A Thinking Reed

Category: Books

  • Aliens without sin

    Recently I’ve been reading A Case of Conscience by James Blish. This is a science fiction novel written in the 50s about a Jesuit priest/biologist studying a race of reptillian anthropoids on a distant planet. They have a seemingly perfect ethical society without friction or conflict, but also utterly destitute of religion or any sense of transcendence. He thus concludes that they are, literally, spawn of the Devil!

    I haven’t finished it yet, but it provides an interesting contrast with C. S. Lewis’ Out On the Silent Planet where an Earthman encounters “unfallen” extraterrestrials. One of the chief differences is that the aliens have a kind of natural rapport with God and the humans are almost uniformly malicious and predatory. Lewis expressed in a few different places his firm belief that nothing good could come from human encounters with extraterrestrials. He was convinced that we would treat them pretty much the way European colonists treated indigenous peoples. Being subject to Original Sin, he thought humanity should be quarantined.

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century.

    Small Is Still Beautiful is one among a recent spate of books re-thinking what it means to be conservative in light of the apparent triumph of global capitalism and the preeminence of America as global hegemon. Fans of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (review here) and Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America (review here) will find much to like here, as Pearce upholds the small, familiar and local against the forces of globalized homogeneity.

    Pearce doesn’t break much new ground in terms of fundamental ideas; this book is more of an update of Schumacher’s original. But this actually works well since Schumacher’s ideas seem just as timely now as they did thirty years ago. The issues that this book grapples with – our insatiable appetite for growth, environmental despoilation, and the plight of local communities – have gained a new resonance in recent years.

    If you had to boil down Schumacher’s (and Pearce’s) message into a pithy maxim, I think it would be that “Economics was made for man, not man for economics.” Schumacher’s vision was rooted in a view of humankind as having transcendent worth, but also part of an ordered cosmos that has its own beauty and integrity. For Schumacher, much of the problem of conventional economic thinking was that it subordinated the ends of human life to the means of economic production – a complete reversal of the proper order of things.

    Pearce sees both cause for worry and celebration in the events that have transpired since Small Is Beautiful was originally published. On the one hand, many of the worrying trends Schumacher identified have only accelerated: neoliberal globalization and its attendant monoculture, skewed theories of development that privilege intensive industrial production and agriculture, and, of course, the worship of centralization and “giantism.” On the other hand, a counter-movement of organic farmers, craft brewers, proponents of local economies, co-ops, and movements for political decentralization have also made a surprising amount of headway.

    The underlying premise of Schumacher’s work is that unlimited economic growth in the pursuit of meeting a never-ending stream of consumer demands is “unnatrual” in the deepest possible sense. It goes against the grain of human nature in that it won’t satisfy our deepest longings, and it threatens to destroy the fragile biosphere upon which we and all other life depend. Only a reorientation of our economic and political life toward proper human ends – joy, wisdom, peace – can stave off an ecological disaster.

    This view is both radical and conservative in that it requires a massive re-thinking of the political and economic status quo, but does so in the name of a very traditional, even religious, view of human beings and their destiny. Schumacher’s less-known work, A Guide for the Perplexed, actually presents the key to his thought here. His aim in that work was to recover the traditional metaphysical view of humanity and the universe that underlies what Huston Smith calls the “wisdom traditions” of the world. This philosophia perennis stands in stark opposition to the materialism of post-Englightenment modernity.

    Pearce, like Schumacher, is a practicing Catholic who combines what we’d call social conservatism with economic positions well to the “left” of most Democrats, much less Republicans. He opposes “free trade” and thinks government policy should favor small businesses and local producers. He takes the issue of climate change and environmental degradation with the utmost seriousness, seeing them as direct consequences of growth-oriented and inequitable economic policy. He excoriates the World Bank and IMF and their regimes of “structural adjustment” programs for developing nations. And he opts for organic farming as the only way to save the land from destruction at the hands of intensive agriculture.

