[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Idols of the Marketplace

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (August 11 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


As last week's post suggested, the forces that keep American families 
stuck on an economic treadmill, trying to meet new and challenging 
conditions with old and increasingly dysfunctional responses, are by no 
means entirely economic in nature. Despite the polite fiction that all 
players in the economic game are rational actors pursuing their own 
interests in free exchanges, most of the decisions individuals make in 
the course of that game involve precious little of the sort of rational 
deliberation the fiction suggests.

To begin with, of course, a great many of the choices are enforced. I 
think it was Anatole France who pointed out that equality under the law, 
as often as not, amounts to forbidding the rich as well as the poor to 
sleep under bridges, steal bread, or beg for coins in the street. For 
many Americans, and most people elsewhere in the world, the freedom to 
exchange their labor for money amounts to a Hobson's choice between 
sweatshop labor at poverty wages, on the one hand, and starving in the 
streets on the other. America's caste system is somewhat more flexible 
than average, and its privileged classes long ago figured out the 
advantages of opening their doors to a trickle of aspirants from below, 
but access to economic opportunity in America still depends to a very 
large extent on how much money your parents made.

Yet the power of cultural narratives and myths, a frequent theme in 
these essays, also plays a massive role in leading supposedly rational 
actors into the irrational decisions that shape so much of our 
collective lives these days. The twilight of the household economy, the 
theme of last week's post, is a good example. A number of my readers 
responded to the post with emails describing couples they knew who 
maintained two salaries, even though the costs incurred by doing so - 
professional childcare, commuting, office clothing, and more - far 
exceeded the income of the less lucrative of the two jobs. This is quite 
common nowadays, because the cultural narratives surrounding employment 
make it impossible for most American families to notice that their 
economic status might be improved noticeably by giving up one salary in 
exchange for full-time involvement by one family member in the household 
economy.

Behind the narratives that prop up this curious blindness, though, lies 
a broader pattern, and it's this that I want to discuss this week. For 
reasons rooted in history, it's difficult to talk about the theme I have 
in mind without stirring up passions of the most irrational and 
intemperate kind. Still, the attempt has to be made, because the 
narrative in question is turning out to be a massive barrier to 
constructive change as we approach the twilight of the industrial age. 
The cultural story I have in mind is the myth of the market.

The measure of a narrative's power is the extent to which its believers 
miss the fact that it's a culturally conditioned narrative, and treat it 
as an objective reality obvious to any unbiased observer. This condition 
is widespread enough in the case of today's market mythology that it's 
probably necessary to sketch out the narrative in some detail. In 
simplest terms, the myth of the market starts from the belief that all 
human economic activity naturally involves free exchanges of value in a 
free market, mediated by an accepted measure of value - that is, by 
money. The myth goes on to claim that any economic activity outside the 
world of market exchanges either doesn't count, doesn't contribute to 
prosperity, or is a bad thing that can only be redeemed by bringing it 
within the sacred precincts of the market. Finally, the myth insists, 
anything that restricts or regulates the choices made by participants in 
market exchanges is a bad thing, guaranteed to hinder prosperity, 
because the market itself - guided by Adam Smith's famous "invisible 
hand" - inevitably maximizes the benefits received by all its 
participants, so long as it's given the freedom to do so.

I have used the word "myth" here deliberately, with an eye both of its 
current meanings. Its older meaning - the sense possessed by its source, 
the Classical Greek word muthos - defines a myth as an important 
cultural narrative, a story that every full participant in the culture 
can be expected to know, that serves as a paradigm for some aspect of 
humanity's experience of itself and the world. Its more recent, 
derivative, and polemical sense defines a myth as an important cultural 
narrative that happens to be false. In this second sense, proving that 
something is a myth doesn't mean showing that it plays a crucial role in 
some society's view of the world; it means showing that whatever it says 
about the world is untrue.

Now it so happens that some cultural narratives are myths in both senses 
of the word: they are crucial elements of a society's view of the world, 
and they also make statements about the world that can be shown to be 
untrue. The myth of the market falls into this interesting category. 
Just now, in America and some other industrial nations, it plays a 
central role in defining how people think about the economic dimension 
of their lives. At the same time, some of its core assumptions, and many 
of the statements about the world that derive from it, are hard to 
support on any basis but blind faith.

This is where the intemperate passions I mentioned earlier enter the 
picture, of course, because the myth of the market is not simply a 
cultural narrative; it's also an ideology supported by a great many 
people just now. There's a complicated history behind its current 
ideological role. The grand geopolitical struggle between the American 
and Russian empires that occupied most of the twentieth century, and 
still makes headlines today, followed the usual custom and borrowed 
ideological garments to provide a scrap of decency to the clash of naked 
ambitions.

The American empire's first choice of ideologies to counter Russia's 
Marxist polemics was Christianity - this is why, for example, the words 
"under God" were tacked onto the Pledge of Allegiance during the 
Eisenhower administration, and why the word "Russia" rarely appeared in 
American political speech for more than two decades without the 
adjective "godless" in front of it. This turned out to be a bad choice, 
though, not least because it had little appeal outside America's 
borders. A secular ideology had to be coined, and free market capitalism 
filled that need. It's not accidental that many of its active proponents 
in recent years were Marxists during their years of adolescent rebellion 
in the 1960s; much of what now passes for economic thought in America 
simply takes Marxist assumptions and stands them on their head, in the 
same way that Satanists borrow most of Christian theology but root for 
the other side.

