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Chapter Fifteen
Problems III
8. Alienated Youth
A viewpoint that sees culture, with all its ethical demands, its successes, and its failures, as growing out of and measured by physical reality, provides grounds for assigning a legitimate use to the embattled concept of “alienation.” Once I have sketched reasons for assigning a legitimate use to this concept, so treasured by some, so anathema to others, I will have a pad from which to launch ideas for solutions.
I suggest a gestalt switch: Instead of seeing (as Foucault does in Les Mots et les Choses) history as fond and biology as forme, I see biology as fond and history as forme. The natural sciences provide us with knowledge of the background realities with which and in which humans during the course of history have constructed cultures. But unlike Edmund O. Wilson (Wilson ), I see no need to conduct a polemic against Emile Durkheim in order to establish that it makes more sense to see human discursive practices as tools for coping with physical reality than it does to see physical reality as something that may or may not exist, depending upon whether it can comply with criteria set by logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. Social facts fit perfectly well into a naturalistic worldview. So do religions. So does acknowledging that homo sapiens sapiens is a tribal animal.
For hundreds of thousands of years our hunter and gatherer ancestors spent nights together in small groups under starry skies. For thousands of years they looked at campfires. They shared air with trees. Babies suckled mothers’ milk. Humans were moon-watchers before they were television-watchers and tribe members before they were juridical subjects capable of owning property and entering into contracts.
Because the body evolved under characteristic circumstances, and developed a series of behaviors and emotions in those circumstances, there is an inherited human essence. It is an essence embracing diversity, but an essence nonetheless. Therefore, it is legitimate to use the concept of alienation to describe as alienated and alienating a way of life in which humans are foreign to themselves, not what they are. The concept of essence insofar as it or its equivalent is needed to justify a concept of alienation, need not be identified with the intellectual traditions that anti-essentialists attack. It need not be identified with any interpretation of the Greek word phusis; nor with the imago dei, which assigned specifically to our species the divine qualities of reason, love, and will; nor with Ludwig Feuerbach’s turning of the tables on the Christians which made the essence of God a projection of the essence of humanity; nor with any nineteenth century Wesen or Gattungwesen; nor with any twentieth century attempt to write a list of characteristics predicable of all and only humans. Nor need alienation from the human essence be regarded as a concept that collapsed and died, survived by no descendants, when Michel Foucault demonstrated that the human essence is simultaneously a naive illusion and an intolerable oppression. Essence can be identified instead with the tendency of the human body to flourish under conditions it evolved to interface with, and to become disoriented under conditions outside the range it is equipped to adapt to.
What Anthony Giddens calls radicalized modernity is alienating not because Adam Smith was wrong in finding in human nature a pervasive inclination to truck or barter, but because radicalizing this half-truth about human nature disregards the other pervasive half-truths that humans evolved over thousands of years connected to other humans by kinship ties, connected to the cosmos by stories, and often connected also to one thing or another in ways such as totemic participation that our ordinary language today has no proper vocabulary for. Modernity is contract. Radical modernity dissolves non-market (non-contract) relationships, melting what formerly was solid into air. What mainly makes a modern bargaining society different from a tribe is not that in the former where there is a contract there is a set of mutual obligations. It is that when there is no contract there is no set of mutual obligations. If there are epidemics of hyperactive children, of anti-social children, of children who cannot sleep at night, it is partly because children realize that they do not live in a world structured by moral standards and mutual obligations. They do not feel secure; they lack what Erik Erikson calls basic trust. Their feelings do not mislead them. They are not secure. They are not secure because there are fewer and fewer standards and more and more deals. They are not secure because the network of social relationships into which they are born is unstable. It does not consist of solid obligations. It consists of exchanges of promises (i.e. of contracts) limited in scope and likely to be breached.
Although I have mentioned early childhood when the basis and foundation of the person’s future personality is laid, in a market-dominated society similar considerations apply to adolescents and to people of all ages.
In a modern city, it is not just the pavement and the cement that is alienating. It is also the loneliness. The loneliness inheres in the detached relationship of one juridical subject to another as they pass each other on the sidewalk, in the aisles of the shopping mall, in the parking lot, on the freeway, or across the dinner table. Roman commercial law, derived from the jus gentium, was designed to be a lowest common denominator that could enable strangers to trade with one another, regardless of their personal identities. It has evolved toward becoming the only common denominator, as personal identities fade away because connections fade away.