    Somewhat confusingly, and despite the subtitle, Pearce says little directly about families. There are a few asides about the ways in which market capitalism breaks up social bonds, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. But very little is said about how families in particular are affected. For instance, it seems to me that Pearce could’ve made a lot of hay out of the way that our current economic practices force parents to work long hours, depriving them of the opportunities to spend time with their children as well as to participate in their communities.

    I have to say that this book likely won’t convince anyone who isn’t already at least somewhat familiar with and somewhat sympathetic to Schumacher’s original arguments. But Pearce has done us a service even if the only effect of his book is to send people (particularly the more conservative-leaning people likely to read this) back to Schumacher’s original works. And beyond that, it’s nice to see Schumacherian principles applied to the current scence, giving us a picture of their continuing relevance.

    P.S.     Dear Publishers: I would be happy to review books like this when they come out instead of waiting till they’re available at the library. Please feel free to send review copies. 😉

  • September reading notes

    Well, okay, the month isn’t over yet, but it sure is flying.

    Earlier I mentioned I was still working on Monbiot’s Heat. Well, I still am. Just haven’t been in the mood to read it. ‘Nuff said.

    Finished Jame’s Alison’s Raising Abel. I stand by my earlier claim that, while Alison has some absolutely brilliant insights, I don’t think his Girardian analysis does justice to the entirety of the biblical witness. I also feel like he has an allergy to metaphysics and is forced to account for everything Christ does for us in sheerly psychological terms, which seems reductionistic to me.

    Picked up a copy of Gerhard Forde’s Justification by Faith – A Matter of Death and Life for a quarter at a church yard sale. This is vintage Forde – pithy, direct and committed above all to the Reformation insight of justification by faith. Forde stresses the language of death and resurrection as a necessary complement to the more forensic “legal” language we often use to talk about justification. I also read Carl Braaten’s Justification: The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls wherein Braaten makes a surprisingly (to me, anyway) robust defense of justification by faith alone. I say surprisingly because of what appeared to me to be his move to a more “catholic” position in recent years. Taken together these two books provide a good picture of what commitment to the principles of the Reformation can look like in the contemporary theological and ecumenical scene.

    Right now I’m working on Reza Aslan’s No god but God, which is both a history of Islam and an argument for a more pluralistic understanding of Islam. Extremely informative and well-written, though at times one does get the feeling that Aslan is whitewashing a bit. He essentially shrugs off Muhammad’s military conquests with “that’s the way things were done then” and gives a rather idyllic picture of Christian and Jewish minorities under Islamic rule. Still, a very interesting book and I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes with his argument for why Islamic militants have Islam wrong.

  • The anti-utopian

    Nice profile (from a couple of months ago) of the eclectic and eccentric British political thinker John Gray. I’ve always found Gray’s stuff fascinating, and this piece puts his various ideological twists and turns (from Thatcherite neo-liberal, to skeptic of neo-liberalism, to all-around pessimist) in context.

    (Found here.)

  • Scapegoats, sacrifice, and the “violence” of God

    In addition to the other books I’ve been juggling, this weekend I started reading James Alison’s Raising Abel, which carries the subtitle “Recovering the Eschatological Imagination.”

    Alison is a great writer and offers some startling insights that bring new life to seemingly obscure theological concepts, but here I want to think a little bit about his Girard-inspired reimagining of God.

    For those who don’t know, Rene Girard is a literary critic and anthropological theorist who has been very influential in certain theological circles. Girard’s most well-known contibutions revolve arround his account of human desire, violence, and scapegoating.

    Girard holds that all human desire is mimetic, that is, we desire something because we see someone else desiring it. Our selves are “socially constructed” in that we model ourselves after others, prior to even being aware of it.

    But it’s easy to see how the process of mimesis can breed conflict. If A and B both desire some good which only one can possess, competition and conflict are ready to hand.

    In Girard’s account, the way that conflict and the “war of each against all” is defused is by (subconsciously) directing the violence it creates against an innocent person – the scapegoat. But in order to hide the murder human beings tell stories about why it was necessary for this person to be expelled from the community in order to maintain/restore order. Thus, the way human beings run thing is inevitably tainted by violence against the innocent.

