. It makes the law more predictable, and therefore makes it easier for people to plan ahead knowing the legal consequences of their actions. When the law works on the whole to keep the rich rich and the poor poor –as Roman Law certainly did—its logical coherence makes it easier to intimidate the poor verbally, thus diminishing the need to intimidate them physically. A lucid rational exposition of the laws governing dominium, slavery, and the status of women makes it easier to forget and harder to remember that their origin and cause is violence. For these and other reasons, constitutive rules consciously organized are historical causes with historical effects.
The classical jurist Ulpian (died 228) carried systematization so far that he regarded the whole of law as derived from three principles, as nearly 15 centuries later Sir Isaac Newton would derive the whole of mechanics from three laws of motion. Ulpian, like Newton, proposed three principles to characterize and synthesize a vast array of data; unlike Newton, he treated the opinions of authorities as data. Ulpian was followed by the compilers working for Justinian, who put at the head of the Institutes, which was intended as an introduction to law for beginning students, the same three principles. Iuris praecepta sunt haec: honeste vivere, alterum non laedere, suum cuique tribuere. (Digest book 1; 1, 10, 1. Institutes 1) “The principles of jurisprudence are these: live honorably, do not harm others, to each his own.” The first principle honeste vivere, live honorably, shows ius (law) to be a continuation of mores and rooted in mores; it enjoins virtu (from vir, the Roman word for man, the root of the English words “virile” and “virility” as well as “virtue”), the conduct expected of a good man. The second principle alterum non laedere, do not injure the other, shows that although law is rooted in mores it demands less: although customary norms may prescribe helping others, the law only forbids harming others. Leave them alone and do not hurt them. The praetor’s aim is to keep the peace; he will intervene in fights but he will not insure that everyone cooperates to till the fields and bake the bread. The latter functions belong to the familia, not to the res publica. They belong more to slaves and women than to men. The third principle suum cuique, to each his own, commits the law to confirming existing property rights, as they have been established by conquest, maintained by inheritance, and modified by commerce. That Roman Law favored a limited form of social peace based on respect for the status quo is confirmed by Ulpian’s definition of justice, which was, like his three principles, endorsed and carried forward in Justinian’s Institutes: constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi. (Ibid.) Justice is the constant and perpetual will to give to each what the law defines as his. The administration of justice so defined represented a Roman achievement that should not be underestimated. Logic won out over constant internecine warfare. It limited the tendencies of Romans to fight among themselves, and thus helped them to live more happily and to conquer a vast empire.
Contracts, the aspect of law most constitutive of today´s global economy are not mentioned explicitly in any of Ulpian’s three fundamental postulates. To be sure, nearly 15 centuries later Samuel Pufendorf coined a maxim expressing the first principle of contract law, pacta sunt servanda (pacts are “served,” i.e. honored, complied with). Pufendorf worked in and contributed to the Roman Law tradition; his maxim might be added as a fourth postulate of the system, one that was implicit in Ulpian’s day, remained implicit in Justinian’s day, and became explicit in Pufendorf’s day.
The delayed development of contract law might be explained two ways. Firstly, the delayed development of the law of contract can be explained by observing that the practice of making contracts developed slowly in Rome. Since discourse follows practice; since even though the two are inextricably mixed in discursive practices the practical aspect tends to drive the discursive aspect; since –as the legal historian Sir Henry Maine showed in Ancient Law (Maine 1861)—it is normal for practice to change faster than language, so that for a time the new substance parades under the same form, the new wine remaining in the old bottles; since –as the same writer shows in the same book—the transition from a society where a person’s activities are mainly determined by his social role (i.e. his status) to a society where a person’s activities are mainly determined by markets (i.e. by contracts) is the work of centuries, not of years; it is to be expected that doing business by contract, which evolved slowly in Rome in practice, would evolve even more slowly in theory. “Even as late as the reign of Justinian, the Roman jurists did not conceive of the performance of promises as a matter of urgent social necessity.” (Hyland 1994 p. 413) The Romans did not at first use the consensual contract—what for us is the normal contract, which consists of a meeting of the minds leading to the drafting of an agreement that expresses the joint will of the parties. Instead they often used what they called a stipulatio. (Iglesias 1958 p. 441ff) A stipulatio was a ceremonial performance in which the parties engaged in asking and answering a standard set of questions and answers. Many things we do routinely by contract –buying or selling a house, renting a farm, hiring or being hired, chartering a boat …-- they did by stipulatio. There remain remnants of the stipulatio today in our European and Europeanized successor states of the Roman Empire; for example at that point in a marriage ceremony when the preacher asks standard questions and the bride and groom answer “I do.” There are similar echoes of the ancient past in Roman Catholicism, for example in that part of the sacrament of first communion when the priest asks a series of questions beginning with, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works and all his pomps?” The gradual decline of stipulatio and other early practices, and the rise of the consensual contract, that is to say of contract in its modern form, accompanied the growth of the Empire and the growth of commerce. “Consensual contracts are those whose validity does not require the observance of a standard form …. Purchase and sale, lease, forming a partnership, and giving a power of attorney fall in the category of consensual contracts, ruled by the principle of good faith, free of formal requirements, and available to foreigners.” (Iglesias 1958 p. 415) In discussing the emergence of contracts as we know them Iglesias refers to the jus gentium or law of nature, a school of thought that proposed to distill from Roman Law and from what it took to be natural reason a common law applicable to everybody whether Roman or non-Roman; so that anybody, regardless of religion or nation, could engage in trade with anybody else. “Born in the school of the jus gentium, at the time of the expansion of Rome, they [consensual contracts] spoke to the new necessities of world commerce.” (Ibid.)
Secondly, the delay in seeing contract as a fundamental concept of the system can be explained by saying it was really not a fundamental concept of the system after all. It is a derived concept, and as such it was an important part of the Roman law of obligations. ( Iglesias 1958 pp. 401-69) This second explanation is consistent with the first if one posits that the ancient Romans had all the premises from which pacta sunt servanda follows. Over a thousand years after Justinian, the growing commercial importance of contracts led European jurists to make the consensual contract even more central than it had been in the last days of Rome. The work the jus gentium began was interrupted for a thousand years during the Middle Ages and then completed in early modern times. If pacta sunt servanda could be ranked since the 17th century as a fourth fundamental postulate of the system, alongside Ulpian’s three, it is not because jurists discovered something new in the 17th century; it is because the historical process Karl Polanyi describes as the disembedding of market relationships from social relationships had made contract the glue of glues, the social glue that more than any other social glue was responsible for holding society together. But Ulpian and Justinian were right to treat it as a corollary of first principles, not as a first principle. Conceptually contract law is like Sir Isaac Newton’s parallelogram law. It is not one of the three laws of motion from which mechanics can be deduced; it is rather their first and perhaps most important corollary. (Newton’s parallelogram law states that the resultant of two combined vector forces can be calculated by drawing a diagram in which the two forces are depicted moving outward from a single point, the length of their corresponding line segments showing their magnitude, the angles the lines make with the axis showing their direction; completing a parallelogram by drawing two more lines parallel to the first two; and then drawing a third line segment starting from the same point and through the middle of the parallelogram as its diagonal. The diagonal graphs the resultant vector force.)
