Is capitalism dead?
The New York Times[1], writes of a trader holding a sign that said, “Capitalism is Dead.” You know things are not nearly kosher when you see someone on Wal-street holding a sign like that! Overstatement, sure, but what are we mere morals to think of this entire economic crisis. Even if you have an economics degree it is hard to understand comprehensively, but why. Simply put it is because economics is a comprehensive subject, thus it has worldview implications.
Economics as worldview
One of the main problems is how economics is taught in college. The economic philosophy of the particular facility, no matter Capitalist or Socialist, is taught like one teaches worldview. With pervasive and overarching principles, dealing with themes like what is humanity, values, ect. Thus economic “worldview” education can’t help but govern a life, unlike religious ideas that are abstract and must be integrated into the soul thought existential action, economic ideas are rooted in immediate reality. Life and character are immediately affected; because of the way it affects life. It is a style of teaching that trains a person in a “way the world works” or “works best.” We like to believe in economics because it gives us a sense of control over the universe no mater the theory. For example, In capitalism, we can render ourselves as self-man men and women. We seek control in believing in economics.
We Americans, need departments of economics to exist because if they exist, then we assume that we know something like an economic realm must exist that is subject to its own 'laws.' Moreover, in order for economics to be a prediction science, we increasingly live as well as think about our lives as if we are utilitarian calculators. To live in any other way threatens to make rational choice methodologies, so important to the explanatory power of contemporary economics, not work. We become interests seeking units of desire in order to sustain the prediction power of economics. Not so to think of ourselves would render our trust in those experts we call economist unintelligible[2]
As a Christian, I already have a worldview that says only theocracy, ultimately and eternally will work as the economic frame for a society. Yet such a frame is not to be until the king comes to clam His bride and establish a true kingdom. Thus all other human attempts operate from a scale of imperfection, no matter how logically tight or historically consistent it is in theory. My rights as a free man has moral validity and vitality in Him (not sure yet about the structure of this) yet equality true, my rights end in his Lordship. Fundamentally, My personal lust for power ended at the cross. I am dead to self-seeking after greed to gain power over my life and others. I am dead to self-seeking after political power thought manipulation and control of others.
My worldview tells me people are bad in their hearts unlike socialism. My worldview tells me God is in control and institutions can’t be allowed to be self-regulating for they are given to structures of injustice. Where as people have a conscience, post-whatever society dose not. The herd is void of a conscience. In short, I want to remind everyone, when we talk of which system is better or more Christian, we must not loose our worldview in the talk. From the Christian worldview – can be seduced by economic theory like it can be by nationalism.
The Fall
All of life has been affected by the one turning point in history: the fall. So to talk about one part of society being bad and another being pure is wrong headed. All parts are saturated an men will use any means to get there ends. The proper used of all neutral elements like technology is determine by the ends towards which we direct them.
Capitalism and socialism, are twisted; polluted, and diluted by the fall and thus both are week. The Great weakness of Capitalism is it produces and idolatry of greed and if left unchecked social structures can exist without a since of social justice (read Amose). Things go bad when the view of the good life in capitalism looses aspects of virtue, character, and religious pity. One Philosophy notes that America has become a culture that forms in people a very “consumer” character.
They are educated or rather miseducated to believe that they should aim and hope for not what they deserve but what ever they may happen to want. They are in the vast majority of cases to regard themselves primarily as consumers whose practical and productive activities are no more than a means to consumption. What constitutes success in life becomes a matter of acquisition of the consumer good, and thereby that acquisitiveness which is so often a character trait necessary for success in capital accumulation is further sanctioned. Unsurprisingly, pleonexia, the drive to have more and more, becomes treated as a central virtue. The Christian theologians in the middle Ages had learned from Aristotle that pleonexia is the vice that is counterpart to the virtue of justice. And they had understood, as later theologians failed to do, the close connection between the developing of capitalism and the sin of usury. So it's not, after all just general human sinfulness that generates particular individual actions of injustice over and above the institutional injustice of capitalism itself. Capitalism also provides systematic incentives to develop a type of character that has propensity to injustice.[3]
That is when capitalism is unrestrained and lacking a conscious. So both moral restraint and social boundaries are needed. Since the British economist John Maynard Keynes rescued the British economy “from the quicksand of the 1930s.” Usually, the markets correct themselves, but every once in a while “unorthodox government intervention” is required to keep the engine running. This is the way capitalism has worked in practice. [4]
Socialism is weak in that it does not work. It is a bad structure, in and of itself. History bears this out, in considerable measure. In the year 1620, an extraordinary charter was written called the “Mayflower Compact.” William Bradford and other writers formulated the original contract with over sight from their sponsors in London. In it they called for everything as producers to give into a common storehouse (YES, a very bad reading of ACT). Yes, The pilgrims who settled in New Plymouth, Virgina, where trying to be granola eating, black hat wearing, witch burning, biblical (with a questions mark) socialist!
This attempt to practice socialism had very poor results and Bradford wrote in his Journal why it failed, he said, “For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense ... that was thought injustice.”
OK so the system is unjust in itself. Further, its greatest weakness is in the centralizing of power. (Hello!! read Animal farm, and think metaphor of USSR) The lust for power will limit human freedom. Socialism is open to it. The problem with socialism is it becomes the center pushing out all true centers, like religious and communal life.
This inversion of the structure of the State which, instead of being built up from below, is organized from above, is the one great iniquity of our time, the iniquity which overshadows all others, and generates them of itself. The order of creation is turned upside down; what should be last is first, the expedient, the subsidiary, has become the main thing. The State, which should be only the bark on the life of the community, has become the tree itself. [5]
Yet, no matter the system a Christian can be a Christian. A Christian can exist in and be ethical in an imperfect system, Brunner explains.
no man, as a member of an institution is only a member of an institution, but always and only a person, there is room for love even in the most impersonal of institutions, not in the actual activity of the institution itself, but “between the lines. [6]
The question is which one promotes the common good and allows for the clearest path towards the good life and I’m a sure there are a few more questions that I can’t think of. But that how I see it.
End note
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/opinion/01wed4.html?ref=opinion
[2] Stanley Hauerwas, sanctify them in the truth, (Abingdon press, Nashville1998), 233
[3] Alastair macIntyre, Marxism and Christianity 2nd ed (London: Duckworth, 1995), 13-14
[4] Satyendra Nayak, The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/01/savior-of-capitalism/
[5] Emil Brunner, Justice and the social order (Lutterworth Press 1945) 124-125 p.
[6] Emil Brunner Justice and the social order (Lutterworth Press 1945) 117 p.
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