Economics and the Existential Imagination
[Previous posts: I. Economics and the Political Imagination; II. Economics and the Vocational Imagination; III. Economics and the Educational Imagination]
In previous posts I have described three places where we find a similar—if not the same—inversion of the order between money or capital and the human person: politics, work, and education. If I had been more careful I would have presented these example in a slightly different order (politics, education, then work). Nonetheless, my point is not only that these description are true, but, furthermore, that they are relatively new.
In other words, it is my belief that what many have called “neo-liberalism” describes this move that radicalizes the liberal autonomous individual from seeking reason to one seeking material and social wealth as an end in itself.
The ego cogito of Descartes has now been replaced the homo economicus of Wall Street. We have moved from the rational man of liberalism to the economic man of neo-liberalism.
This puts a genealogical distance between the person that Jean-Luc Marion describes as the “ego amans,” the person as lover that begets reason. Charles Taylor also describes the move as one from a “porous self” to a “buffered self.” What Taylor and Marion both miss is the next genealogical and anthropological step in the alienation and dis-enchantment of the person after modernity: the homo economicus.
This is not to say that money or capital are historically recent, but it is to say that the order between the human person and money or capital—not to mention God—is particularly and disturbingly disordered.
As a final example, take the idea of a ‘profession.’ There was once a time when a profession was ordered by some good. Medicine served the good of health; Law the good of justice; Academics the good of truth; Art the good of beauty, and so on. This was the norm for most of human history, including most of modernity.
Liberalism itself was conceived out of the desire for goods that came from the development of human rationality. Nowadays, however, we have “professionals” who serve the (non)good of self-interest. People whose profession is to oversee professionals and make sure they are held accountable to the (non)good of economic self-interest.
This self is not the same as the autonomous individual; it is individualism on economic steroids. The effects these drugs have is to monopolize the existential imagination to the point where we begin to think of ourselves as just such an economic man.
Even as most people mistakenly think of themselves as autonomous individuals, there is a more nefarious self-to-be that has captured the imagination of our times. This economic self that is born from the womb of modern, secular liberalism inverts the meaning of existence into a corpse of living that is really dying—the life of The Death of Ivan Illych.
Facing such a thorough colonization of the existential imaginary, the Church offers a way out—perhaps, the only way out. When we look closely, we can hear and see the tragic Catholic insight as one that not only sees the person as a sacred end, but looks beyond that so-called “individual” and calls us to communio. To love.
In these relations we find powerful antidotes to the economic enslavement of our times: the embrace of poverty, the love of enemy, and death to self.
The question becomes whether or not we have ears and eyes—and hearts.
(In the epilogue to follow, I will try to articulate the Catholic antidote more clearly.)
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Great Series, Sam. I eagerly await your epilogue.
I’m wondering if we can push a little on your point about capital as an end being a recent phenomenon, whereas in the past professions were ordered towards some good.
Say we roll the clock back from 2010 to 1810 (or 1910, if you think that would be far enough back). What we’d find is that the number of professionals providing the sort of goods you mention (doctors providing healing, lawyers providing justice, etc.) is a very small portion of society, while the vast majority as involved directly in producing some good for use of consumption. Farmers are producing food. Workmen are producing roads and buildings. Craftsmen and factory workers are producing finished goods.
Depending on whether we’re talking 1810 or 1910, these professions might or might not actually result in receiving much capital/money. Work might be primarily subsistence or paid in kind or via barter. However, work was clearly done with this material gain in mind.
Today, people still work for material gain, but their work is much more specialized, and results in much more gain, because of increases in division of labor and productivity. So I think the question becomes: Is this in any fundamental sense different? Does the fact that we are now very far from subsistence levels mean that we are now more fundamentally working for money as an end rather than for sustainance/life as an end, when we are really doing very much the same thing only being much more successful about it?
Darwin Catholic: As usual, you are raising some important historical objections that push me beyond my (very limited) historical abilities. This time, though, I think that your historical point misses the heart of my argument.
You wrote:
“Work might be primarily subsistence or paid in kind or via barter. However, work was clearly done with this material gain in mind.”
And I would not disagree with this. No one could, really. My point is not that at one time people didn’t work with material gain in mind and now they do. My point is that, as you rightly point out, people have, to some degree, always worked for material gain, but that material gain did not have a stake to autarky—it did not dominate the imaginary of the vocation or the profession itself.
Now, such an assertion is a historical conjecture, to be sure. But, the genealogical movement we find in evolution of modernity—elaborated by many far more credible than myself—seems to answer your question:
“Does the fact that we are now very far from subsistence levels mean that we are now more fundamentally working for money as an end rather than for sustainance/life as an end, when we are really doing very much the same thing only being much more successful about it?”
My point is not matter of success or failure, but, rather, the extent to which money (and other forms of capital) have come to dominate our ability to imagine—and be(come)—higher goods. From a modern, 20/20-look backwards, I think we can easily say that things look strangely familiar. And this is true. However, I think we can also see that the human person has been dis-enchanted in particular ways that have their basis in where the horizon of the imagination is set by the social and cultural condition of the times.
The economic basis, as I see it, is more than just a matter of debits and credits or the basics of material exchange: it is more a matter of how the human person has come to think of itself as a mean to economic ends—even at the expense of his literal existence.
Thanks, as always, for your careful reading of my work and even more for your challenging and engaging remarks.
Sam