As Newton could derive his first corollary, the parallelogram law, from his three laws of motion, somewhat similarly the concept of contract, as it developed in the jus gentium and later in modern European law, can be regarded as a logical outgrowth of the principles of early Roman Law. It follows from the idea of independent juridical subjects in principle not bound by anything but their own wills, who can together create obligation by an act of their mutual will.
Early Modern Times
With a few exceptions (such as Michel Foucault who dates notre modernité as starting after the French Revolution) scholars think of our modern world-system as taking shape approximately in the years 1400 – 1800. I will briefly list nineteen points concerning its then emerging basic cultural structures:
1. In the territories Rome had governed, its law survived the fall of its Empire, not only in the Byzantine East but also in the medieval West, not only on the continent but also in Britain.
2. Most of Europe officially received Roman law and fashioned from it a modern jurisprudence that was part and parcel of the modern economy under construction during the same time period.
3. The principal institutions of Europe were formed under monarchies. Democracy came later.
4. The monarchs of Europe ruled by and under law. Roman legal principles were a normative framework limiting the powers of the state.
5. Later, when the sovereign people replaced the sovereign monarch, the new sovereign was also a constitutional ruler, who accepted the principles of private law, notably those of property and contract, as juridical and moral givens.
6. The early modern philosophers articulated ethics and politics as normative frameworks parallel and complementary to law.
7. Immanuel Kant, for example, in his Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) illustrates his ethical theory with only one example of a strict duty to others, the duty not to incur a debt without intending to pay it (cf. pacta sunt servanda). Late in the book he remarks that he could just as well have chosen as his illustration the duty to respect the property of others (cf. suum cuique) or the duty to respect other people´s freedom (cf. honeste vivare).
8. (Kant explicitly makes the principles of Ulpian eternal and universal (Kant 1797, pp. 314-5))
9. Other early modern European thinkers (Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau) explicitly made contract (cf. pacta sunt servanda) the basis of political obligation, imagining that society had been created by an original social contract.
10. Large populations came to depend on markets to obtain food. Selling something to get money became a necessity of life.
11. The historical conditions of the possibility of unemployment were established, i.e. a wage earning class composed of people who needed to sell their labor power and sometimes did not find employers willing and able to buy it.
12. The shaping of the European system, then on its way to becoming the world-system, was part and parcel of the conquest by Europe of the rest of the world.
13. The conquered peoples were compelled to accept European legal reasoning, sometimes by fraud, as when native Americans who had no comprehension of Roman Law concepts of contract “sold” Manhattan Island to the Dutch for a few trinkets ….
14. … more often by force, as when in South Africa tribal peoples were forced to sell their labor for wages in the mines in order to pay a money tax that had been levied on them.
15. (My friend Catherine Hoppers who teaches at the University of Pretoria once said to me, “Europeans never remember that Africa was incorporated into the global economy by violence. Africans never forget.”)
16. One of the bitter lessons the defeated peoples of the world learned from their European conquerors was that tribal or community ownership of land was legally impossible.
17. Perhaps the most bitter lesson was that each juridical subject is in principle alone. The bitter point of contract conceived as the general form of social relationships is that where there is no contract there is no obligation of mutual aid. Older forms of social relationship, the normal ones for the human species, depend on reciprocity and gift-giving. (Gouldner 1960, Malinowski 1922, Mauss 1925, Vaughan 2006, www.gift-economy.com )
18. (This bitter point is expressed in the Argentine national epic Martin Fierro when the main character exclaims, “What kind of world is this where everybody demands to be addressed as señor, and nobody takes care of you?”)
19. I will not try to add up every plus and subtract every minus of modernity. At this point trying to decide rationally whether modernity is on the whole good or bad is a low priority task compared to high priority tasks like the ones aptly described by Mahatma Gandhi with this striking image: “…with the rest of the world India finds itself in the deadly coil of the mercantile cobra… It will take all the resources of all her best Brahmins to unwind that coil.” (Gandhi 1924, p. 316)
The Decline of Social Democracy in Our Times
My thesis (and that of my co-author Joanna Swanger, Richards and Swanger 2006) is that social democracy declined in the decade 1970-1980 mainly because it was incompatible with the basic cultural structures of the modern world. Any attempt to revive its ideals must therefore be transformative. It must transform a basic normative (legal and ethical) framework that effectively prohibits the construction of a caring economy.
The modern world-system has from its beginnings been resisted and contested by its victims. Modifying it to make it work for the benefit of everybody reached a high point in the Scandinavian social democracies in the decades immediately following World War II. Through the United Nations the Scandinavian high point came to define the ideal of “economic and social development” to which the rest of the world aspired. But by the year 2000 all challengers to the dominant paradigm, including social democracy in its Scandinavian and in its other forms, appeared to have been defeated or to be in retreat. Our assessment of the proposals of Barack Obama will depend on our understanding of the causes of social democracy´s decline. His proposals must confront the objection that they will not work for the same reasons that social democracy did not work, insofar as he is proposing, as social democrats proposed earlier, to make the economy function for the benefit of everybody; and insofar as he proposes to do so in ways similar to what the social democrats (counting Franklin D. Roosevelt as a social democrat) attempted earlier. His hearers are entitled to ask in what, if anything, the differences between Obama and his predecessors consist. If he thinks economics for the people will work now in ways it did not work then, it must be because he thinks he knows something that Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, Gosta Rehn, Rudolf Meidner, Dag Hammarskjold, John Maynard Keynes, and the other architects of social democracy did not know.
If one imagines someone in a western democracy reading daily newspapers year after year during the decade of the 1970s; and if one runs one´s imagination like an Eisenstein film, alternating images of someone reading a newspaper with images of someone standing on a beach watching the waves roll in and out, the eddies swirling to and fro, the occasional flotsam stranded on the sand, while listening to seabirds squawking unintelligible but apparently urgent messages that may and may not predict which way the sea is moving; then one might well be imagining someone who did not realize, even after processing a plethora of information, that the tide was surging decisively to the right; someone who was surprised when, in a single year of denouement, at the end of the decade, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Helmut Kohl was elected Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany; all three voicing the same message, a message the voters apparently heard and understood because with their ballots they endorsed it: get the economy moving again. The social democrats, they said to the voters (if I may attribute to them a slight enlarging of the category “social democrat” to include Jimmy Carter) have brought you stagflation. (Stagflation is rising unemployment, falling profits, a rise in bankruptcies, a decline in investment, and rising prices.) We, the economic realists (if I may imagine them naming themselves back then with a phrase now made famous by Nicolas Sarkozy) will get you on the road again.