    Girard has applied these insights to the Gospel stories, arguing that in the New Testament we see, for the first time, a scapegoat who is recognized to be innocent. Thus the “scapegoating mechanism” is unmasked and the possibility of living non-violently is made a reality.

    Alison picks up on these Girardian themes and applies them more generally to the biblical story. For Alison, the revelation that comes to us in the Bible, albeit gradually and piecemeal, is that of God as entriely without violence.

    Though there are certainly passages aplenty that seem to involve God in violence, Alison argues that the overall trajectory, culminating in the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is toward a vision of God who is utterly “deathless,” that is, has nothing to do with death and violence.

    And Jesus, in living a human life whose imagination is utterly possessed by this vision of God, makes it possible for us to live without reference to death. The reason this is so important is because all our violence is aimed ultimately at securing ourselves against the threat of death. Only when that fear is dispelled (by Jesus’ resurrection) can we begin to live non-violently.

    As I discussed briefly here, Alison sees this “Girardian” reading of the biblical text as having revolutionary implications for our understanding of Atonement. In some accounts of the Atonement the death of Jesus is taken to “satisfy” God’s wrath.

    There is some difference of opinion about whether God’s “wrath” should be understood as a personal anger against sin or more of an impersonal “force” – the inevitable consequences of human sin. But Alison contends that God has nothing to do with wrath.

    “Wrath” in Alison’s telling is our violence. We falsely attribute the violence that seems necessary to maintain order and security to the divine will. To say that Jesus experienced wrath is really to say that, in living a life of love perfectly infused with the vision of God, he fell afoul of our violence, the way by which we maintain order in this world. As I quoted Alison previously:

    God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

    In large part, what the death of Christ accomplishes is a change in our perception. Instead of thinking that the death of the “outsider” is necessary to maintain good order (which is identified with the will of God), the manifest innocence of this victim allows us to see that God is without wrath and that order of death and violence by which we run things here is our creation.

    It’s difficult to deny the power in Alison’s revisioning of traditional theological motifs, however I do worry that, in applying the Girardian interpretive grid to the Bible, he ends up seeing a God that fits the Girardian spectacles. In other words, is the Bible really saying what he says it’s saying? I, at any rate, find it tough to expunge the New Testament of more traditional renderings of “sacrifice” and the idea of God’s wrath.

    Part of what’s going on here is a broader argument in contemporary theology about whether there is any “violence” in God. Much of the criticism of “Anselmian” atonement theologies (often bearing little resemblance to what Anselm actually said), for instance, insists that they picture a God who inflicts, or at least approves of, violence.

    Of course, “violence” is a loaded term and it might be more helpful to talk about “force” and when force may or may not be justified. Also, in some circles, the concept of violence has become absurdly inflated to the point where any exercise of power or influence is deemed “violent.”

    But, even with all these qualifications, it still remains to ask whether the Bible and Christian tradition attibute “violence” to God (understood as some kind of opposition, exclusion, or expulsion) or whether God is characterized simply by unconditional acceptance. In his book Free of Charge, contemporary theologian Miroslav Volf writes about how the events in his homeland in the former Yugoslavia convinced him of the reality of God’s wrath:

    My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love. (Volf, Free of Charge, pp. 138-9)

    Volf goes on immediately to point out that, of course, we can’t exempt ourselves from being subject to God’s judgment without inconsistency. The perpetrator isn’t “the other,” but all have sinned and fallen short. And therefore all fall under just condemnation.

    However, contrary to what some modern critics maintain, a properly “Anselmian” account of redemption is more restorative than retributive. Human beings, according to Anselm, are made for felicity with God, but sin necessarily cuts us off from that. Our sin mars God’s creation and so we properly fall under God’s wrath, as Volf says.