That the alienated youth of today is looking for a tribe in a cold impersonal world is sometimes explicitly stated, as in the musical “Hair,” as in reports on the phenomenon known as urban tribes, and as in the novel Ishmael by Anthony Quinn. However, the viewpoint suggested here can also be applied even where the word “tribe” does not occur. One can see atavistic behavior; one can see the need to be more nearly what humans normally have been for eons; one can see alienation and attempts to feel better by becoming less alienated in youth gangs, in rock concerts, in football, in basketball, in fundamentalism, in hiking and camping, in gardening, in keeping pets, in many forms of music and dancing; and in general—once one starts looking at the world through this lens—all around us.
This philosophical perspective implies that the things young people ordinarily do to make themselves feel better tend on the whole to make them less alienated. Of course sometimes they make mistakes and end up feeling more alienated when they aimed to feel less alienated, but if, for example, millions of them enthusiastically follow World Cup soccer as fans of one team or another, it is unlikely that they are all mistaken; it is much more likely that they become less alienated by identifying with something like a tribe.
Speaking generally, why young people do what they do is to be explained, insofar as it can be explained at all, partly by behavioral biology and partly by the social sciences. As a general rule biology and culture are intertwined. When the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda writes, for example, Quiero hacer contigo lo que hace la primavera con el cerezo (I want to do to you what the Spring does to the cherry tree) he illustrates the point that culture is both conventional and natural; it depends on the meanings of words and it also depends on vital physical energy. In spite of an intertwining that makes it hard or impossible to separate culture from biology, it is reasonable to believe that when a culture taps a vein of emotional energy that is deep and ancient, its institutions will motivate its people. It is also reasonable to believe that whatever a culture’s norms may prescribe, there will be a tendency for young people to follow the calls of their bodies.
To describe a person as “not alienated” generally means both that the person is in synch with her or his inherited characteristics and that the person is in synch with the community she or he lives in. Thus a young person who joins a criminal gang becomes in a sense less alienated because she or he acquires a quasi-tribal social life typical of homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time she or he becomes alienated from law-abiding citizens. But a young person who joins the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts usually becomes less alienated to a greater degree, because in addition to acquiring a quasi-tribal social life, she or he is not alienated from the surrounding mainstream society. The ideal of non-alienation is reached when the entire community is in synch with each other and with nature. (Olman )
Most contemporary social scientists work with research paradigms that do not include any concept of alienation. Nevertheless, research findings support my philosophical perspective, especially with respect to the causes and cures of loneliness. A great deal of evidence shows that young people thrive when they enjoy strong networks of personal support of non-market types, such as family and church; such as friends and neighbors and affinity groups associated with activities like sports, dance, music, and service to others. Building community bonds that revitalize connections decimated by radicalized modernity tends to produce healthy young people according to a number of plausible indicators. (Benson ; www.search-institute.org)
9. Unemployment, precarious employment, and low wages
A naturalistic philosophy which relativizes historically contingent institutions by putting them in a realist context facilitates the delivery of an urgent message humanity desperately needs to hear: the problems of employment cannot be solved in the terms in which they are conventionally posed. Employment is a contract. There will never be enough contracts of the right kinds; never enough employers able and willing to enter into an employment contract at a decent wage level with all the people who need good jobs.
Conventional unwisdom takes for granted the neo-Roman constitutive rules this book has been criticizing. It suffers from illusions, fallacies, ideological distortions, and unjustified optimism. There are so many of them. I cannot discuss them all. They resemble the endlessly proliferating epicycles within epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy before the heliocentric theory simplified that science.
By an illusion, I mean seeing things that are not there. An example would be seeing oneself as contributing to solving the unemployment problem by training people so that they will have job skills, as if that problem could be solved from the supply side by increasing the supply of qualified workers offering their skills in the job market.