They did. They brought inflation down and investment up. The American landscape was dotted with new millionaires as ordinary people found the values of the company shares in their retirement plans ballooning. The formula for success of the economic realists can be reduced to a few words that skip details and omit nuances but are not untrue: Change the balance of economic power in favor of the investing class, while bringing more people into that class through delayed taxation of retirement plan portfolios, life insurance, and other invested funds. When corporate profits go up, and the size of the savings made available for investment increases, then investment goes up. The economy gets moving again. Even the working masses (the ones whose real incomes adjusted for inflation have been steadily going down since the mid 1970s except for a brief respite during part of the Clinton years) arguably are better off because of such neoliberal policies; for, it can be argued, if creeping socialism had been allowed to creep forward during two decades more, then by the year 2000 the deterioration of incentives for entrepreneurs and galloping inflation would have lowered the standards of living of the working masses to depths far below the depths to which they admittedly did sink during the last decades of the twentieth century while conservative leaders advised by orthodox economists steered the ships of state.
The transition from the world just after World War II to the world today can also be described with the help of the concept of “regime of accumulation.” (e.g. Harvey 1990, Aglietta 1987) It is a concept that presupposes the previous social construction of the basic cultural structures of the modern world. Given that;
(1) The production of goods and services happens if and only if the owners of the means of production decide to make it happen; and
(2) That they usually decide to make it happen when they have confidence that the result of investing in productive activities will be that after a time the money thus invested will grow and become more money, i.e. accumulate; and
(3) That society cannot exist at all without goods and services;
it follows that whatever else a society does, one thing it must do is to assure that investors have confidence (as required by (2). A “regime” in this context governs a political order, an educational system (see Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), ideologies, and everything else –the whole ball of wax. Everything must be compatible with one thing that is essential; the confidence of the investor.
The working people who had the good fortune to live in a western democracy in the decades just prior to the 1970s were the beneficiaries of a Keynesian regime of accumulation. Keynes had taught that the great drag on prosperity that limited profitable production was a chronic weakness of effective demand. (Keynes 1936 pp. 27-28) The best way to inspire investors´ confidence was to assure investors that when the products produced were brought to market they would be met there by plenty of customers able to buy them. Social democrats were happy to hear this. High wages were said to be good for business. Policies designed to create a prosperous middle class were said to be good for business.
The late lamented Keynesian regime of accumulation was also known as “Fordist.” It was named after Henry Ford because he perfected assembly line mass production. Fordist production (which is “roundabout” in the terminology of Ludwig von Mises, meaning that it takes a lot of time and money to tool it up, but once it is tooled up it is incomparably more efficient than village crafts) requires huge investments. It produces Model T´s or refrigerators of antibiotics or almost anything at a unit cost far below the unit cost of undercapitalized small fry. Henry Ford could easily undersell the boutique automakers of France. The latter were thenceforth combined to niche markets making a few special vehicles for a few wealthy clients. But in the process of making Model T´s and other products at a low unit price, Henry Ford and others created a vast and expensive productive apparatus that imposed a will of its own on its makers. It demanded to be put to work to make if not Model T´s then next year´s model or in any case something or other that could be sold. And there had to be customers to buy it. It was a corollary of mass production technology that there had to be a mass market. Neither Henry et al nor society as a whole could afford to let millions of cars and refrigerators rust unsold. Neither society as a whole nor Henry et al could afford to write off as losses the huge sums invested in tooling up to make them. Society needed –and through the backing of labor unions by social democratic governments and the mesmerizing of consumers by mass media it got—a regime of accumulation that put in the pockets of the masses money; and in their heads visions of sugar plums, automobiles, and refrigerators.
Today´s phase of the evolution of the modern world-system can also be said to be governed by a regime of accumulation. To strengthen investor confidence that capital will accumulate by being turned into more capital, today´s regime depends more than yesterday´s on low wages. It raises profits directly by lowering the portion of revenue paid out in wages. To find buyers with money in their pockets and desires in their heads today´s regime depends more on globalization. It no longer needs a prosperous mass of consumers at home.
Elsewhere, a co-author and I have written a book showing that what can be said using the idea of “regime of accumulation” can be reframed in a broader and more anthropological perspective. (Richards and Swanger 2006) What is constant in human history are ecology and culture. A human group always makes some adaptation or other to its environment. It always has some culture or other. It does not always have a regime of accumulation. Premise (1) above, “The production of goods and services happens if and only if the owners of the means of production decide to make it happen” is not always true. Workers are not always separated from their tools by Roman concepts of dominus, and people are not always separated from each other by Roman concepts of separate juridical subjects who owe each other nothing if no contract connects them. Even today in our western democracies, a great deal of the work we do (Hazel Henderson estimates that it is more than half) is not done in the entrepreneurial economy where workers are hired for the ultimate purpose of turning money into more money. (Henderson 1996 Gibson-Graham 1995) What we show in our book is that the decline of social democracy can be understood in terms more fundamental, older, and more pervasive than the concept of regime of accumulation, namely: suum cuique, alterum non laedere, honeste vivare, pacta sunt servanda. The Austrian social democrat and one time President of Austria, Karl Renner, published a book in 1904 acknowledging that Roman Law as updated in modern European codes provided the legal framework for a commercial way of life that privileged a few and exploited many, and which was inherently unstable, but he claimed that the very same traditional legal concepts could be used to fashion a new society that would be democratic, caring, and stable. Society could be changed, as many socialists thought then and still think today, by changing who possesses “power,” and the “power” could be used to put new content in the old forms. We show in our book that Renner was mistaken (but without mentioning him, since we did not know about him when we wrote the book). The basic structures of the modern world condition production (always remembering that as Hazel Henderson and others show that those basic structures do not govern everything) on making the rich richer, and they do not lend themselves to simultaneously increasing production and democratizing distribution. Modern cultures are unstable from the moment free markets based on the juridical principle of contract become their organizing principle, simply because people are free to buy or not to buy, for any reason or for no reason. There is no guarantee that everyone who needs a job paying a living wage will find somebody who wants to hire him or her; and there is no guarantee that somebody who wants to sell a product at a cost-covering price will find buyers – not for the reasons Keynes gave to establish these points, which are true as far as they go, but for the deeper and simpler reason that the basic structure of our culture rests on premises that imply that nobody has any obligation to do anything just because somebody else needs it done. No regime of accumulation can make a modern economy indefinitely stable, none has, and none ever will.
The required transformation is not from one regime of accumulation to another but from a lower level of moral development to a higher level of moral development. In Eisler´s terminology it is orienting more to the partnership end of a spectrum and less toward a dominator configuration. Like a Hegelian Aufhebung or a Piagetian advance to a higher stage, transformation as I want to think of it preserves previous gains. It is not designed to destroy anything, certainly not modernity. I do not want to fix anything that is not broken, nor to undermine the happiness of people who in spite of all the challenges that face human beings in this imperfect world have managed to establish tolerably happy lives for themselves and their families. I do want to move to a system that is so social and so socially conscious that it will still be called capitalism only by those who love the very word as Gandhi loved the very word “socialism” (etymologically equivalent to “partnership,” being derived from socius, Latin for “partner”) even though Gandhi was aware of the great crimes that were being committed in socialism´s name; but helping capitalism to transform itself into social democracy is not destroying it, nor is it failing to appreciate its achievements; it is helping it to become its better self, the self that its best dreamers always wanted it to be.