The Siamese-twin relationship between Marxism and today's free market 
ideology can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in the insistence on both 
sides that the only valid position on the spectrum of possible relations 
between government and the economic sphere lies at the two extremes: 
either all economic activity should be controlled by the government, or 
the government should have nothing to do with the economic sphere at 
all. I doubt anyone just now needs to be shown that the Utopian promises 
of Marxism don't work in practice, but the current ideology of the free 
market is another matter. Still, the evidence of history simply doesn't 
support the claims made by free market advocates.

Track the economic history of the United States in the 20th century, for 
example, and an interesting pattern emerges. Until the 1920s, a free 
market ideology far more principled than its current equivalent 
dominated American politics; government kept its hands off business 
until the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression made that politically 
impossible. During the Depression years, politicians imposed an alphabet 
soup of regulations on the American economy, and those remained in place 
until the early 1980s, when most of them were removed. If the myth of 
the market is to be believed, the American economy should have been more 
prosperous before the mid-1930s and after the mid-1980s than in the 
intervening period.

The problem, of course, is that this isn't what happened. Until the 
1930s, the American economy was racked at regular intervals by a 
disastrous cycle of booms and busts that drastically limited American 
prosperity and made severe economic depressions a frequent experience. 
As the New Deal took hold, the economic cycle damped down to livable 
levels, and the United States entered the longest period of general 
prosperity in its history. That prosperity waned in the 1970s as US oil 
production peaked and began to decline, but the deregulation of the 
1980s did not bring it back. For most Americans, per capita income in 
constant dollars has declined since the early 1970s, and many other 
measures of effective wealth have slumped accordingly; the rate of 
infant mortality in America today, for example, is roughly on a par with 
that of Indonesia.

What has returned, and in spades, is the old cycle of boom and bust. 
Since the beginning of the Reagan years, speculative booms and their 
inevitable implosions have once again become a dominant feature of the 
economic landscape. So far, the US government has responded to each 
popping bubble by ignoring its own free market rhetoric and flooding the 
economy with borrowed money. There seems to be some doubt about whether 
that strategy will work in the aftermath of the most recent incarnation 
of the process, the real estate frenzy of 2002-2006; one way or another, 
though, US government, corporate, and individual debt has soared to 
unsustainable levels after these binges of borrowing, and a reckoning 
cannot be avoided forever.

Of course it's possible to argue that the regulations established in the 
1930s and eliminated in the 1980s had nothing to do with the period of 
relative economic stability and rising national prosperity that arrived 
in the 1930s and ended in the 1980s. Look beyond US borders, though, and 
the same patterns show up. The nations with the highest standards of 
living today, for example, are not those that have embraced an 
unrestricted free market, or for that matter those that have 
subordinated all economic activity to the political sphere. Rather, 
they're nations that have found a middle ground, leaving economic 
activity in private hands but regulating it where necessary for the 
public good, and in particular, preventing it from indulging in the 
self-destructive excesses it pursues when left to itself.

That middle ground, granted, lacks the simplistic good-and-evil 
categorization that makes for a popular ideology these days. It's 
pragmatic, it's sloppy, and it requires constant tinkering and a 
willingness to deal with the reality of conflicting interests. All that 
can be said for it is that, by and large, it does seem to work better 
than the alternatives.

Well, that may not be quite all that can be said for it. One of the 
fundamental axioms of ecology is that an ecosystem becomes more stable 
and productive as it becomes more balanced. Cycles of boom and bust are 
common in marginal ecosystems, where nothing controls populations except 
the crude forces of food supply and starvation; as ecosystems develop 
complexity and richness, subtler factors come into play, and conflict 
and chaos give way to equilibrium. Economic systems may well be subject 
to the same rule.

Political systems certainly are; the success of democratic systems of 
governance, after all, depends precisely on the extent to which they 
establish and maintain a balance of powers in which no one has unchecked 
authority. Today's market economies may be badly in need of a dose of 
the same medicine. Part of the countervailing force that's needed to 
pull them out of the vicious cycle of speculative boom and bust will 
likely come from government regulation, but the same principle may need 
to be applied in other ways, not least to keep government power from 
ballooning further out of control than it already is.

Just as it's clearly not true that the unregulated market automatically 
brings prosperity - the invisible hand, it turns out, is quite capable 
of giving us the finger - the issues raised in the last two posts 
suggest that it's also not true that all economic activity ought to be 
subject to the market's vagaries. Economies outside the market system 
could play a large role in helping to balance out the market's wobbles. 
The household economy is one potential balancing force; another could 
come from local economies driven by the very different forces of 
reciprocity and custom, in which surplus products are exchanged as gifts 
between neighboring families. Other economies beyond the market also 
deserve exploration.

The crucial thing to keep in mind, it seems to me, is that subservience 
to the intellectual idols of the contemporary marketplace may well turn 
out to be profoundly counterproductive in the years ahead of us. The 
market economy is already having to deal with rising transportation 
costs and the twilight of the short-lived global marketplace, and will 
shortly have to face the desperate need to retool our lives and 
productive capacities to meet the requirements of the dawning age of 
scarcity industrialism. In such a context, remaining stuck in a rigid, 
ideologically based stance about the proper relationship between the 
market economy and other sectors of society may be a luxury we can no 
longer afford.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality 
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books, 
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/08/idols-of-marketplace.html#links


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