By a fallacy, I mean drawing unwarranted conclusions from the empirical evidence. An example (a version of the fallacy of pars pro toto) is deducing from the fact that in the 1960s Switzerland achieved full employment, stable employment (for the Swiss, not counting the guest workers), and high wages, the conclusion that other nations can learn today from Switzerland how to achieve the results Switzerland achieved then. This example could be multiplied indefinitely citing nation after nation whose employment rates have been examined as if its level of employment were a function of its national policies. Immanuel Wallerstein succinctly explains why deducing conclusions about employment from national cases is likely to be a fallacy: at this point in history the global economy is the only existing economy. (Wallerstein 1995) There is no separate Swiss economy that can achieve full employment independently of its insertion into the global economy, and there is no way for the only existing system deserving to be called an economy in the full sense of the term, the global one, to achieve full employment everywhere by applying throughout policies once employed in a part of it (e.g. the Swiss part).
By an ideological distortion I mean systematic thinking distorted by power, the domination of the weak by the strong expressed at the level of science. Examples are the ideas that jobs are created by investment, and the related idea that the problems of employment can be solved by productivity gains. These ideas are not simply false. They are half-truths that are commonly used to serve some interests and prejudice others.
By unjustified optimism I mean expecting the problems of unemployment, precarious employment, and low wages to be solved within the framework provided by the constitutive rules of the basic structures of the modern world. One example is the belief that students of macroeconomic science staffing government ministries can use the policy instruments available to governments to solve those problems. An even greater optimism adjusts the criteria for success so that under the new criteria in some nations the problems have already been solved. An unemployment rate of at least 6%, a labor force whose jobs are precarious enough to make workers fear dismissal, and low wages are said to be desirable because they promote the efficient allocation of human resources in the labor market, maintain labor discipline, and enable a nation to compete internationally.
In this chapter designed less to introduce fresh concepts than to show that previously introduced ones have applications, I will limit my discussion of solutions to the problems of employment to just one example. It is taken from my own neighborhood. It could be multiplied by citing any of thousands of innovations that are breaking free from the dominant paradigm around the globe; some with government backing and some without; some inspired by feminism, some inspired by Buddhist ideals, some growing out of a version of anarchism or Marxism, some reviving the ways of life of indigenous cultures, some participating in the solidarity economics movement, some run by retired business people intent on reforming capitalism while preserving its merits, and some drawing their guiding ideas from yet other sources. Because they modify the basic rules the mainstream takes for granted, the innovators can do what the mainstream cannot do.
Most of the people in our neighborhood (which has a total population under 200) spend most of the year intoxicated, unemployed, or precariously employed. It is only an overall minority (although perhaps nearly a majority among the men) that spends a substantial portion of its time in the first category, and when the members of that minority are sober enough to be employable they too are usually either unemployed or precariously employed. (“Precariously” here means both having little work -- for example several of my neighbors are employed just two days a week-- and also being liable at any moment to lose the little work one has.) At the times of year when the demand for agricultural labor peaks almost everyone is steadily employed, but even then the wages are low, the equivalent of about ten US dollars a day. The neighborhood is also home for a substantial contingent of relatively prosperous people, among whom two are professional philosophers, myself and Gaston Soublette, professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Chile. Gaston once studied with the Italian disciple of Gandhi Lanzo del Vasto. The president of our local Neighbors’ Council is Rosa Rivera, a protestant pastor whose views generally favor treating Christianity not as a doctrine but as a practical way of life (Tolstoy ).
We (The first person plural refers in the first instance to Rosa, Gaston, and me, and in the second instance to the Neighbors’ Council) start from three premises:
1. People who do not have employment have time. They can cooperate with the neighbors, and the neighbors can cooperate with them.
2. Most people who do have employment cannot live on their wages. Wages need to be supplemented by cooperation with family, friends, and neighbors; by the churches and by the government.
3. People should share what they have a surplus of, be it money, time, talents, food, special skills, or something else. (See the ABCD manual for identifying and mobilizing a community’s resources, McKnight 2004).
The explicit and implicit deviations of these premises from the framework framed by the neo-Roman constitutive rules are hopefully self-evident enough that they need not be belabored.