I have more to say about why social democracy declined in the late twentieth century, why it is so hard to revive it and to go beyond it to build societies even better than the Scandinavian social democracies, and about what “transformation” means, but instead I will move on now to consider the ideas of Barack Obama and Riane Eisler. I will later insert the remaining points I want to make about “transformation.” But first I will mention just one example of the need for transformation –an especially pertinent example because it played a key role in social democracy´s decline and neoliberalism´s rise about 1970-1980. It is an example of something that is broken and does need a paradigm shift to fix it. Inflation.
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Milton Friedman´s classic monetarist theory explains inflation as a monetary phenomenon. I gloss it as attributing inflation to deviations of the “amount of money” circulating in the economy (bearing in mind that holdings in bank accounts and other things besides simple cash on hand are included when measuring “amount of money”) from what it should be (bearing in mind that “what it should be” depends not just on to what extent the money has the solid backing of real stocks of real goods and services, but also on how fast the same money facilitates more than one sale transaction by moving quickly from hand to hand). Friedman´s theory is an updating of David Hume´s 18th century theory: the coinage is debased (i.e. inflated) when the sovereign issues more of it, or for some other reason more of it gets into circulation, beyond what is justified by the existence of things to buy with it. The results of many studies tend to show that Friedman´s monetarist theory is on the whole empirically verifiable. (Laidler and Parkin 1975) The theory implies that governments should reduce public spending, central banks should raise interest rates to reduce the money supply, and employers should hold the line on wages and on new hires when prices are rising and inflation threatens to become chronic. But these measures slow down economic activity. There are fewer sales. These measures tend to favor those who are already favored (for example, those who do not need to work because they live off interest, who are favored by higher interest rates). They tend to punish those who are already punished (for example people whose wages are low). But the alternatives are even worse: inflation out of control will harm everyone, and it will harm especially the poor. Economic science says to the poor: heads you lose, tails you lose. This is a practical anomaly; it is analogous to the theoretical anomalies discussed by Thomas Kuhn in his work on the history of science. Kuhn shows that anomalies that cannot be handled satisfactorily by an existing “normal” science precede a paradigm shift.
Obamian and Eislerian Transformations
Speaking in New York City on September 17, 2007, before a Wall Street audience, Senator Obama called for “…a re-appraisal of our values as a nation.” He went on:
“I believe that America’s free market has been the engine of America’s great progress. It’s created a prosperity that is the envy of the world. It’s led to a standard of living unmatched in history. And it has provided great rewards to the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon for science, and technology, and discovery.
But I also know that in this country, our grand experiment has only worked because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle.” (Obama 2007A)
What could that higher principle be ? Riane Eisler suggests an answer: Caring. (Eisler 2007) What is caring? Carol Gilligan once answered this question: “Caring is attending to and responding to need.” But what are needs? An answer to this question is provided by Manfred Max-Neef and his co-authors Antonio Elizalde and Martin Hopenhayn. Needs stem from the condition of being human. They are few and finite. They can be classed in nine categories: subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, recreation, creation, identity, and freedom. (Max-Neef et al 1991)
Obama goes on to say what “higher principle” he has in mind in somewhat different terms that as far as I can tell do not contradict what Eisler, Gilligan, Max-Neef, Elizalde, and Hopenhayn say, but rather add an agreeing voice to the same conversation:
“It’s the idea that we are all in this together. From CEOs to shareholders, from financiers to factory workers, we all have a stake in each other’s success because the more Americans prosper, the more America prospers. That’s why we’ve had titans of industry who’ve made it their mission to pay well enough that their employees could afford the products they made. That’s why employees at companies like Google don’t mind the vast success of their CEOs - because they share in that success just the same. And that’s why our economy hasn’t just been the world’s greatest wealth creator - it’s been the world’s greatest job generator. It’s been the tide that has lifted the boats of the largest middle-class in history.
“We have not come this far because we practice survival of the fittest. America is America because we believe in creating a framework in which all can succeed.” (Ibid.)
The famous and emblematic titan of industry who paid his employees enough to buy his products was of course the Henry Ford of the five dollar day and the Model T. The largest middle-class in history was of course generated not only in the USA but also in Europe during the same time period and under the guidance of the same economic philosophy, that of John Maynard Keynes. Obama frames these features of yesterday´s regime of accumulation in the context of a “re-appraisal of values.” He cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt as having called for a “re-appraisal of values” at a period of American history similar to ours, but he is careful to distance himself from saying that the USA is heading into another Great Depression (which would be political suicide since he could then be accused of undermining confidence in a system which depends on confidence). Obama says “we all have a stake in each other´s success” and then proves this claim with a tautology evoking a sentiment of patriotic solidarity: “the more Americans prosper the more America prospers.” Obama succinctly rewrites American history, attributing to all of it certain features of part of it, and attributing those features not to the requirements of the cold logic of capital accumulation but to a higher principle, a value, an idea: “…that we are all in this together.” (Ibid.)
Obama goes on putting new wine in old bottles, claiming for Americanism the social democratic ideal of solidarity: “Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. And so from time to time, we have put in place certain rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest. We have done this not to stifle prosperity or liberty, but to foster those things and ensure that they are shared and spread as widely as possible.” I think his Wall Street audience (and the others who learned what he said through the media) were aware that if “prosperity” were in actual practical fact and not just in occasional rhetoric to be “shared and spread as widely as possible” then the United States would indeed be transformed. I assume that “as widely as possible” does not mean in Obama´s mind or in that of any of his hearers an equal distribution of income. It must mean a distribution of income unequal enough (as in John Rawls´ theory of justice) to provide incentives that benefit everyone. Still, even if Obama and his hearers think that the huge salaries of the CEOs of Google are legitimated by the smaller benefits their subordinates also enjoy, the Obama message remains a transformative one: the bottom line is that everyone should benefit. It is a tribal message, a kinship of all citizens message, an inclusive message. It acknowledges that the communitarian goal of including everyone in the nation´s prosperity requires more than the jus gentium; it requires the bonds of mutual obligation that the bare-bones ethic that became the legal framework of commerce deliberately left out; it requires in Obama´s words guiding the invisible hand of the market with a higher principle.
I am encouraged because Warren Buffet and other Wall Street friends after hearing his speech gave him money for his campaign even though he told them he was going to raise their taxes. Many more who heard Obama´s reappraisal of values message in his many speeches across the country gave him money in smaller amounts and voted for him. I am encouraged because the acceptance of Obama´s message by the public suggests that the public believes something I believe: By promoting caring values we can change the iron laws of the market. However, it is not obvious that what I believe and what the millions who voted for Obama apparently believe is true. The fact that Keynesian/Fordist policies that Obama praises and perhaps wants to reinstate led in the course of time to the stagflation of the 1970s makes it necessary to ask whether Obama has a feasible plan. It is necessary to ask whether he has a plan for reversing several decades of ever-greater inequality, ever-greater destruction of the biosphere, ever-greater exclusion, and ever-greater violence; and for confronting the current downturn in which a system that has been made to run by waging a class war in which as Warren Buffet said “my class is winning” (Buffet 2007), and made to run by globalizing markets so that capital can freely roam the globe in search of opportunities to multiply itself—producing wherever labor with the necessary skills is cheapest, paying taxes through subsidiaries in jurisdictions where taxes are lowest (using creative accounting to show that the profits were made there), and selling to the affluent classes of the oil-rich nations, to the newly prosperous entrepreneurs of India and China, and to what is left of Keynes´ middle classes in Europe and America— is finally running out of steam and grinding to a halt and threatening to stop running: while at the same time bringing inflation under control and making the production of goods and services hum smoothly along. A formidable challenge. One that calls not just for new policies but for new paradigms.