    But God doesn’t want to punish us, according to Anselm. Punishment would be a decidedly second-best outcome, and Anselm’s God never does what is second-best. So God, in order to bring to completion his intentions for creation restores fallen humanity in the person of Jesus. This restored humanity is no longer the object of God’s wrath and the same goes for any who are incorporated into it (by “pleading Christ’s sacrifice”).

    And yet, there is no question that God opposes those things which distort or destroy the proper ends of his creatures. The difference is that God will go to whatever lengths are necessary to see his creation brought to fulfillment. So, it is perhaps possible to speak of God’s “violence” in that God will exclude from creation all that which threatens to destroy it.

    Whether or not this is a pernicious form of violence is, of course, disputable. But it seems to me that “non-violence” shouldn’t be an a priori axiom that dictates the shape of theology, but rather theology should shape our understanding of violence and when, if ever, violence is justifiable.

    I’m not sure Alison is guilty of this kind of “a priorism” (for starters, I’m only half-way through the book!), but it does seem to be a danger for theologians when they use an interpretive scheme to sift what counts as a genuine revelation of God.

  • August reading notes

    Some highlights from the past month:

    I blogged a bit about Keith Ward’s latest, Re-Thinking Christianity here, here and here. Ward continues his streak of intelligent, accessible theology that straddles the popular and the academic. The takeaway lesson from RC is that there isn’t exactly an unchanging core of doctrine, but that Christianity has changed throughout its history, sometimes in quite radical ways. And yet, Ward doesn’t draw the conclusion that therefore Christianity is a sham; he maintains that the history of Christianity is properly seen as an ongoing response to the God disclosed and incarnate in Jesus.

    Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals is an earlier work (published in the late 80s) that anticipates many of the themes in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel, but it delves more into the underlying assumptions of his theology: creation as gift with intrinsic value, God as fellow-sufferer and redeemer of all creation, animals as bearers of “theos-rights.” As such it’s a bit more systematic and synoptic, while being a relatively easy read. A good place to start for someone looking for an “animal-friendly” take on Christianity, though the conclusions Linzey draws are quite radical.

    I’m still working my way through George Monbiot’s Heat. Monbiot is both extremely pessimistic about the dangers of climate change and optimistic that it’s possible to actually cut our carbon emissions by the requisite 90% or so while still retaining something like a modern industrial economy. Monbiot is a very engaging writer, willing to admit when he’s not sure about something, unafraid to take on shibboleths, including those of environmentalists, and passionate about his cause. I may post some more about this in the near future.

  • Ends and means, again

    E.F. Schumacher on “Buddhist economics”:

    While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern–amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

    For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. […] The ownership and consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.

    Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production–land, labour, and capital–as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. (Small Is Beautiful, pp. 57-58)

  • Schumacher on the poverty of economics

    It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very center of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern socieites. In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive as the word “uneconomic.” If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper. — E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, pp. 41-42

    Schumacher’s work holds up surprisingly well considering that it was published in the early 70s. The issues he identifies are still with us and, if anything, may have intensified in the last 30+ years. The chapter that this quote comes from addresses the fragmentary nature of economics – its inability to deal with subject matter that falls outside its methodology. This is worth recalling in a time where economics has taken on something like an aura of omnicompetence, and the bestseller list is full of books applying the principles of economics to everyday life.

    The argument is pretty straightforward: economics, valuable as it is within its own domain, presupposes a host of non-economic facts as given. And its quantitative nature renders it inadequate for dealing with questions of quality (or, we might say, value). Thus we get a model of “the Market” where there is an inexhaustible supply of goods, and everything is, in principle, convertible into everything else (i.e. there are no incommensurable values).