A person in our neighborhood who has time on her or his hands can cooperate with the neighbors in any of a number of different ways, limited only by the needs and opportunities detected by the local knowledge (Geertz ) of the neighbors themselves. One way to help is to spend time at City Hall pursuing negotiations to get benefits for the neighborhood (for example paving, home improvement grants) out of one or more of the many programs funded by Chile’s social democratic government. The government supplements wages in a big way by running among other things a free public health service that puts richer countries like the United States to shame. Cleanup of streets and the nearby riverbed and organizing activities for children are other typical contributions of the unemployed. Two ladies bake bread. Gaston and I pay for the flour. The ladies and their families eat part of the bread, sell part of the bread, and with part of the bread they “cooperate” with people who are “cooperating.” Two other basic ways the cooperators are cooperated with is that the Neighbors’ Council runs a food bank and Rosa’s church runs a clothing bank; nobody need go hungry or badly clothed. The Food Bank gets contributions from me, Gaston, Rosa’s church, smaller amounts from other neighbors, and especially from farm laborers who from time to time get gifts from their bosses. It often happens that food is harvested but the market price is so low that it does not pay to ship it; or else the truck to take produce to the city is full and there is produce left over. In such cases, the boss gives the leftovers to the workers, and if the worker lives in our neighborhood then crates of bell peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, or green beans end up being shared. Once the food bank got a gift of twenty chickens.
The general idea is that everybody cooperates with what they have to offer, and nobody’s needs are neglected. On the whole, most of the neighbors seem to understand this general idea perfectly well, as if they had seen it before, as Plato would say, walking behind the gods in a previous incarnation; as if they had been born with it already lodged in their memories waiting there to be awakened.
10. War, which at this point in history is usually civil war
See Richards 2004, Richards 2007. The former is largely an endorsement of the views of the Finnish critical realist Heikki Patomaki, who is professor of international relations at University of Helsinki. See Patomaki 2002.
11. Crime
Austria in the 1960s was a place where the crime rate approached zero. It had a number of characteristics that explained its low crime rate. If “explain” is deemed to be too strong a word, one could say instead that it had a number of characteristics consistent with plausible beliefs about what it takes, starting with the human body as raw material, to build a culture in which almost all of the people respect each other’s persons and property, and in which the few who do not can fairly easily be kept under control.
Austria in the 1960s enjoyed full or nearly full employment. It was a comprehensive welfare state with cradle to grave security for everyone. After centuries of Hapsburg autocracy, barely a decade of contentious democracy, the Dollfuss dictatorship and the Hitler dictatorship, and with the Soviet bloc beginning at its eastern border, Austria had become a democracy again at the end of World War II. The two principal parties were the Catholic party (literally the People’s or Volk’s party, whose name carries all the mystical connotations of Volk) and the Socialist Party. The two parties expressed two different ideologies, each of which in its own way affirmed human values and gave young people (and adults) something positive to live for distinct from self and ephemeral pleasure. After a violent century of class struggle, the two main parties had the good sense to form a coalition governing by consensus and not by confrontation. Their social engineering was inspired by principles common to Christian social doctrine (remember that the Austrian theologian Karl Rahner was perhaps the most influential figure in drafting the Vatican II documents) and Austro-Marxism. (Remember that Austrian Marxists had their own distinctive theoretical tradition; moreover they had experience participating in democratic governments, since their candidates had been elected to be the mayors of “Red Vienna” during the 1920s.) Austrian civil society was highly organized, rich in what is today called social capital.
Almost everybody was a member of a church and/or a labor union and/or a political party and/or a professional association and/or one or another Bund. Austria was and to some extent still is the nation of the Bund, a club-union-association gathered around some purpose, pretext, or affinity in which people band together and bond together. Vienna was and to a small extent still is the city of the coffee house. People who lived in small apartments went to coffee houses at night to socialize with friends and read newspapers. In previous decades, political parties had sponsored coffee houses where their members and sympathizers read the party’s publications. The justification of crime I have regularly heard from prisoners in jails, that as long as the leisure class is filthy rich they have a right to take their share, had little application in social-democratic Austria. Incomes were becoming less unequal. The major industries were in the public sector, not because the government had nationalized them but because it had inherited them from Hitler and had declined to privatize them. Hard-core criminologists will regard this as speculative, but please allow me to mention too that Austria is a music-loving country. (Thank you for allowing me to mention this.) Austria must be rated as in general highly cultured compared to most other nations, even if one is careful to distinguish elite cultures from mass cultures. For Plato and Schiller, who hold, respectively, that beauty prepares the soul for the entrance of right reason, and that the brute sentiments of the human animal are not ready for ethics until they are refined by esthetics, Austria in the 1960s is a confirmatory case. For Plato disorderly conduct is associated with disorderly music. I know of no confirmatory study, but I would beg leave to suggest the hypothesis that now when the crime rate in Austria has gone up again, the unemployed youths of Austria listen to the same disorderly music unemployed youths in the rest of the world listen to. (Now there are unemployed youths in Austria because there is no longer full employment.) And I suggest the further hypothesis that the association between disorderly conduct and disorderly music is as Plato would have predicted.