If one reads the plans that the candidate has presented to the public one finds that they ring the bells of the American Ideals we all learned in school, calling on us to be the generation that transforms ideals into realities. One also finds that each plan presupposes full (or nearly full) employment without runaway inflation. The civil rights plan calls for reducing recidivism by providing ex-offender support so that ex-offenders will be reintegrated into society with jobs. The defense plan calls for expanding humanitarian activities (such as the military´s contributions to the tsunami in South and Southeast Asia) that will be, as will be all the other expansions Obama proposes (such as quadrupling Head Start) paid for without deficit financing (presupposing that inflation is not out of control). The disabilities plan proposes to end discrimination and create equal employment opportunity. The education plan will recruit, prepare, retain, and reward teachers (more spending to do without causing inflation). America will invest in education from early childhood through college, so that American workers “will be ready to compete with any workers for the best jobs the world has to offer.” (Obama 2007B) . America will invest more in research, science, and technology with the same aim. The ethics plan clamps down on illegal and unethical business practices, including waste and fraud in defense contracting. Raising ethical standards may not seem at first to presuppose full employment without runaway inflation, but if one reflects with Michel Foucault that a high proportion of business activity has been for centuries past and is still today illegal business, then one will see the need for a robust legal economy to compensate for the massive loss of illicit ways of making a living that a successful raising of ethical standards would entail. Obama´s plan for families calls for a living wage, raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation to guarantee that every working family will be able to pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing --- a plan that presupposes employers able and willing to pay a living wage. His fiscal plan calls for reversing Bush´s tax cuts for the wealthy, ending tax-haven abuse, ending tax subsidies for oil and gas companies that are making record profits and instead imposing windfall taxes on them, and eliminating special interest corporate tax loopholes; while making government more efficient through such measures as smarter use of information technology and ending no-bid contracts to cronies. All employees including the self-employed and the owners of small-businesses will be entitled to buy low cost health care, with no exclusions for pre-existing conditions, and employers will be compelled to help pay for it. All the powerful special interests whose privileges Obama will curtail will be compelled to behave in more socially responsible ways, refraining from retaliating by cutting jobs and raising prices. Obama is in favor of working with Mexico so that Mexico too will have a full employment economy where people feel no pressure to migrate north to make a living. His rural policy is about increasing economic opportunities for family farmers.
The first plank of Obama´s anti-poverty platform is access to jobs. He knows about anti-poverty work firsthand from his own experience as an anti-poverty organizer in Chicago. When he speaks about that issue he knows well his confidence sometimes falters, as it did when he spoke on July 18, 2007 to voters at Anacostia, a miserably poor neighborhood of Washington DC just a few blocks from the White House: “What you learn when you spend your time in these neighborhoods trying to solve these problems is that there are no easy solutions and no perfect arguments. And you come to understand that for the last four decades, both ends of the political spectrum have been talking past one another.” (Obama 2007B)
“The moral question about poverty in America - How can a country like this allow it? - has an easy answer: we can’t. The political question that follows - What do we do about it? - has always been more difficult. But now that we’re finally seeing the beginnings of an answer, this country has an obligation to keep trying.” (Ibid.)
“So there are no easy answers and perfect arguments. As Dr. King said, it is not either-or, it is both-and. Hope is not found in any single ideology - an insistence on doing the same thing with the same result year after year”. (Ibid.)
“Today’s economy has made it easier to fall into poverty. The fall is often more precipitous and more permanent than ever before. You used to be able to find a good job without a degree from college or even high school. Today that’s nearly impossible. You used to be able to count on your job to be there for your entire life. Today almost any job can be shipped overseas in an instant.
“The jobs that remain are paying less and offering fewer benefits, as employers have succeeded in busting up unions and cutting back on health care and pensions to stay competitive with the companies abroad that are paying their workers next to nothing.
“Every American is vulnerable to the insecurities and anxieties of this new economy. And that’s why the single most important focus of my economic agenda as President will be to pursue policies that create jobs and make work pay.” (Ibid.)
“…while we can’t stop every job from going overseas, we can stop giving tax breaks to the companies who send them there and start giving them to companies who create jobs at home.” (Ibid.)
I cite ideas from Obama not just as ideas from Obama but as ideas that circulate and have resonance in a cultural milieu where he has become a leader; I cite them as encouraging and hopeful even when their feasibility is doubtful, and as perhaps most hopeful when the leader confesses that he does not know how to solve all our problems and calls on everyone else to contribute their ideas. At this point I suspect that readers who have more or less followed my reasoning and my quotations from Obama so far can be divided into three classes; (1) Those who from the beginning agreed with me that the dominant economic paradigm rooted in the cultural structures inherited from ancient Rome and early modern Europe needs to be transformed and can be transformed; (2) Those to whom seeing the imperatives that drive the global economy as consequences of socially constructed legal and ethical norms, and seeing the possibility of revising those norms so that we are no longer constrained by those global systemic imperatives, were new ideas when they started reading this paper, but who are now convinced that the sort of transformation to a caring economy that Riane Eisler and other feminist economists propose might in principle be possible, who are eager to learn how to make the transformation happen; and (3) those who are still unconvinced, who still see the ideas Obama´s audiences cheer as a set of policy proposals to be judged by whether they will work in the world as it is, who do not see the point of saying that they will not work in the world as it is, but they would work if and only if they become part and parcel of a culture shift toward more caring values. To reduce the risk of boring the readers I assume to be in classes (1) and (2), I will not make any further effort here to convince readers in class (3) but instead refer them to The Dilemmas of Social Democracies (Richards and Swanger 2006) and for those who read Spanish Solidaridad, Participación, Transparencia (Richards 2007) confident that anyone who reads one or both of those two books cover to cover will be convinced that sustainable full employment without inflation and without strong tendencies promoting violence and environmental destruction is not possible in the world as it is presently organized but is possible. (I might mention also that the two books cited are not only theoretical proposals but also case studies of working models.)
Eisler emphasizes, “We can´t change economic systems by just focusing on economics. Economic systems are embedded in larger social systems.” (Eisler 2007, p. 93) Goods and services are produced not only by businesses, but also by households, by the unpaid community sector, by nature itself, and by other sectors. We think much too narrowly when we think of “the economy” as a place where independent juridical subjects (honeste vivare) who own means of production (suum cuique) create jobs by hiring workers (pacta sunt servanda) in order to produce products to sell in markets (pacta sunt servanda again) governed by the obligation not to harm anybody (alterum non laedere) but with no positive social bonding calling on them to help anybody. Whether “the economy” so conceived is kept running by the Keynesian device of high wages to promote sales to middle class consumers, or whether it is put on the road again by the economic realist´s prescription of low wages and global markets, it is in fact only a part, not all, and not even the largest part, of the work that gets babies fed, the diapers of the elderly changed, that gets air into human lungs so that metabolism can proceed, lawns mowed, gardens weeded, children socialized, houses repaired, and water and nourishment to the places where they are needed in the cells of human bodies.
