New year, new thinking

Ian Boyne, Contributor

'No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental construction of their modes of thought.' - John Stuart Mill

We need new modes of thought for this new year. The old ways of thinking which got us in this mess are unable to get us out. One of the deficits in Jamaica today is the deficit of ideas - of alternative ways of thinking. We have lots of ideas as Jamaicans. But most of them are variations on the same bourgeois themes. There has been truly a death of radical options. Our new-found dogma is pragmatism, utilitarianism and amorality.

"Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today," mourns the brilliant historian Tony Judt in his 2010 book, Ill Fares the Land, sadly, his last before his death last year. Judt has taught at Cambridge and Oxford and won the 2009 Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In his book, he laments the malaise which has befallen the West, a malaise which Jamaica also suffers.

Says Judt: "We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? This used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them." And in this intellectually enthralling work, Judt, who has had a lifetime of serving intellectual delights, poses them with sheer elegance and resonance.

It was philosopher John Stuart Mill who wrote that "the idea is essentially repulsive of a society held together only by relations and feelings arising out of pecuniary interest".

Far-reaching questions

Ronnie Thwaites on his radio show has continued to pose far-reaching, if disturbing, philosophical questions about how we order society; about our priorities and obsessions; about the things we care about. But he is a rare Jamaican politician. Usually, philosophical questions are marginalised, shunted to the irrelevant, impractical "uncool" section; dismissed as too airy-fairy, too theoretical. So we go on talking about constitutional, legislative, economic, political issues, failing to raise overarching questions and issues. It is much easier and more convenient to stick to what's under our nose.

We have accepted that our raison d'être as a society is economic growth. The two parties have accepted that. Their only issue is who is better at it! Judt reminds us: "The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears natural today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatisation and the private sector; the growing disparities of rich and poor. And, above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: Uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth".

Judt warns us: "We cannot go on loving like this." But many of us think we can. Our goals for 2011 revolve around the same set of priorities we deemed unfulfilled in 2010. Judt's is a call to care about issues of justice, fairness, human rights and development - a development which benefits all, rather than a few. The great economist John Maynard Keynes put it well: "Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilisation."

Today, the value of everything is reduced to monetary indices.

Grieves Tony Judt in Ill Fares the Land: "Conventional economic reasoning today … describes human behaviour in terms of rational choice. We are all, it asserts, economic beings. We pursue self-interest (defined as maximised economic advantage) with minimal reference to extraneous criteria such as altruism, self-denial, taste, cultural habit or collective purpose."

I keep reminding that the philosophical father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, was not a nihilist or hedonist. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he wrote: "The disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and the powerful and to despise, or at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … (is) the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments".

He also wrote that "to feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections constitute the perfection of human nature."

Smith understood that capitalism shorn of its moral sentiments and depleted of moral capital would provide the seeds for its own destruction.

He would not have been surprised at the Enron, WorldCom and other scandals or of the greed and corruption which helped plunge the world into the worst recession in 70 years. It was inevitable once moral foundations were not built. Harvard's Daniel Bell from the right, also from the 1970s, wrote his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Christopher Lasch's from the left his Culture of Narcissism.

Salary inequity

We have reached the stage where in 2005, 21.2 per cent of US national income accrued to just one per cent of the workforce. In 1968, the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, 66 times the amount paid to the typical GM worker. Today, the CEO of Wal-Mart earns 900 times the wages of his average employee. Nine hundred times!

In fact, the wealth of the Wal-Mart family is estimated at $90 billion - the same as the bottom 40 per cent of the US population which is 120 million people. Many see nothing wrong with such gross inequality - indeed, praise it as the ingenuity, creativity and savvy of the wealthy.

We need a new conversation. A moral discourse. Of course, there are many who are dismissive of any such notion, warning of "moralising our problems away" and drawing attention to the givenness of our present capitalist order. Anything else other than what we have is unrealistic, unachievable - not "common sense". The present order is just there. Just a brute fact to be accepted as we accept the law of gravity. Karl Marx was right that the bourgeoisie's power lays in its ability to pass off its ideological views as ordinary, neutral, commonsensical and just there. "The ideas of the ruling class," Marx famously opined, "are the ruling ideas."

Equality good

Judt is careful to beat the neo-liberals at their statistical games, citing empirical data to demonstrate that equality is good for development.

"Sweden and Finland, two of the world's wealthiest countries by per capita income or GDP, have a very narrow gap separating rich and poor - and they consistently lead the world in indices of measurable well-being. Conversely, the United States, despite its huge aggregate wealth, always comes low on such measures." Life expectancy in the US is lower than in Bosnia and just above Albania!

" Inequality, then, is not just unattractive in itself. It clearly corresponds to pathological, special problems that we cannot hope to address unless we attend to the underlying cause. There is a reason why infant mortality, life expectancy, criminality, the prison population, mental illness, unemployment, obesity, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, economic insecurity, personal indebtedness and anxiety are much more marked in the US and UK than they are in continental Europe," says Judt who authored the magisterial A History of Europe since 1945, and has been voted one of the Ten Best Books of 2005 by The New York Times.

Judt wails: "Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional free market and the much-advertised horrors of socialism?"

Richard Titmuss was correct: "Without knowledge of wind and current, without some sense of purpose, men and societies do not keep afloat for long, morally or economically, by bailing out the water."

That is what we have been doing. But it can't continue indefinitely. The repeated calls for institutional and constitutional change are sideshows outside of a larger philosophical context. Says Judt poignantly: "Most critics of our present condition start with institutions. They look at parliaments, senates, presidents, elections and lobbies and point to the ways in which these have degraded or abused the trust and authority placed in them. We need new laws, different electoral regimes, restrictions on lobbying and political funding. We need to give more (or less) authority to the executive branch and we need to find ways to make elected and unelected officials responsive and answerable to their constituents and paymasters: us." But that's not enough, asserts Judt.

"It has become commonplace to assert that we all want then same things, we just have slightly different ways of going about it. But this is simply false. The rich do not want the same things as the poor. Those who depend on their job for their livelihood do not want the same things as those who live off investments and dividends. Those who do not need public services - because they can purchase private transport, education and protection - do not seek the same things as those who depend exclusively on the public sector."

We need to truly think outside the box. Ill fares our land, Jamaica, indeed.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.