Readers who have attentively read the eleven philosophical chapters between the initial list of problems and these final two chapters sketching solutions to them will recognize in this brief discussion of crime another call to make visible, to evaluate, and to modify the basic constitutive rules of modern society. Although I have not said why the crime rate in Austria went up again, they know what I have in mind. Achieving respect for law requires getting social democracy back on track. Social democracy was advancing after World War II in Austria and elsewhere, but later its advance slowed, stopped, and reversed. Within the confines of the dominant paradigm, it is stymied. Such readers will also notice the pragmatic and Wittgensteinian treatment of Catholicism and Marxism as potential sources of cultural resources that may (or may not) be useful (or harmful) in a context. They will detect a frank acknowledgement that if we cannot somehow work with the cultural resources available at a given time and place to establish the authority of functional social norms we cannot do anything else.
12. Drugs
University life inevitably assigns some degree of priority to the issues that immediately concern the personal lives of the students. In this context, which was Foucault’s context for most of his life, before asking how to solve the drug problem one needs to ask whether it is a problem. Along with sex and alcohol, drugs are sources of pleasure for students. In such a subculture, words can take on specialized local meanings. “Conservative” can refer to a woman whose garments conceal her breasts. “Christian” can refer to students who do not smoke marijuana.
In his last works, the several published volumes and the miscellaneous writings devoted to the history of sexuality, Foucault reviews at length the opinions of Greek and Roman philosophers regarding what I shall label the perennial issues of pleasure vs. control. Foucault is notoriously in favor of the former and against the latter. In his last years, he implicitly advocates using techniques for taking care of oneself (for example, to cite one of many, keeping a diary). One cares for oneself, not for the sake of anyone else, certainly not for the sake of society or God, not in obedience to rules, not in obedience to reason, not in any obedience, but for the purpose of being an improved self. Although he wavers sometimes toward the direction of education for good citizenship, as when he comments sympathetically on Roman texts saying that the practice of self discipline prepares one to be a master whose social role is to command others, on the whole late the late Foucault still endorses the individualistic ideal of making of one’s life a work of art, as did his life-long heroes Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille.
Smoking hashish is for Foucault an ornamental practice, making a beautiful life more beautiful still. Foucault’s great charm on campus, however, emanates more from his middle works than from his late works, less from his alternative lifestyle and more from his histories of power. His histories of the past are histories of the present. They are stories about ever-greater surveillance and control. They are stories about the entire world becoming a jail. Their message is more than likely to be heard by students as a welcome attack on the enemies of their pleasures.
In this book, I have been defending common sense against Foucault. Common sense says, and I agree, that when one moves beyond the limited and privileged social circles to which the preceding paragraphs essentially refer; when one brings into focus the suffering of the victims of drug-crazed delinquents and other ways drugs destroy lives, drugs are a problem. It then becomes relevant to ask how to solve it.
My suggestions regarding drugs are for the most part the same as those regarding alienated youth. Among the things people tend to do spontaneously (or with a little encouragement) to make themselves feel better, some are anti-social, some are harmless, and some are pro-social. Weaving the third and the second into the warp and woof of family and community activities crowds out the first. Hopefully people will learn that feeling better is not the end and aim of life at all, but even if they never learn that philosophical lesson, bonding adventures that satisfy the body and the soul will make them healthy enough that they will have no motive for turning to dangerous drugs to relieve misery and boredom.
Law enforcement and treatment for those already addicted are important, but obviously, they cannot solve the problem alone. With respect to treatment, the viewpoint outlined in the preceding chapters makes it unsurprising that fundamentalist preachers, who according to scientific criteria know nothing, often succeed in curing alcoholism and drug addiction better than professionals who have the benefit of the findings of millions of dollars worth of research. A viewpoint that is both naturalistic and Wittgensteinian puts authority at the very heart of language; it asks what language does more than it asks what language means. It views both society and the individual personality as constituted by authority. Without authority, both disintegrate. There is a God-shaped hole in the human heart, a receptiveness to news of a higher power. The higher power is a person, often called a Person, as in early infancy the primary caregivers were persons. From this point of view, seeing the success of cognitively meaningless activities in fighting addiction is not just an empirical finding. It is a finding read in the light of a philosophical orientation that facilitates a realistic reading of the facts.