Riane Eisler knows a number of things that Franklin Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and the architects of post World War II Scandinavian social democracy did not know. She knows that neuroscientists have now demonstrated that when subjects engage in mutually beneficial behavior the pleasure centers of their brains light up. (Id. p. 189-90) Although environmental stress can inhibit the capacity for enjoying cooperation and sharing, there is strong evidence that the human species is “wired by evolution for reciprocity and mutual caring as an effective survival strategy.” (p. 190)
When it is acknowledged in a society that more than one normative framework organizes the provisioning of human beings with goods and services (viewing economics with a wider lens in Eisler’s terminology); when there is awareness that human beings are physiologically hard wired to support more than one culturally conditioned emotional repertory (with pleasure centers in the brain literally turned on by sharing); when anthropologists succeed in teaching the lesson that human beings have invented not one but many diverse basic cultural structures (including those of the Javanese peasants—much different from those of Roman Law—studied by anthropologist Ann Sutoro, Barack Obama’s mother); then one might say that the society is ready to implement the slogan of the students who demonstrated in Paris in May of 1968: l’imagination au pouvoir! Given that it is possible in principle to bring imagination to power, given that many people want to change from a dysfunctional system to a functional system badly enough to think different thoughts and alter their behavior, it is necessary to direct attention to the nitty gritty of operational details.
It is significant that Obama pays attention to improving the bankruptcy laws. Some details are normal elements of an old paradigm; others are harbingers of a new paradigm. The bankruptcy clause of the United States constitution (in Article I, section 8) is one of few openings in the constitutional law of the United States that provides relief from its rigid imposition of the basic cultural structures of the old paradigm, that of Rome, another notable opening being the power granted to Congress by the Sixteenth Amendment to tax income “from whatever source derived” including inheritance. The notorious doctrine of substantive due process makes suum cuique the law of the land, whatever the elected legislators or the voters they represent may say. The Constitution itself, and similar clauses in state constitutions, forbid the impairment of contracts. Nevertheless contracts are impaired every day in bankruptcy courts, authorized by the fact that bankruptcy proceedings are contemplated by the same Constitution. Life triumphs over death as the Hebrew principle of year of Jubilee (the year all debts were cancelled) carves out healthy exceptions to the Roman principle of pacta sunt servanda. Contracts are rewritten and sometimes executory contracts (contracts not yet performed) are cancelled. Businesses large (chapter 11) and small (chapter 13) are reorganized so that they can stay in business in spite of having run up debts that cannot be paid. Instead of or in addition to establishing a climate of confidence that induces investors to create jobs, the bankruptcy courts help investors to salvage firms they have already invested in. They take steps toward full employment by keeping the old jobs of workers and managers going, and sometimes they soften the blow for creditors by ordering part payment when if the firm had simply gone under the creditors would have gotten nothing. Obama proposes specifically to widen bankruptcy protection for persons burdened by unpayable medical bills, giving them a fresh start in life, and to widen protection for homeowners who cannot pay their mortgages, providing for rewriting the terms for payment of real estate debt by homeowners as businesses (but without Obama’s proposed amendment not homeowners) are already allowed to do.
The bankruptcy exception to the Roman rules suggests a general principle for a caring economy: Business failure should not be personal failure. No human being should suffer when a legal fiction, a corporation or other business form, is unable to balance its books. As in Sweden in the heyday of the Swedish model, society as a whole should expect that there will be sunrise industries and sunset industries. People who cease to work in the latter should be transferred to the former, with generous scholarships for retraining in between jobs.
Even more significant steps toward full employment have been taken in recent years by the bankruptcy courts of Argentina and in some cases not so much by the courts as by special legislation passed by Argentine provincial and national legislatures. When the Argentine economy collapsed in 2001, some three hundred among the thousands of businesses that failed continued to operate. Even though their owners decided to close them because they were not capable of generating any profits, their doors stayed open (or in some cases were reopened). They became enterprises operated by their workers, usually with the assistance of volunteer accountants, lawyers, and engineers from sympathetic political parties and/or from universities. There was a net gain in employment because businesses that generated no profits nevertheless generated wages. Orders from bankruptcy courts usually provided some accommodation with the creditors of the now worker-run firms, and with former owners who decided that they wanted their once-abandoned businesses back when times improved. The “recovered” industries joined what the Argentine economist José Luis Corragio calls the “people’s economy.’ (Corragio 2004, 2004) It is an economy whose objective is not to accumulate capital but to make a living. It includes all the small business people and self-employed repair and service people who earn for themselves the equivalent of a wage without having any employer who pays a wage to them. In neighboring Chile the “people’s economy” is estimated to provide a fourth of all employment. (Gobierno de Chile 2006)
The people’s economy does not require a regime of accumulation. It does not require a politics, a culture, and an ideology that make it possible for the production of goods and services to go forward by assuring investors that they will make profits. It creates jobs that do not exist in John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory (1936). When Keynes set out to calculate what the rate of employment and the rate of unemployment would be, he considered what factors would induce employers to hire employees. He did not consider that employees would hire themselves and each other. Obama’s proposals for health care back the people´s economy because they specifically include small businesses and the self-employed, making the same insurance now available to Members of Congress available at an affordable price to people who cannot possibly be insured under their employer’s health care plan because they have no employer.
The microcredit movement, a movement Obama’s mother was part of in Indonesia, with Women’s World Banking in New York City, and as a consultant in Pakistan, takes another step toward full employment without depending on a regime of accumulation. It is a movement that was pioneered by two Indian women, Jaya Arunachalam and Ela Bhatt, and further developed by Mohammad Yunuf´s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. In its best forms (when it does not degenerate, as it sometimes has, into just another way to turn money into more money) it not only gives small loans but also combines unionizing and cooperatives, and supports self-employed women whose work is often invisible. Part of it, the 700,000 member Self Employed Women´s Association of India, is led by women and is a combination of women’s movement, labor movement, and cooperative movement and incorporates Gandhian principles as well. (See http://www.sewa.org) The micro-enterprises are usually partnerships, and they often enjoy subsidies of one kind or another from public or private agencies. For example, in Rosario, Argentina, micro-enterprises get free booths at flea market fairs sponsored on weekends by the city government. The ones that produce food products get free training on how to comply with health regulations. The social democratic government of Chile (under its socialist president Michelle Bachelet) encourages micro-enterprises in organic agriculture and pays for advertising that touts the health benefits of their products. Thousands of other examples could be given from around the world; and, as one would expect, microcredit programs are featured in Barack’s platform and in Riane’s book. (pp. 209-10) With a few exceptions (such as a notorious poultry tycoon who got her start from the Grameen Bank) (Lappe and Lappe 2002) micro enterprises are a form of self-employment and a form of partnership.