    The market therefore represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them. In a sense, the market is the institutionalisation of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself. It would be “uneconomic” for a wealthy seller to reduce his prices to poor customers merely because they are in need, or for a wealthy buyer to pay an extra price merely because the supplier is poor. Equally, it would be “uneconomic” for a buyer to give preference to home-produced goods if imported goods are cheaper. He does not, and is not expected to, accept responsibility for the country’s balance of payments. (p. 44)

    What’s in question is not the usefulness of the model, but the consequences of mistaking the model for the reality:

    Economics deals with a virtually limitless variety of goods and services, produced and consumed by an equally limitless variety of people. It would obviously be impossible to develop any economic theory at all, unless one were prepared to disregard a vast array of qualitative distinctions. But it should be just as obvious that the total suppression of qualitative distinctions, while it makes theorising easy, at the same time makes it totally sterile. Most of the “conspicuous developments of economics in the last quarter of a century” (referred to by Professor Phelps Brown) are in the direction of quantification, at the expense of the understanding of qualitative differences. Indeed, one might say that economics has become increasingly intolerant of the latter, because they do not fit into its method and makes demands on the practical understanding and the power of insight of economists, which they are unable or unwilling to fulfill. For example, having established by his purely quantitative methods that the Gross National Product of a country has risen by, say, five per cent, the economist-turned-econometrician is unwilling, and generally unable, to face the question of whether this is to be taken as a good thing or a bad thing. He would lose all his certainties if he even entertained such a question: growth of GNP must be a good thing, irrespective of what has grown and who, if anyone, has benefited. The idea that there could be pathological growth, unhealthy growth, disruptive or destructive growth is to him a perverse idea which must not be allowed to surface. A small minority of economists is at present beginning to question how much further “growth” will be possible, since infinite growth in a finite environment is an obvious impossibility; but even they cannot get away from the purely quantitative growth concept. Instead of insisting on the primacy of qualitative distinctions, they simply substitute non-growth for growth, that is to say, one emptiness for another. (pp. 47-48)

    One of the most important qualitative distinctions Schumacher has in mind is that between primary and secondary goods. Primary goods are those which human beings don’t produce, i.e. natural resources. Secondary goods are the products and services which we make, but which have their ultimate origin in the natural world. To pretend that all goods are equal in the sense of being convertible in principle and given a monetary value is to fail to recognize the essential incommensurability between these different categories of goods.

    Additionally, he refers to meta-economic factors which are presupposed by economics but not adequately dealth with by its concepts. The entire natural environment, especially things not amenable to private appropriation like air, water, and soil, constitutes the framework that any economic activity depends on, but they typically fail to appear in economic calculation and therefore the damage that economic activity may cause them is ignored. This is a bit like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

    All of these considerations can, perhaps, be summed up under the heading of ends versus means. Economics can tell us what means are most efficient for acheiving given ends, but it can’t tell us what ends are worth pursuing. It may be that it’s not the economists who are at fault here, but the policy makers who are too timid to question the value of things like limitless growth. Debates about things like trade agreements or how best to address climate change are almost inevitably couched in economic terms, with the unspoken assumption being that anything which threatens aggregate economic growth is ipso facto bad and anything which promotes it is good, regardless of their effect on non-economic values.

    The trouble about valuing means above ends–which, as confirmed by Keynes, is the attitude of modern economics–is that it destroys man’s freedom and power to choose the ends he really favours; the development of means, as it were, dictates the choice of ends. Obvious examples are the pursuit of supersonic transport speeds and the immense efforts made to land men on the moon. The conception of these aims was not the result of any insight into real human needs and aspirations, which technology is meant to serve, but solely of the fact that the necessary technical means appeared to be available. (p. 51)

    It may be that in a diverse and pluralistic society “growing the GDP” provides a convenient lowest-common-denominator goal that (nearly) everyone can agree on. But I think it’s safe to say that in the last 30 years or so since Schumacher wrote this we’ve become more aware of the impact the pursuit of growth at all costs is having not only on the natural world, but on our communities and human happiness. What’s less clear is that we still have a public language for debating whether things are not only “uneconomic” but “immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations.” “Mere” aesthetics, value judgments, philosophy, religion, etc. have been largely relegated, at least among the elite classes, to matters of private judgment or sheer preference, while economics retains its reputation as a hard-headed empirical science. As such, it seems to provide a more “objective” basis for policy-making, despite well-founded critiques like Schumacher’s.