As to the soft drugs that are harmful mainly because using them forms in young people the habit of breaking the law, the best solution is to repeal the laws that ban them. But note: if hundreds of thousands of prisoners are freed because they have been jailed for violating laws that should not be on the books; if hundreds of thousands of underground drug dealers can no longer make a living because it is easier and cheaper to buy soft drugs above ground, and because fewer people buy drugs either soft or hard; if hundreds of thousands of police and prison guards and support personnel are no longer employed because there is less substance abuse to repress; then millions of new job-seekers will be thrown onto a job market where supply already exceeds demand. Therefore, employment problems need to be solved in order to solve drug problems. Therefore, the paradigm shift needed to solve employment problems is also needed to solve drug problems.
13. Sexism, racism, homophobia and other forms of illegitimate discrimination
I will sketch an application of the philosophy of rules-talk I have been recommending to solving problems of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Although my sketch will be about sexism, I believe the same principles could be applied to solving problems of racism and homophobia. (A more complete account of the method sketched here will be found in Richards and Swanger forthcoming.)
Simplifying, and hoping the reader will remember qualifications, nuances, exceptions and details I have provided elsewhere, a rule (or norm) is:
a. A regularity in the behavior of the group for which it is a rule
b. A license for criticism when it is violated, and
c. A guide consciously looked to for guidance
A sexist society is one whose rules prescribe discrimination against women. Of course, that society would not express its rules in just this way, for “discrimination” here is a pejorative term. A sexist society talks in a way that makes discrimination against women sound (at least to the males holding power in it) right and proper, perhaps even divine.
In a gender-equal society, the rules prescribe equality. Equality is generally practiced. Discrimination is the exception rather than the rule. Violation of the norm of gender equality licenses criticism. A woman discriminated against has a right to complain. She can expect an apology. The law may award her damages. People are normally guided by the equality norm, and when they slip up and make a mistake they will consciously correct their mistake.
In a fully sexist society, it does a woman no good to complain when she is discriminated against, because the rules whose violation she would like to complain about do not exist in that society. On the contrary, the society’s norms license criticism of the woman who rejects her subordinate role. Women themselves may have internalized their oppression.
Solving the problem of sexism (or racism, or homophobia) requires a culture shift that changes social norms. It requires replacing the old sexist (or racist, or homophobic) norms with rules prescribing gender equality (or racial equality, or sexual preference equality). More commonly in practice, a culture has mixed and conflicting norms. It may have a nominal commitment to gender equality while practicing sexist norms in daily life. The problem is to shift from partial sexism to complete gender (or racial, or sexual preference) equality.
The first step is consciousness-raising to establish communication. This is often done in English classes in schools through reading and discussing literary works. It is also done by getting women and men together separately to share experiences and reflect on them. It can be done anywhere where there is an opportunity to broaden people’s imagination and increase their sensibility in a non-threatening way. Consciousness raising makes sexism visible rather than invisible. It makes it an issue rather than an assumption. It makes it one set of norms that happens to exist among many possible sets of norms that might exist. It vividly displays the actual physical suffering (the physical makeup of human emotions is such that being humiliated is a form of physical suffering) of women subjected to sexist norms. The life-blocking consequences of dysfunctional social norms are shown so clearly as to be inescapable.
Even before the first step, as a step before the first step, a systematic anti-sexism (or anti-racism or anti-homophobia) program can begin with a study of the existing norms, the sexist ones, the ones to be changed. The results of the preliminary study provide a benchmark for measuring future progress as well as clues concerning how to communicate in language people will understand. The staff of the Centro de Investigacion y Desarrollo de la Educacion (CIDE) in Santiago, Chile, prefaced educational work in a highly sexist rural area in Chile with an anthropological study of its existing norms. After two years of anti-sexist educational work, they did a follow up anthropological study to see whether the norms had changed. (They had.) (Martinic )
The next step after raising consciousness to establish communication is to look for growth points and nurture them. A growth point is a place in the existing culture where there is energy for change and where transformation is conceivable. It can be something introduced that strikes a responsive chord, thus showing that there was a potential for response already there, a chord waiting to be struck. Not every culture shift is possible. The possible ones are the ones that can be hinged to something in the existing culture the people have a frame of reference for understanding.