While conventional economics makes employment depend on whether a potential employer believes that the cost of hiring will be less than the extra revenue generated by the worker hired (expressed in the theorem that the wage is equal to the marginal productivity of labor), a caring economics creates jobs that do not create profits. Whatever the good intentions of the owners of for-profit businesses may be, however socially responsible they may decide to be, and even when in the firm’s Mission Statement and Vision Statement there is language stating the providing of high quality employment to be an objective on a par with dividends to shareholders, nevertheless a for-profit business is limited by its need to make profits, if not maximum profits then at least reasonable profits. The for-profit sector cannot create full employment alone, except, as Keynes noted, under unusual historical circumstances which are usually of short duration. (Keynes 1936, pp. 249-50)
The socialization of large well-capitalized corporations employing advanced technologies, so that they become (more than they are already) what are sometimes called “good corporate citizens” is essential; as is the recycling of the profits they generate into channels that are ethically justifiable (of which there are many, from funding the retirement incomes of their senior stockholders, to being plowed back into the same corporation to study how to produce healthier products in more environmentally safe ways, to paying taxes that fund social programs, to name just three). Eisler presents evidence that caring practices, such as providing quality day care for the children of employees, often pay off for business in dollars and cents. (Eisler 2007, chapter 3; see also www.unglobalcompact.org)
Since large well-capitalized corporations are in most fields the institutions that can deliver quality products to consumers at affordable unit costs, most others who try to make a living by selling something cannot compete with them and are either confined to niche markets, or to working for large corporations not directly as employees but indirectly as suppliers or subcontractors or franchisees. Large corporations do not, however, employ the bulk of the labor force. Although the actual and potential contributions of large enterprises to the common good are essential, one contribution they cannot make is to create full employment. Even small business cannot create full employment, although small businesses and farms employ more people, both per unit of output and in total numbers, than large firms. For that reason supporting small businesses and farms, as Barack Obama does and as many other political leaders do, is a step toward full employment.
The creation of jobs by employers encounters an insurmountable barrier in the requirement that employers cannot continue hiring past their breakeven point. The creation of jobs by microlending and by supporting other components of the people´s economy encounters an insurmountable barrier in the requirement that even if the self-employed do not need to generate a return on capital at least they have to sell their products or services at cost-covering prices. This does not always happen. A full employment program must therefore break the sales barrier. It must de-commodify our highly commodified culture. It must rewrite one of the most deeply embedded stories of our culture: the story in which the happy ending is always the successful sale of a product or service to a customer who pays money for it.
A concept that breaks the sales barrier is that of “social entrepreneur.” Social entrepreneurs identify something that needs to be done, and raise money and other resources to do it, not (or not only) by appealing to customers to buy something, but by appealing to people who agree with them about what needs to be done. Backing social entrepreneurship is part of Obama´s program and message. He himself was a social entrepreneur when he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. Eisler gives some examples of social entrepreneurship in her new book:
· Ocean Robbins co-founded YES, Youth for Environmental Sanity when he was 16. YES holds camps for young leaders and activists around the globe, inspiring them to build a better world.
· Hafsat Abiola, the daughter of the first democratically elected president of Nigeria, found herself alone in the United States after both her parents were killed by the Nigerian military. She founded an organization to work to restore democracy in her homeland, and later returned there as founder of KIND, an organization that works to end gender discrimination. (p. 209)
Eisler adds, “There are today thousands of such social entrepreneurs, women and men, even boys and girls, with innovative ideas for solving social problems and the dedication to put these ideas into action.” (Ibid.)
Social entrepreneurship can be regarded as the conceptual opposite of capital accumulation. In capital accumulation investors start with money with the goal of turning it into more money. Money roams the planet seeking ways to produce marketable goods and services (when the system is working well and does not degenerate into a global casino of useless speculation) that will earn a high return. In the social enterprise, whether it is organizing a Little League team for the youngsters of the neighborhood or a movement to end hunger worldwide, the objective comes first. First comes the identification of the good or service needed. After that comes the search for the resources needed to produce it. Corragio, who has studied the financing of social enterprises in Argentina, follows some Brazilian economists in calling this way of generating employment hybrid financing: the resources are hybrid in the sense that they come from a variety of sources that add up to what it takes to get the job done: in the Little League example it might be access to playing fields donated by public schools, money generated by selling tickets to games, uniforms paid for by a local dentist, contributions from parents, volunteer dads doing the coaching, United Way, etc.. and somehow it all adds up in such a way that some social entrepreneur makes a living putting this particular youth movement together in some part of the world and making it happen.
Community organizers in Chicago --not the Roman Catholic Campaign for Human Development Barack worked with but a group across town associated with urban studies at Northwestern University in Evanston-- have taken the logic of social entrepreneurship a step farther. (Kretzmann and McKnight 1993) Instead of first identifying a need and then mobilizing resources to meet it, they first find the resources and then look for ways to put them to good use. They have developed the technique of “asset mapping.” Community members meet to brainstorm about the skills, the experience, the institutional assets, and the physical assets that they have, not about what they do not have. Building community is done by connecting gifts. Instead of starting by identifying the hungry child in the neighborhood whose mother´s food stamps do not stretch to the end of the month, they start by identifying the elderly couple who have an apple tree in the backyard where the apples go to waste because they are too old to harvest them and nobody ever thought of inviting them to join a gift economy. Similarly, community activists in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, start by looking for underutilized resources. (Lappe and Lappe 2002) This sort of reverse economics, making sure every resource is used, can be compared to Jean Piaget´s studies of children learning to do what he calls “reverse operations.” In one of Piaget´s experiments children were asked to fit blocks into a box. They were unable to get all of the blocks to fit into the box until they reversed their approach. They were successful when they started by picking a space in the box and filling it, making sure every space was filled by a block.
Making high quality employment an explicit aim in corporate mission statements; creating bankruptcy, labor, business, and educational practices that separate business failure from personal failure; forging an industrial policy that does its best to insert the USA into the world economy in ways that build equitably shared prosperity; public-private cooperation with labor included as a player in the game; support for the people’s economy; microcredit; social entrepreneurship; and community organizing that effectively mobilizes the resources of a neighborhood are steps in the direction of full employment. They are not just government policies. They are elements of a culture shift. They involve everybody in and out of government.
When I say they are only steps in the right direction, I might be accused of overkill. Surely, it might be argued, if all that were done, then everybody would be making a living wage with good benefits. Not so. More is needed. Remember that it is a basic rule of our dominant cultural structures that nobody is obliged to do anything just because someone else needs it done. Until that basic rule is thoroughly transformed, we will all continue to be in danger of becoming homeless beggars because for one reason or another we lose whatever property we may have and because we are no longer able to offer anything for sale that buyers are able and willing to pay money for. Remember that throughout most of history most people have been poor, and that it was only during the Age of Keynes, which is now over, that the western democracies were able to achieve prosperity for majorities. Remember that it is not just a matter of finding jobs for those who now have none (realistically fifteen percent of those who need work, disregarding fudged official statistics that give lower numbers) but also a matter of coping with the onrushing economic crisis that nobody yet dares call a depression. Remember that in nations that have already had a crash, such as Indonesia, Mexico, and Argentina, millions who were formerly middle class have fallen into poverty; so we are not just talking about lifting out of poverty those who are poor now; we are also talking about lifting up those who are not poor now but may become poor. Remember that most poor people have jobs already and that full employment means upgrading them to a living wage. It also means replacing the jobs that will be lost when employers who cannot pay a living wage shut up shop. And remember that any success that may be achieved in curtailing the multi-billion dollar illegal drug business and\or in demilitarizing America will add millions more to the rolls of the job-seekers. And the robotic revolution has just begun. (Eisler 2007, chapter eight)
(Of course I regard as a pipe dream the notion that we can lift our fellow citizens out of poverty just by making United States export products competitive in global markets. And of course I do not believe jobs lost to robots will be replaced by other good jobs if we just leave the market alone.)