  • Spong’s Jesus

    Ben Myers at Faith and Theology reviews the new book Jesus for the Non-Religious by the notorious John Shelby Spong.

    Dr. Myers’ review is consistent with the impression I’ve long had of Spong’s work: in an attempt to be modern and relevant he evacuates Christianity of everything that makes it remotely interesting and weird and challenging. At that pont why not just sleep in on Sunday morning?

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises:

    In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

    Roepke was a free market economist, widely credited with Germany’s post-war economic recovery. He was also a deeply conservative thinker in the best sense who recognized that life is more than the market. His A Humane Economy argues that the market requires strong social, cultural and legal frameworks in order to function as it should without reducing social values to market values.

    Here’s a snippet:

    The questionable things of this world come to grief on their nature, the good ones on their own excesses. Conservative respect for the past and its preservation are indispensable conditions of a sound society, but to cling exclusively to tradition, history, and established customs is an exaggeration leading to intolerable rigidity. The liberal predilection for movement and progress is an equally indispensable counterweight, but if it sets no limits and recognizes nothing as lasting and worth preserving, it ends in disintegration and destruction. The rights of the community are no less imperative than those of the individual, but exaggeration of the rights of the community in the form of collectivism is just as dangerous as exaggerated individualism and its extreme form, anarchism. Ownership ends up in plutocracy, authority in bondage and despotism, democracy in arbitrariness and demagogy. Whatever political tendencies or currents we choose as examples, it will be found that they always sow the seed of their own destruction when they lose their sense of proportion and overstep their limits. In this field, suicide is the normal cause of death.

    The market economy is no exception to the rule. Indeed, its advocates, in so far as they are at all intellectually fastidious, have always recognized that the sphere of the market, of competition, of the system where supply and demand move prices and thereby govern production, may be regarded and defended only as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power. Society as a whole cannot be ruled by the laws of supply and demand, and the state is more than a sort of business company, as has been the conviction of the best conservative opinion since the time of Burke. Individuals who compete on the market and there pursue their own advantage stand all the more in need of the social and moral bonds of community, without which competition degenerates most grievously. As we have said before, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place in a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. It must be firmly contained within an all-embracing order of society in which the imperfections and harshness of economic freedom are corrected by law and in which man is not denied conditions of life appropriate to his nature. Man can wholly fulfill his nature only by freely becoming part of a community and having a sense of solidarity with it. Otherwise he leads a miserable existence and he knows it. (A Humane Economy, pp. 90-91)

    Here Roepke sounds a bit like John Paul II, who recognized the value and importance of markets for production and exchange, but the equal or greater importance of maintaining the value of things, especially human life, that cannot be reduced to exchange value. As he wrote in the encyclical Centesimus annus:

    It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. But this is true only for those needs which are “solvent”, insofar as they are endowed with purchasing power, and for those resources which are “marketable”, insofar as they are capable of obtaining a satisfactory price. But there are many human needs which find no place on the market. It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied, and not to allow those burdened by such needs to perish. It is also necessary to help these needy people to acquire expertise, to enter the circle of exchange, and to develop their skills in order to make the best use of their capacities and resources. Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity. Inseparable from that required “something” is the possibility to survive and, at the same time, to make an active contribution to the common good of humanity. (Para. 34)

    It’s probably no coincidence that Roepke, the son of a Lutheran pastor, enunciated a similar kind of Christian Democratic vision. American conservatism has, unfortunately, tended toward a kind of “vulgar libertarianism” in theory, which valorizes “the market” as the solution to all social problems. And in practice it has ironically tended toward corporatism – favors for big business that actually end up shielding them from the vicissitudes of the market.

    The interesting question to me is whether there is a space for Roepke-style “humane conservatism” to join with McKibbon-style grass-roots progressivism in offering an alternative to the kind of neoliberal version of globalization that many would argue threatens the social, moral, political, and ecological health of our society.