In another CIDE project (not the same one) an image of a man changing diapers proved to be a growth point. It got people talking and excited. It showed the beginning of a conceivable transformation. It energized both the women and the men. As it turned out the men for the most part enjoyed their new roles as partners in child care. There was no way to predict a priori that this would happen in this particular culture at this particular time. Growth points have to be located and nurtured in practice without preconceived ideas about what they will turn out to be.
Thinking in terms of rules helps to distinguish two rather different sorts of activity: (1) Working to strengthen gender (or racial or sexual preference) equality where it is to some extent already the social norm: and (2) Working to transform cultures that are explicitly sexist, racist, or homophobic. The idea that culture grows out of physical reality leads to thinking about how to find energy for change (as well as to thinking about how to understand and cope with energy that resists change).
14. Inflation and economic instability generally
Money is commonly described as having three functions. I recommend that it be described as having at least six functions.
1. Money is a means for meeting the needs of life. Here money meets metabolism. For the body to move the muscles must have fuel in the form of sugars, as well as Oxygen and water. The fuel comes to the muscles from the blood; the blood gets the fuel from the digestive system. It enters the digestive system by way of the mouth and the throat. It gets to the mouth by way of the kitchen, and it comes to the kitchen from the market. In order to exit the market it must pass a cash register where a ceremony is performed. The agent of the owner of the food receives money. The consumer pays money.
Therefore, it is an ethical imperative that every human being have money.
2. Money is a means for imposing social discipline. In order to own money legitimately people must obey the accepted rules. Our current rules prescribe that it is legitimate to acquire money by gift, by inheritance, as an entitlement, as a prize or reward, or by selling something. Most people acquire money by selling their services, and thus they place themselves under the authority of an employer. Anthony Giddens has suggested that the largest single factor maintaining social discipline in modern society is people’s fear of losing their jobs. One might add the hope of getting a job, or of getting a better job. And something similar might be said about the self-employed who need to follow appropriate social norms to please their customers. These suggestions make significant points about the societies we live in, even though it would be hard to spell out exactly what evidence would count as showing them to be true.
It seems to me to follow from the above that measures to comply with the ethical imperative that everybody should have money need to be careful not to remove the existing forms of social discipline without putting any others in their place. The people who get easy money without working for it –whether members of the rentier class, or proletarians on the dole, or anyone else—should practice other forms of discipline to compensate for being liberated from the discipline imposed by the need to earn money.
3. Money motivates production. Under capitalism, the purpose of production is to turn money into more money.
4. Money is a medium of exchange. This and (5) and (6) following are the three commonly described functions of money. From a liberal utopian viewpoint, it is sufficient to establish free markets where money facilitates exchanges, and it is not necessary to mention my functions 1, 2, and 3. They are automatically performed by money functioning as a medium of exchange. Function 1 is performed (with a few exceptions which even liberal utopians would regard as charity cases entitled to public or private aid) because everybody has something to offer for sale, and whatever is offered will be sold (Say’s Law). Function 2 is performed because sellers will discipline themselves to please their buyers (consumer sovereignty). In a free market production (function 3) will be maximized and optimized (equilibrium). I believe the viewpoint I am here calling liberal utopian to be mistaken, but not completely mistaken. It highlights some important aspects of the world as it is while it obscures others. (See Richards 2007)
5. Money is a store of value. John Maynard Keynes in his writings on money points out that long before there were monies issued by governments and central banks, money developed as a convenient way to save; it was gold, silver, cattle, seashells… People held onto things with a low carrying cost: they did not deteriorate they were always in demand; they did not cost much to maintain. Money was a way to preserve assets over time.
It is only because money is a stable store of value that it is able to function as a medium of exchange. It is for this reason that inflation wreaks havoc with the modern world-system as it is presently constituted.