More is needed. What a conscientious business community and a conscientious civil society can do is to take measures in the direction of ending poverty like those mentioned above (as well as those other people think of that I have not thought of) not as a substitute for government-funded employment, but as an effort to make the tasks of government doable by reducing their magnitude.
After World War II Swedish social democracy showed the way by making the government the employer of last resort. Sweden conceives of itself, as its national anthem sings, as the home of all Swedes. Home is where you find security, and that implies employment security, health security, and old age security. What the private sector does not provide, the public sector will. That is what a public sector is for. Accordingly, Sweden established the principle of guaranteed employment for everyone. In effect, it established a new kind of minimum wage, since few people were willing to work for less than the wages the government was paying. (Richards and Swanger 2006)
The workers hired in Sweden’s government-as-employer-of-last-resort program were put to work mainly in county government jobs (Sweden is divided into counties) and mainly in the education and health sectors. The largest single contingent consisted of women who worked in early childhood education and in day care. Government work tended to be the kind of caring work that Martin Luther King Jr. said there was an inexhaustible need for. (King 1967) It was not robot work: It is an insult to leave an ailing elderly person in the care of a robot, as it is an insult to leave a child with a television set for a babysitter. Another area where the work that needs to be done is inexhaustible is in the greening of the economy. Obama’s program recognizes the employment potential of greening (sometimes using phrases that seem to have been copied from the writings of Earlham peace studies graduate Michael Shellenberger). The need for caring and greening work is immense, as is the need for jobs that pay a living wage.
The Swedish government found that it could not carry the burden it had assigned itself. In the end it had to abandon its role as employer of last resort because it could not pay for it. It could not raise taxes, which already averaged more than 50% of income. It could not comply with its other financial obligations in Sweden’s labor-government-business partnership and at the same time pay the wages of every Swede who did not find satisfactory work in the private sector.
My suggestion is that government funding for caring and greening work is much to be desired insofar as it is possible in the light of other priorities and constraints. Private business and civil society organizations should do as much as they can. Government should do as much as it can. Private-public cooperation to fight poverty should be standard procedure. Besides the risk of embarking on a program which in the long run proves not to be feasible, illustrated by Sweden, there is also the risk of moral decay inherent in guaranteeing work for every citizen, illustrated by the Soviet Union. I am informed and believe that despite the good intentions of many of its founders, in the Soviet system universal cynicism combined with massive inefficiency produced a scenario described by the well-known Soviet cliché, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” This brings me to Riane Eisler’s main point.
Eisler´s main point is that uncaring economic relationships are part and parcel of a broader pattern of uncaring human relationships. (I hope she will forgive me if I paraphrase and summarize in words that are not exactly the ones she would have chosen.) It is unrealistic to work for a caring economic paradigm separately from working for a caring social paradigm. She classifies human societies not in any of the traditional ways (although she would probably acknowledge that traditional words for classifying kinds of societies are sometimes useful) but instead by placing them on a continuum that runs from the “dominator configuration” at one end to the “partnership configuration” at the other end. The dominator configuration is similar to what others call patriarchy, but she chooses not to use that term. The dominator configuration values stereotypically male values of toughness and power-seeking, and systematically undervalues stereotypically female values of nurturing and serving the needs of others.
Human history for the past five hundred years (and also at some other times at some places) has seen the gradual rise of the partnership configuration. Partnership has risen not so much through what I call “tides” inherent in basic structures, and not so much by class struggle driven by self-interest, as through ethical appeals to the better potentials of human nature. Moral pioneers have led the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the green movement, the women´s movement, pro-democracy movements, the gay and lesbian and bi rights movement, prison reform movements, education reform movements, and many others. We are indebted to idealists and to the fact that evolution has constituted the human species in such a way that we can be moved by stories and images that tap the caring side of our nature for the many advances toward the partnership end of the continuum that we enjoy today.
The last several decades, which I have characterized as a shift from a Keynesian/Fordist regime of accumulation to a neoliberal regime of accumulation, Eisler characterizes as regression toward the dominator configuration end of the spectrum. (Eisler 2007, p. 101) She engages the religious right on their own terms: They advocate regression to old-fashioned family structures where the father wields the rod as an Old Testament patriarch, and at the same time they cheer for military confrontation in foreign policy. Eisler connects the dots, advocating progression to an equal partnership of women and men in the home as an essential part of the same sea-change in values that will support a peacebuilding foreign policy. And a caring economy. She cites a great deal of empirical evidence to show that the observed patterns of human values and attitudes fit her dominator/partnership explanatory model. Although there are exceptions, the pattern in the data is that people who were mistreated as children tend to favor a violent foreign policy as adults.
Transforming the basic structures of the economy is part of the same culture shift that makes women equal to men. The shift raises the status and pay of stereotypically feminine work. Teaching children dignity and respect by treating them with dignity and respect is part of the same partnership configuration that will end poverty. Although conversion to caring ways in later life is possible, there is a strong tendency for dominator attitudes learned in early childhood to carry over into later life as political authoritarianism, economic indifference and exploitation, racial and ethnic prejudice, homophobia, domestic violence, hatred of nature, low self-esteem, crime, and war. There is an equally strong tendency for partnership attitudes learned in early childhood to carry over into adult life in the “do-gooder,” “bleeding heart,” and “naïve liberal,” behavior patterns that hosts of right wing talk shows love to despise, but which Riane Eisler loves to honor and works to redeem.
“A caring revolution is a sea-change. It is the cumulative effect of all the ripples flowing from giving visibility and value to the most important human work: the work of caring and caregiving.
“When the economic importance of caring and caregiving in the household is made visible, workplace rules such as flextime, job sharing and other partnership economic inventions gain currency. Men do more of this work as its value is more generally recognized, and women and men participate equally in the formal labor force and have the same opportunities and responsibilities at home. Schools offer education for good parenting and teach skills for caring personal relations. Governments fund universal health care and high quality child care, as well as parental leave for both fathers and mothers. People are happier at home and in workplaces. All this promotes better care for children, and helps produce the high-quality human capital needed for a healthy, equitable economy.” (Eisler 2007, p. 226)
The good news in terms of the discussion that led into this précis of what I take to be Eisler´s main point is that full employment need not lead to universal cynicism and massive inefficiency. When a society orients toward the dominator end of the continuum, when women do a double shift working all day and waiting on men at night, when fear is the ruling passion, then what are on paper equitable institutions may in practice be jungles where power-seeking petty tyrants prey on resentful victims whose only desire is to beat the system however |