6. Money functions in keeping accounts. It does not only motivate production (function 3). It also organizes production. Business people do not know how to run enterprises, not even non-profit enterprises or public sector enterprises, without keeping books. The books tell how much money is spent and why and how much money comes in and why. The bottom line requires receivables to exceed payables. (Most contemporary enterprises have Mission Statements that define the bottom line as more than that, but it must be at least that.) The system is always unstable (“All that is solid melts into air”) partly because since one firm’s receivable is another firm’s payable, it is impossible for all firms simultaneously to have receivables exceeding payables. This does not mean that the only way to achieve stability is to build a completely different system. There are many ways to add stability to the system, supplementing it with a number of different logics, including many which already exist and function even today when the logic of accumulation is in important respects dominant. (See Henderson, Gibson-Graham 1996). In any case, without using money to keep accounts, modern social institutions cannot function. This does not mean that profits must necessarily accumulate in the hands of the idle rich. There are many ways to recycle the bottom line into socially useful channels after it has performed its organizing functions.
Stating the functions of money in this way suggests ways to solve the problem of inflation without falling into the illusions of either the liberal utopians or unreconstructed old-fashioned Keynesians. The monetarists are fundamentally right to say that it is undesirable to pursue social objectives by increasing the money supply, partly because of the havoc wrought by a debased currency and partly because the resulting social gains, given the constitutive rules of the system (as partly reflected in functions two, three, five, and six above) usually prove to be disappointing and temporary. This is not to deny that the damage done by moderate and more or less anticipated inflation is often exaggerated. Increasing the quantity of money in circulation is sometimes the lesser of evils because all the presently available alternatives are worse. Albert Hirschmann once wrote that inflation is a remarkable invention that allows a society to live in an intermediate state between the extremes of social harmony and civil war. (Hirschmann 1981). He had in mind, for example, the need to grant symbolic satisfaction of distributional claims in the form of money payments, where physical satisfaction of the claims was impossible because there were not enough physical assets to go around.
Accepting that for the most part social objectives should not be pursued by increasing the money supply does not mean that social objectives should not be pursued. It is possible to be sure everyone has money (Function 1) to meet their vital needs by making transfers in various ways from those who have more to those who have less. This is more painful than printing money but not impossible. It is possible to avoid the decadent bread and circuses of a replay of the end of the Roman Empire by building a learning society where there is no idleness because everybody who is not working is engaged in some educational, cultural, athletic, religious, or other worthwhile disciplined activity. (Function 2) It is possible to augment production without relying, or relying less, on profit incentives payable into the private coffers of the over privileged in hard currency. (Function 3) Exchange can be a transparent process which is evaluated and revised according to how markets perform. Exchange can be supplemented by gift-giving, entitlements, and other ways to meet needs. (Function 4) The amount of money in circulation need not be unduly augmented to accomplish any of the above. (Function 5) Accounting can be improved to measure social as well as financial efficiency. Good accounting lends itself to the social recycling of profits (Function 6).
Money probably has other functions I have not thought of or listed. It is not easy to make even the six functions I have listed compatible with each other. In particular, as Keynes dramatically demonstrated, saving (Function 5) interrupts circulation (Function 4), leading to a drag on prosperity for lack of effective demand and a chronic tendency to unemployment and underemployment (frustrating Function 1 and Function 2) and a chronic tendency toward recession (frustrating Function 3). Nevertheless, taking a realistic and pragmatic view of the problems of inflation and economic instability takes one at least half way toward their solutions.
References
Peter Benson
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge
Albert O. Hirschmann, Essays in Trespassing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
John McKnight, A Method for Identifying and Mobilizing Community Resources. Chicago: ATLA Publishers
Bertel Olman, Alienation
Hazel Henderson,
J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism as we Knew It. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Plato, Meno
Heikki Patomaki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (re)Construction of World Politics. London: Routledge, 2002.
Howard Richards, “A Logical Plan for Peace,” in Howard Richards, Understanding the Global Economy. Santa Barbara CA: Peace Education Books, 2004.
Howard Richards, “On Ending War” 2007 at www.howardrichards.org
Howard Richards, Solidaridad, Participcion, Transparencia. Rosario, Argentina: Fundacion Estevez Boero, 2007.
Howard Richards and Joanna Swanger, “Culture Change: a Practical Method with a Theoretical Basis,” in Joseph de Rivera (ed.) Manual for Building Cultures of Peace. New York: Springer, forthcoming.
Schiller, The Esthetic Education of Man
Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
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